ABSTRACT
Rhyme – it goes almost without saying – is supposed to reinforce memory. As Mary Carruthers points out, one need only think of the time-honored “[t]hirty days hath September, / April, June, and November” (Carruthers 1990: 80). Rhyme, like meter, makes a poem easier to memorize; one endword cues us to remember the next, and each recurring sound reminds us of its previous occurrences. “Now that Verse far exceedeth Prose in the knitting up of the memorie, the reason is manifest,” explains Sir Philip Sidney in The Defence of Poesie: “one word, so as it were begetting another, as be it in rime or measured verse, by the former a ma[n] shall have a neare gesse to the follower” (Sidney 1968: 27). Sidney’s discussion of rhyme serves his wider rhetorical purpose of rescuing poetry from the charges of frivolity and falsehood leveled by anti-poetic arguments such as Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (Gosson 1973: A6v-A7r).1 If memorable lines of verse can function as “hourely lessons” in the reader’s memory, and “if reading be foolish without remembering,” then poetry, with its built-in mnemonic features, is ideally suited for respectably didactic purposes (Sidney 1968: 28, 27). And yet the period in which Sidney praised rhyme’s mnemonic potential was also one in which rhyme was frequently attacked. It may seem surprising that an age that produced a seemingly endless stream of songs and sonnets should question the value of rhyme. But among the poets who did so were Jonson, Campion, and Milton, who famously rejected rhyme in the preface to the second edition of Paradise Lost. Not a few writers in early modern England considered rhyme to be vulgar, tyrannical, seductive, or childishly excessive,
a vestige of the “barbarous” Middle Ages that needed to be cast aside to make way for poetry written in proper classical forms.
