Just say 'nay'

Eventually every author has to face the sad fact that one of the greatest threats to good prose is fine writing.  There seems to be an ineradicable tendency for a penny-plain sentence to become lush and purplish, blossoming with assonances and alliterations, and falling into the sinuous, sensuous curve of a half-heard beat as rhythm's subtle samba of words kicks in.

It is this same urge that gives rise to full-blown poetry.  Verse is born of a sensitivity to surrounding words which goes further than the simple sense they contain.  A poem is like some subtle force field, a web of tensions between every word it contains, every syllable instinct with the knowledge of its antecedents and successors.

At one, simple level this means rhyme, that miraculous unjustified coincidence of sounds.  As poets write they have not only to navigate their phrases through the ideas they wish to express but they must also hit a particular sound at a particular point along the way.  This in part explains our enjoyment of poetry: it is tremendously satisfying to reach these little havens of rhyme whose existence had been implicitly promised by the first element of the couplet or triplet, and whose appearance is a kind of resolution, like a perfect cadence in music.

At a deeper level this unconscious feeling for the literal ramifications of every word - the branches of rhyme, rhetoric and the rest - may play a crucial part in creating the poem's final structure. After all, just where do words come from if not from other words already written whose shape and sound suggest other forms and phonemes to us which in turn lead us by the hand down a new and unexpected poetic avenue?

Nor is this restricted to verse. Although there we are licensed by its assumptions to make these similarities explicit - through the chime of rhyme, through the emphasis of alliteration, and through the linguistic tricks of repetition and such-like - it is easy to spot similar turns of phrase elsewhere. Indeed many languages have this kind of homely poetry built-in to their culture.

For example, English is full of nutty two-beat phrases which alliterate, assonate or rhyme: 'bread and butter', 'north and south', 'the bee's knees'.  It is interesting to note that cockney rhyming slang takes this approach even further.  Thus 'feet' become 'plates of meat' which rhymes, has the two-beat structure, and offers an apt and witty transformation.

No wonder, then, that these complex habits of echoing forward and back crop up continually in even the least pretentious of prose.  Every word we write begins to suggest the next or one in the next sentence.  Every word brings with it a family of rhymes and a large clan of near-rhymes, all begging to join their relation.  Similarly each word has hundreds of other friendly assonances, puns and handy pre-existing phrases which it is keen to introduce to us.  No wonder, then, that in our desire to accommodate this huge, chattering tumult, our tumbling prose becomes overloaded with those wonderful words to which we just can't say 'no' - or 'nay'.

(29.2.92)

See also Moody Sonnets

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