Rhyme or Reason

Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung". 1963. The John Hopkins Press

To the traditional interpretation of the new rhyme technique as due to the decay of ancient quantity and the rise of stress in the Romance languages, I should like to add a further explanations based on the different function of phonetic consonance in the ancient and modern languages respectively: The device of homoioteleuton was used in the ancient languages to express intellectual correspondences: nect- , flect- , plect- , or, especially, in the endings of the declension: omnia praeclara rara; abiit, fugit, evasit. A language which has established the principle of rhyme as a basis of grammatical accord can draw from it little poetic effect (in French the scant remainders of grammatical consonance -é, -er, -ais are never poetic). Rhyme as a poetic device has originated in our modern languages because it is no longer used for grammatical concordance: it serves to link words which precisely are not easily connected, and therein lies its charms. The Latin sequence quoted above appears in modern languages without grammatical rhyme (toutes les belles choses sont rares), and we may assume that the decay of the Latin nominal and verbal declension system must have contributed to the development of rhyme as a poetic device. While the inflectional system was still in full vigor, the poetic flavor of language could be enhanced only by quantitative prosody. That the disappearance of grammatical rhyme opened the way to poetic rhyme is also suggested by the fact that in late antiquity (and later, through the Middle Ages in the so-called Reimprosa) rhyme was used, in prose alone, as a device for underlining intellectual parallelism (cola). It was employed by Tertullian (according to Vossler) because it belonged to the “sophistical and rhetorical apparatus of Greco-Latin artistic prose” —and Christian propaganda should not show a style inferior to that of the heathen. It is well known that Augustine, although in his discussion of metrics (De musica) he fails to mention rhyme as a “musical phenomenon”, was the first to use the rhyme form in a poem; it is to be found in a psalm, reminiscent of later Romance tirades, contra Donatianum, which is somewhat in the middle between poetry and dogmatic propaganda. I would suggest that, in the rescue of rhyme from its prosaic commitments, nothing was more influential (in a Latin which had freed itself from the quantitative system and which —at least in the case of the spoken form, Vulgar Latin— was about to lose its declension system) that was the idea of (the musical) world harmony. With the Romans, the expression consonantia vocum (which, as we have already seen, was a by-product of their world harmony) was applied to grammatical accord, but now we find “consonance” used as the name for the rhyme ([con]sonans, acordans in the old Provençal Leys d’Amors, etc.), since this, likewise, is an echo of the world harmony (the German word for rhyme meant originally “order” and may render the idea of the numeri. Rhyme as a musical device is in line with Ambrose’s addition of oriental music to the text of his hymns in praise of world harmony —oriental music that would have sounded as barbarous to the nice ear of the Greeks as the rhyme. The tremendous development of music is not thinkable without the Christina idea of world harmony: as Ambrose says in his History of Music (quoted by Vossler), music was “freed from the shackles of metrics”: in the alleluias, or in the final lines of psalms, music went its own way, apart from the text. Now rhyme itself is perhaps of a parallel “barbaric,” oriental original (Lydian according to Vossler, but Syrian according to W. Meyer aus Speier); it is also a typically Christian device (“In the first six centuries there is hardly a single rhymed poem to be found in Latin that is not inspired by Christian sentiment” —Vossler). Is it, then, too bold to assume, along with the introduction of a music joined with words and expanding beyond the range of words the introduction also of a second music within the words themselves, i.e., rhyme, used as a devise in unison with the idea of world harmony and possessed of all the emotional, unintellectual impact of this idea? The Gesamtkunstwerk technique implies generally synesthetic devices: the “musicalization of poetry”  by the rhyme would be only another feature of the conception of art as musical art. The polyphony in which the manifoldness of the universe is brought to unity, is echoed within the poem by a device which holds together words that strive apart. Both polyphony and rhyme are Christina developments, patterned on world harmony; in the ambiguity of the word consonantia in the Middle Ages (“chord” or “rhyme”) we may grasp the fundamental kinship of the two meanings. Rhyme is now redeemed from intellectualism, it is an acoustic and emotional phenomenon responding to the harmony of the world.