First Rhyme

The birth of poetry

Here is my theory on the beginning of poetry. The birth of a thing tells us what it is. Thus we can say what is not in poetry’s beginnings, is not poetry.

The first seeds of poetry came in word play. Children will play with words, with two words that sound alike but mean different things, with puns, but mostly with the sound of words. Alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, along with words that sound like what they represent.

Rhythm was not at first part of poetry but came with it early. Rhythm would have begun with the pace and beat of walking, then with hitting things with fist or stick or other tool.

I have three candidates for the first kind of poem.

1. The magical incantation
2. Memory aid
3. Toil relief

There is a sort of magic in song (which is what we would call the first poems). Songs invoke and call the gods and magical forces to us. This is I think due to the effect a strongly-rhythmic, rhyming song has upon us. The trance that we fall under, while singing or hearing a long, rhythmic chant, seems filled with magic itself. It is only natural to feel the close presence of powerful forces.

Poems help us to remember them (and their contents) using a combination of effects. Rhythm and rhyme afford a poem what is called a ‘check-sum’ in computer algorithms. Together they allow for the reconstruction of lines only partly remembered. If you know one end-word of a rhyme couplet, you narrow the choices for its mate. The sense of the phrase gives you another guidepost. In simple language, you may end with only one possible word that could fit the meter and the rhyme.

Songs help us to get through the effort of a long hike, repeated work (such as chopping wood) and even pain, by distracting us as well as luring us into the seductive trance. The song moves through us, and the work accomplishes itself. The beat of the song regulates the actions of the work. Set the beat of the song right, and we can go on working at a given level, our best, for much longer than we could without the song. Without the song, we would be tempted to work fast and hard and exhaust ourselves early on, then rest too long or even give it up.

Therefore I define poetry in formal terms. It is oral and to be sung, chanted, or heard. A poem that fails these three purposes, that does not induce the spell, or help us to remember it, or lift us through toil, is a poor poem — or is no poem at all.

The needs of meter and rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so forth, compelled poets to substitute language, and to speak in tropes or allusion. This gave rise to the notion that ‘poetry’ was not ‘prosaic’ language, and that mere images and rhetorical devices were somehow the essence of poetry. Thus prose can be called ‘poetic.’ When poetry was primarily read by the eye instead of spoken, remembered, or heard, line breaks came to be seen as the heart of poetry — later the visual arrangement of words (and even letters and numbers) on the page came to be seen as an inherent part. Meanwhile the original poetry, the true poetry, was called ‘doggerel’ and deemed inferior and cheap.

If we wish to call these written and read new forms ‘poems’ then we need another term for what poetry really is.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, June 19, 2008)