Every once in a while Pinsky picks a good poem.

This one is a classic. The tightly structured rhyme and meter poetry was starting to

become passe, but Hardy showed that the form still had life to it, and still does.

Well, Richard, I guess once in a while is better than never.

(It's easier to find something great in these classic poems-- which are legally in Public Domain, incidentally-- than in new work. That may affect what you see as my batting average.)

I'm no scholar of these things, but, as I get it, the idea that poetry in some old tradition was always rhymed needs some revising: the Greek and Latin poets revered by generations of writers in English, French, German, Italian, etc., paid a lot of attention to the sounds of words, and to meter-- but end rhyme comes to us through more native, folk-rhyme and song traditions in those later languages. In English, great works in verse like Milton's Paradise Lost, the big speeches in Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" are in meter but not rhyme.

Someone in the Fray who knows more about this than I do might say more.

This is relevant to Hardy, who clearly draws on the native, vernacular, English ballad tradition in his poems-- notably in "The Darkling Thrush." There's a great essay by Thom Gunn, in his book The Occasions of Poetry called "Hardy and the Ballads."

This is not necessarily relevant to Hardy, and I'm no expert, but I have been wondering lately when and where rhyme crept into Western poetry and from whence.

As far as I can tell, the answer is 10th century Spain and Italy from Arabic influence. Arabic verse, of which I am nearly completely ignorant, apparently rhymed as far back as the Qur'an, and rhyming muwashshahas survive from 11th Century Iberia in both Arabic and Hebrew. Kharjas written in Mozarabic--a sort of Arabic/Hebrew/Castilian pidgin, follow shortly after. Southern Italy was also dominated by Arabic culture in these years, and one of the earliest surviving Latin rhyming poems (again, to my knowledge--this is a new line of inquiry for me and I appreciate correction) dates from 10th or 11th century Verona. It's not hard to imagine the cultural transmission from rhymed Arabic verse in Sicily to rhymed Latin verse in Verona. Similarly, the rhymed Mozarabic verse in Iberia must have had a very near influence on the 12th century troubadours of what is now southern France and northern Spain.

It didn't take long to get to England, either. That Veronese Latin song, "o admirabile veneris idolum," appears among the "Cambridge Songs," a collection of Latin songs copied sometime very close to the Norman Conquest (1066). When verse written in post-Conquest Middle English starts appearing (I should say surviving--who knows what 'appeared' in the interim) rhyme dominates.

There is one curious outlier--the so call "Riming Poem," a piece of Old English verse from the Exeter Book, written no later than the 10th century, and the only occurrence of rhyme in pre-Conquest English. The rhyme is as unmistakably present as its presence is unexplainable:

Me lifes onlah se þis leoht onwrah,
ond þæt torhte geteoh, tillice onwrah.
Glæd wæs ic gliwum, glenged hiwum,
blissa bleoum, blostma hiwum.

All this is not to say that rhyme in English has anything of an Arabic flavor, or ever did. Far from it. But it originally did have a flavor of learnedness, not commonality. When the 14th century saw a revival of the alliterative form in English, it looked an awful lot like an attempt to write something more "English," independent from the suspect Latin and French influence.

By Hardy's time all this is academic (literally so: his productive period almost exactly maps the great rediscovery and flourishing of English medievalism).

The ballads that were formally cutting edge in the 13th century were, by the late 19th, part of the subterraneous popular knowledge. If the Alliterative Revival could react against the incursion of continental rhyme, by the 19th century it was well nigh time to fight back against Milton's post-Renaissance snobbery in the preface to Paradise Lost: "Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom."

Again, none of this has much at all to do with Hardy, and I apologize to anyone who finds it tedious.

But, Mr. Pinsky, I have to agree with you about the relative ease of finding great poetry in the public domain. When I suggested as much on the Fray a few years ago, I was attacked for being close-minded. It's not that there isn't great poetry being written today. Mathmatically, there must be more than ever, since there is more total poetry. But it's obviously correspondingly more difficult to sort through, and the difference in the field of choices among what is submitted to one publication versus all of the public domain is vast.

There's an excellent book on the Moorish influence on the origins of troubadour poetry and rhyming in Europe, Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Indiana UP,l 1965).

I cited a passage from Oppen in another topic here, in which Oppen comments on Hardy's poem "The Oxen." According to the pseudo-political map of poetry peddled in classrooms for about 30 years now, Hardy is on one side of the barricades and Oppen on the other. Evidently Oppen didn't think so, though -- which suggests that maybe these maps meaning to divide & conquer are dyspedagogical not poetic phenomena.

My understanding is that the first source of the rhyme that wound its way into European poetry was Iranian (Persian) poetry. Persian poetry is notoriously complex and very heavy on rhyme, and poetry has long been and still is central to Persian culture (Hafiz's poems, for example, play a part in the New Year's celebration). The account that I've read (in Meg Bogin's excellent book The Women Troubadours) was that the Moors/Arabs learned rhymed from the Persians and then brought it into Spain; from there it moved into southern France via the troubadours, and eventually into English.

I'll add more on Hardy on another thread. . .

This is an excellent post, as are the responses, and one of the reasons I keep coming back here.

Thank you.

Take care,

Joe

Bogin's book has been on my must-read-very-soon list for too long. I don't know a thing about Arab/Persian interactions, especially at that early period (although I have in-family sources who would be more than willing to help me out, there). The incursion of rhyme through the Muslim (and Jewish) poets in Iberia seems beyond argument. What's more interesting, more controversial, and less provable is whether love (as the main topic of poetry, as a deep emotional engagment, as a set of codified social patterns) entered with it.

Those brave enough to take this line have traditionally aimed at 'courtly love,' the specialty of the 13C troubadours. Without even going into the reasons 'courtly love' is and isn't a shibboleth of the 20th century, this seems to me to miss the point. "Love," in literature, in philosophy, in personal letters, in life for all we can tell, did not look like this in the West before this point. And it has ever since.

And it's not just a literary device; it's something we all believe. We believe so deeply we can't even imagine what it would be not to believe it, and we don't want to try. We believe it the way medieval Christians believed in God. And yet, not believing in God is now not only a possibility, but the very fact of its possibility makes believing an act of constant reaffirmation. Literature wins. Thank god.

And yet maybe its better for the believers now. Being Christian didn't mean much when everybody else was, too. Maybe lovers would be better lovers if we had to remind ourselves to believe.

Clearly, I have nothing to say about Hardy.

Thanks to zbigley, Jim Powell, Annie Finch for the bibliography and information this thread has generated.

And where did John Skelton get his strange, a-metrical rhymes in the 15th century? A mixture of Latin, folk-song and his own imagination? So different from the forms that Italian (and French or Provencal?) models inspired Wyatt, Sidney and others in the 16th century.

Hardy's invented or invented-sounding words ("outleant" as Daniel Bosch points out in that excellent thread, "illimited") remind me of that earlier period in English, as his ballad structure reminds me of that tradition, as pointed out in Thom Gunn's essay.