When you’ve lost the key …
EIDOLON in single perfect or syllabic rhyme - CONTEST WINNERS and FEEDBACK
Thank you to all who took the time to write a poem for this contest. However, when you’ve lost the key to open the door to success, no amount of follow-up blogging on my part seems to have done the trick to instil in most the need for attention to detail of the very specific contest requirements. At the end of the day, I hope that I have inspired you to step out of your comfort zone with this challenge and in future to look at rhyme schemes (the patterns of rhyme) with a more critical eye.
The top podium winner had perfectly executed the brief in single perfect rhyme. The intriguing title foreshadows the unusual content of this excellent alexandrine couplet. I was unfamiliar with the archaic word unhold (meaning to let go), but it became clear in the context of the poem, before looking it up in an online dictionary.
Wrapping Spirit
Inscribed still stone unholds, supine spirit enfolds
bemoaned psyche enwrapped, entranced soul strings unsnapped.
© Subimal Simha-Roy 2023
The runner-up, Craig Cornish, also acquitted himself well of the task and delivered a fine example of an alexandrine couplet in single perfect rhyme, incorporating the swung dash as a punctuation mark between the hexaverse (echoes of my Suzette sonnet design?). The unique title, Erinyes (one of the chthonic deities), grabs one’s attention. The 3rd place winner (also in single perfect rhyme), Soul Extraction, by Di11y Da11y, taught me a new word: abscise. I read this alexandrine couplet a number of times to savour its content. The flow could have benefitted from a more obvious enjambment – but maybe it is just me …
Congratulations to the three poets who obtained podium wins in this contest – I will be visiting each one individually with a personal comment on their poems.
Single perfect rhyme and syllabic rhyme are like yin and yang, both rhyming on the final syllable in words, but these syllables are stressed and unstressed respectively, and they are preceded by unmatched syllables. These are never to be mixed up in the same couplet (called an extended phrase of 24 syllables in the definition of alexandrine here on Poetry Soup). Seeing as syllabic rhyme calls for rhyme on two or more syllable words, it stood to reason that for this contest the perfect rhyme was to rhyme on multi-syllabic words as well, but NOT double rhyme (also called feminine rhyme) as it was too close to syllabic rhyme – hence me specifying single perfect rhyme on multi-syllabic words. The rhymes fall on the 6th and 12th syllables (the two hexaverse in the English language that had replaced the two hemistichs while still honouring the caesura in the French alexandrine) in the alexandrines, which are always exactly 12 syllables per line.
The poetry terms left over from a different era: During the previous century, they had hit on the words ‘masculine syllable’ for single stressed syllable words, resulting in the term ‘masculine rhyme’, e.g., door/floor/store. Then some bright spark thought it a good idea to name the unstressed end syllable in the two or more syllabic words ‘feminine syllable’, resulting in the term ‘feminine rhyme’.
THE STANDARD DEFINITION OF PERFECT RHYME
Perfect rhyme is a rhyme in which the final accented vowel, and all succeeding consonants or syllables are identical in sound, while the preceding consonants are different.
Perfect rhyme can be classified according to the number of syllables included in the rhyme, which is dictated by the location of the final stressed syllable. FOR THE CONTEST: Single ~ is a rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words (rhyme/sublime).
An aside: Double rhyme: (also called feminine rhyme) A rhyme in which the stress is on the penultimate (second from last) syllable of the words (picky/tricky; motion/ocean). [This was NOT called for in this contest.]
DEFINITION OF SYLLABIC RHYME
‘Syllabic rhyme: a rhyme in which the last syllable of each word [i.e., multi-syllable words. From my example poem: spirit/merit] sounds the same but does not necessarily contain stressed vowels. [1.] (cleaver, silver [-ver], or pitter, patter [-ter]; the final syllable of the words bottle and fiddle is a liquid consonant /|/. [2.] Imperfect (or near): a rhyme between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. (wing, caring)’ ~Wikipedia. The text in square brackets are my insets.
Even from the examples listed in this article by Wikipedia, one can clearly see that the preceding stressed syllables DON’T rhyme. This is what sets it apart from (perfect) double rhyme/feminine rhyme (see above). NB I have excluded the option no 2 in this contest (see the contest page for details), as it results in FORCED RHYME/WRENCH RHYME.
BEING LENIENT
There were no clear winners amongst the poems based on syllabic rhyme. Despite the clear definition of syllabic rhyme on the contest page and my fine example poem, I had added my own extension of the example words to be found in the Wikipedia article (as I did not like the example ‘pitter, patter’ as there is no such word as ‘pitter’ unless used in conjunction with ‘patter’). My examples inadvertently included a double rhyme, i.e., stutter/patter/mutter, instead of mitre (my intended example). Therefore, in all fairness, I have included the poems from the 4th to the 6th places that included double rhymes. The 7th place winner relied on secondary stressed syllables in the second line of the couplet to conform to the syllabic rhyme. I would not have discounted the final liquid consonant* as in bottle, fiddle, etc (usually included in syllabic rhyme), although this was not specified in the definition on the contest page. These four poems had very original content and the multi-syllable rhymed words were all words in their own right, i.e., they did not rely on a stem word plus a suffix such as ‘-er’, ‘-ing’, ‘-tion’, but to name a few examples to be found. Furthermore, they had correct syllable counts per line and well-defined enjambments but only erred insofar as the rhymes (these had to match in their sound) had to coincide with the requirement to fall on the 6th and 12th syllables of the lines. Congratulations on your placements.
Those who had failed to obtain a placement and are interested to know why, may check their entries against the contest requirements (this appears at the foot of the Contest Results page of this contest) as I don’t indulge in post-mortems.
Happy quills!
Suzette
*ENGLISH HAS TWO LATERAL LIQUIDS [special characters improvised for this site]:
/|/ occurs in syllable-initial position, for example, like, melon, and hello.
/+/ occurs in syllable-final position, for example, full, little, and belfry.