Verse – Making from ‘Over the Teacups.'

New Zealand Mail, Issue 956, 27 June 1890, Page 4

Verse - Making from ‘Over the Teacups.'

I gave, a piece of advice the other day which I said I thought deserved a paragraph to itself. It was from a letter I wrote not long ago to an unknown young correspondent, who had a longing for seeing himself in verse, but was not hopelessly infatuated with the idea that he was born a poet. * When you write in prose,’ I said, * you say what you mean. When you write in verse you say what you must.’ I was thinking more especially of rhymed verse. Rhythm alone is a tether, and not a very long one. But rhymes are iron fetters ; it is dragging a chain and ball to march under their eneunabrance ; it is a clog-dance you are figuring in, when you execute your metrical pas sue). Consider under what a disadvantage your thinking powers are labouring when you are handicapped by the inexorable demands of our scanty English rhyming vocabulary ! You want to say something about tho heavenly bodies, and you have a beautiful lipe ending with the word ‘stars.’ Were you writing in prose, your imagination, your fancy, your rhetoric, your musical ear for the harmonies of language, would all have full play- Lut there is your rhyme fastening you by the leg, and yoq must either reject the line which pleases you or you must whip your hobbling fanoy and all your limping thoughts into the traces which are bitohed to one of three or four or half a dozen serviceable words. You cannot make any use of cars, I will suppose ; you have no occasion to talk about scars ; * the red planet Mars 1 has been used already ; Didbin has said enough about the gallant tars ; what is there left for you but bars ’ So you give up your train of thought, capitulate to necessity, and manage to lug in some kind of allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make use of bars. Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking up all continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigour, all the virility, which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong, graceful, spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of intellect to the clink of well

or ill-matched syllables ? I think you will smilo if I tell you of an idea I have had about teaching the art of writing ‘poems ’ to the half-witted children at the Idiot Asylnm. The trick of rhymning cannot be more usefully employed than in furnishing a pleasant amusement to the poor feeble-minded children. I should feel that I was well employed in getting up a primer for the pupils of the asylum, and other young persons who are incapable of serious thought and connected expression. I would start in the simplest way ; thus : When darkness veils the evening * * * I love to close niy weary * * * 1 he pupil begins by supplying the missing words, which most children who are able to keep out of fire and water can accomplish after a certain number of trials. When the poet that is to be has got so as to perform this task easffy, a skeleton verse, in which two or three words of each line are omitted is given the child to fill up. By-and-by the more difficult forms of metre are outlined, until at length a feeble-minded child can make out a sonnet, completely equipped with its four pairs of rhymes in the first section and its three pairs in the second part. Oliver Wendell Holmes.