Otago Daily Times,Mon, 11 Oct 2010Rhyme in poetry is a relatively recent innovation, Emma Neale points out.
The phrase "poetry is meant to rhyme" is a bit like saying "cats are meant to be black".
Our world is so much wider, richer and more various than that. Poetry in English has always used a healthy range of structuring and musical principles.
It's never been the job of rhyme alone to carry the definition of poetry.
Rhyme didn't fully enter English poetry until the High Middle Ages (think Chaucer).
It was brought in under the influence of French troubadour poets (who were in turn influenced by Arabic), and we could say it has been a point of artistic argument ever since.
The great 17th-century poet Milton said in his preface to Paradise Lost that rhyme was "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 Meter" - in other words, he felt it was used to disguise thin subject matter and a poor sense of rhythm.
Not that rhyme - and regular metre - don't have powerful appeal.
The first thing we hear is the rhythm of the mother's heartbeat in the womb.
We learn to master language through the principles of corresponding sounds - the world says "da", and "ma": we echo it back, in the long, slow rhyme of learning to talk.
A return to childhood certainties is perhaps what many readers are unconsciously seeking when craving the loud, clear bell of end rhyme.
Read Emma Neale's full piece at .http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/130867/not-all-cats-are-black-not-all-poetry-rhymes
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