HAPPY BIRTHDAY FLEMMINGS

[incandescens]

Happy birthday to flemmings!

Please assume waves of suitable gaiety, since I lack the ability to draw them.

---

the dragons, meeting
above the ocean's smooth curves
trace their own patterns

their arcs against the night sky
subtend the moon's pale circle

spinning their seasons
as the tide, winter-retreated,
starts spring's long advance

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Waves assumed, and thanks.

Flying upon the wind, making the wind fly,
Huge wings limned by the setting, rising sun,
Months, years and centuries flow past their eyes
As clouds that equally, easily, blow by.

(Mhh no yappari Chinese-type verse shouldn't rhyme...)

[incandescens]

Not even incidentally?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

(edited to make the TL;DR readable, and edited again for typos)

Basically, rhymes in chinese-type verses undercut the familiar- the expectation that the rhymes *won't* be there.

I've been considering this and I'll write about it sometime, but it seems that half the time these later degenerate days, rhyme in English sets up an expectation of jingle, not verse. So when a rhyme appears where you don't expect it there's almost a feeling of betrayal- 'I thought this was poetry and you're fobbing me off with nursery rhymes.'

(There's other considerations too- that we use rhyme in lyrical verse and song, both of which easily descend into the banal to make their rhymes; and that the most technically brilliant rhymes in English were produced, unfortunately, by poets like Pope, Byron, and Swinburne, who were all being too clever by half. Shakespeare could rhyme respectably because he had a more flexible vocabulary than the modern one, and also because he was Shakespeare, but he was doing grand effects, not the lapidary Chinese thing. I suppose of recent poets Frost might have managed [what I think is] the feel of Chinese poetry, in rhymed verse; but he's a hard act to follow too.)

[incandescens]

Very interesting. Thank you!