ABSTRACT
For in rhyme the arbitrariness of language turns back on itself to produce or to make it possible for the poet as arbiter to produce phonetic or graphemic as well as semantic links among arbitrary linguistic signs. It argues these are calculated stylistic risks, aspects of Shelley's attempt to appropriate and shape the arbitrariness of language into a medium both reflective of and resistant to a power that defies the mind's desire for meaning. Donald Reiman has already given scrupulous attention to Shelley's rhymes in The Triumph of Life; it re-examines and extends his comments with an emphasis on rhyme's relation to the question of the arbitrary. The only line which is grammatically closed disrupts, by virtue of that closure, the integrity of the second tercet; it also ends with the first rhyme word in the poem ('Earth') that fails to answer clearly to its predecessor ('forth').
