The ear remembers what it hears.

The poet’s job is to curate that sound, to shape it, to approve it. Sometimes to rhyme, sometimes not.

One must be careful with rhyme. The proximate resonance elicits an immediate physical response of concluded vibrated harmonious satisfaction. It feels good.

When the brain is involved, the poet needs to guard against the sound overwhelming the thought. That’s why near rhyme, off rhyme, is a special bonus. It says to the brain connected to the ear, “Don’t be lulled.”

The patterns can get complicated. Consonant-vowel-consonant // consonant-other vowel-near consonant, for example. The ear says, “almost,” the brain says, “you got my attention.” The poet says, “I’ve avoided the trap of cheap easy rhyme.”

Using rhyme isn’t as easy as it looks or sounds. Unless, of course, one thinks the sonic match of easy rhyme is poetry. The same, or similar, people think Shakespeare is only the story because they can’t deal with the words.

People used to go to rhyme school. They wrote sonnets. The patterns are demanding. Not everybody can do it. The classical Shakespearean sonnet, which he didn’t invent, gives us fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, the usual flow of English, as 8-6, octave-sestet, with intricate rhymes. The octave sets the situation, examines it, probes it, raises the question. The sestet answers it, often ending itself with a zinger couplet that pounds in the last nail.

Then, of course, there are those sonnets of 4-4-4-2. They exchange the deeper probe of octave-sestet for the chance to spread out consideration, to look at something in three ways before nailing the conclusion.

Either way works well.

I wrote a sonnet once, to try it out and prove that I could. Would you like to read it?

I remember fondly a lesson I used to give my high school seniors. The curriculum relegates the 11th grade to American Lit, the 12th opens out to World Lit. We were reading the poetry of World War I.

We looked at the British poets who fought and mostly died. We looked at Wilfred Owen, the best of them. He kept sending his poems home from the front. He wanted his audience to realize what he had come to realize – that war is bad, and final. He used his mastery of language from the sonnet school to write in patterns the readers had grown up with, raised on iambic pentameter. That lured them past the possible resistance toward something new. “Dulce et Decorum est.” He takes them, us, through the details on the ground, the reality of war, and ends with a last line cut short on the word “mori.” Death is the last word.

He represented and embodied the best of Britain, and when I announced to my class how he died at the front just days before the armistice, they joined me in a moment of silence. I tried to hold back the tears of loss, the recognition of where we were then and where we are now, because too few people read Owen these days, their ears not educated to his words, the realization that “the war to end all wars” was not the last, did not end them.

Our high school Principal, an educated man with a Ph.D. in English, who had taught college, liked to discuss literature and was delighted that I did too, approved what I was doing with my students. He knew the Owen poem, relished the way it was two sonnets pasted together, the second one as an upside down obverse, joined as the last line of the first begins the second. I hadn’t noticed that, chastised myself, but welcomed the observation as something new to me. I can still learn, always learn, am still learning, with delight.

The Principal said with relish, smacking his lips, “That makes it all the more sweet.” I kept my response to myself: “It’s not “sweet” at all, that’s the wrong word. That word betrays “old school” thinking, the academic elitism which led us to the war. War is no longer a game, the Maginot Line would not keep us safe, you just go around it.

Owen knew things were changing, the world was changing, the old ways were changing, our use of language was changing. He wanted so desperately to help us bridge the gap, to hold on to the values of the past, the patterned rhythms, but find ways to live in the new present. His loss is symptomatic of the 20th Century.

It’s only a segue to talk about August Stramm. In the same class lesson, which took two or three days, we looked at the German poets’ response to the war on the other side. Stramm entered the war already primed for dissolution, and his poems, his verbal responses, got shorter and shorter as everything fell out, reduced to nouns and verbs stripped of qualifiers, and more and more ending in the same last word, death. Stramm also did not survive the war.

We looked at Giuseppe Ungaretti, to see that Italian poets in the same war reached the same conclusion. He survived the war, kept writing, and helped us climb out of the trenches. He helped the 20th Century break the old rules and open ourselves to the universe.

M’illumino d’immenso
I illuminate myself with immensity


My whole lesson had a powerful impact on my classes. They concluded that life need not be war, “nasty, brutish and short,” that the answer to war is “No.”