Milton, Dryden And Marvell: an exchange of views on rhyming

Abstract

There could be an argument that English does not readily rhyme - even though it produces a poetry that is overwhelmingly one of rhyme. It does not readily rhyme, that is, in comparison with most Romance languages. Chaucer rhymes rather than continuing in the native alliterative tradition because he works in a novel way, in what Charles Muscatine called 'the French tradition'. Dante can spin off chains of terza rima in The Divine Comedy and it is no extraordinary feat (though it certainly was to Dorothy Sayers, trying to do the same thing in her English translation); Petrarch can accumulate over three hundred sonnets to Laura without breaking sweat, but English sonneteers collapse after knocking up the odd century or so. The terms that describe our forms are imported: rhyme or rima, sonnet, stanza (or room), with which, as Donne says, the English attempt to 'build in sonnets pretty rooms'.