Rhyme systems. The concept of rhyme. Types of rhymes Rich and poor rhymes

30.01.2024

Accent placement: RI`FMA

RHYME (from the Greek rhythmos - proportionality) - repetition of individual sounds or sound complexes connecting the endings of two or more lines (this is the difference between rhyme and the alliteration of ancient Germanic and Turkic verse). In R., individual sounds ("frost - roses"), words ("young - hammer") [simple R.], groups of words (compound R.), and in exceptional cases - entire lines (panto-rhyme) can be repeated. Sometimes one or more sounds of one rhyming word does not meet a correspondence in another (in V. Mayakovsky: “strophe is a fact”). R. plays a very important role in the organization of poetry: it is associated with sound, rhythm, vocabulary, intonation and syntax, and stanza. The rhythmic function of R.R. is very important by sound repetition of clauses (verse endings), emphasizing the interlinear pause:

Yesterday's sweat has smoked away, The sweat has dried, the metal has become cold, The trenches smell of arable land, Summer, peaceful and simple.

The lexical function of rhyme is that it highlights words connected by sound repetition, and thereby strengthens the associative sphere of the verse. The first party anthem in V. Mayakovsky’s poem “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” ends with a stanza in which the most significant words in meaning are rhymed: “brothers are the party,” “valuable is Lenin.” R. in its intonation function contributes to the emergence of logical stress, as a result of which the rhyming word stands out sharply from the speech stream and special attention is drawn to it. This can happen, for example, when close phrases are broken. In the poem “There is still a lot of uncertainty...” L. Martynov directs the reader’s perception to the adverb “frankly”, which is semantically and phonically more noticeable than the associated verb “to lead”:

But I didn’t notice self-hatred anywhere - You just need to behave openly everywhere...

In the compound R. “hate - openly to lead,” the logical emphasis on the word “frankly” is achieved due to a certain phonic muting of the verb “to lead.” There are several types of classification of rhyme with sound t.z. R. are divided into accurate and inaccurate. Exact R. - consonance, in which all the sounds coincide: “Eugene is a genius”, “full of waves”, “ill - could not”, etc. The criterion of accuracy is not the orthographic coincidence of rhyming words, but their phonetic, pronunciation side, e.g. the compound rhyme of V. Mayakovsky: “to grow old - old age” is accurate. Inaccurate R. - consonance, in which the sounds that make up rhyming words do not coincide phonetically; Wed Mayakovsky’s rhymes: “crucified - passport”, “discovering - weapons”, “village - Leninists”, etc. In relation to inaccurate R., specific concepts are assonance (“stars - distributed”), unequal rhyme (“crashing - sobriety "), truncated rhymes (" went around - good "), etc. In modern poetry, "contour" acoustic rhyme is widely represented, in which the general sound "contour", the "dotted line" of words is consonant, and not their endings ("asphalt - wedding", "devastation - reason", "clown - fear", etc.). Sometimes such R. is called root. The basis of R. is made up of supporting sounds located to the left of the stressed vowel, which is the basis of R. Thus, in Pushkin’s R. “Eugene is a genius,” “g” is the supporting consonant. An increase in the number of common repeating sounds enhances the sound perceptibility of R., as in Mayakovsky’s verse. Depending on the location of stress in rhyming words, R. are masculine, feminine, dactylic, hyperdactylic, with stress respectively on the last, penultimate, third syllable from the end of the word and on the fourth and further syllables from the end of the word. Masculine rhyme (the origin of the terms “male” and “female” R. is associated with the Old French language - in it the first coincided with the ending of the masculine gender, and the second with the ending of the feminine gender): “anxious - could”, “rad - apparatus”, etc. .p.; female rhyme: “water - factories”, “ruled - left”, etc. Dactylic rhyme (“deep - lonely”) in Russian poetry 18 - early. 19th century was rarely used. By the mid-19th century, especially in the poetry of N. Nekrasov, dactylic R. became equal in rights along with male and female. V. Bryusov’s poem “Night” presents successively decreasing R. from seven syllables to one: from “hanging - mixing” (hyperdactylic R.) to “night - away” (collection “Experiments”). According to their location in the lines, rhymes are divided into paired or adjacent (rhyme scheme: aabb), cross, in which the first and third, second and fourth lines rhyme (scheme: aba b), enveloping (girdled, ring), in -the first and fourth, second and third lines are consonant (scheme: abba). At the beginning of A. S. Pushkin’s poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” (1831), a couplet with an adjacent rhyme is replaced by a quatrain with a girded rhyme:

What are you making noise about, people? Why are you threatening Russia with anathema? What angered you? unrest in Lithuania? Leave it alone: this is a dispute between the Slavs. A domestic, old dispute, already weighed by fate, A question that you will not resolve.

Cross rhyme is presented, for example, in the lines of Mayakovsky:

This time is buzzing with a telegraph string, this heart and truth are together. It was with the fighters, or the country, or in my heart.

When interacting with a rhyming word of two or more words, a compound rhyme arises: “Harold - with ice”, “bell - lapped milk”, etc.

One of the types of compound rhyme with an unexpected combination of words is the pun R.: “I’ll beat you in a roll.” The punning rhymes of the satirical poet of the 60s are typical. 19th century D. Minaeva:

The realm of rhymes is my element, And I write poetry easily, Without hesitation, without delay, I run to line after line, Even to the brown Finnish rocks I make a pun.

It is extremely rare to find mixed-stress vowels, in which the stressed vowels do not coincide. For example, in V. Mayakovsky: “for some reason - a worker”, “from the outside - Emergency”.

Lit.: Zhirmunsky V., Rhyme, its history and theory, P., 1923; Shtokmar M.P., Rhyme of Mayakovsky, M., 1958; Tomashevsky B.V., On the history of Russian rhyme, in his collection: Verse and Language, M. - L., 1959, p. 69 - 131; Goncharov B.P., Rhyme and its semantic expressiveness, in the collection: Study of versification at school, M., 1960, p. 59 - 95; his, On Mayakovsky's rhyme, "Philology, Sciences", 1972, No. 2; Zapadov A.V., Derzhavin and Russian rhyme of the 18th century, in the book: XVIII century. Sat. 8, L., 1969.

B. Goncharov.

Sources:

Dictionary of literary terms. Ed. From 48 comp.: L. I. Timofeev and S. V. Turaev. M., "Enlightenment", 1974. 509 p.

The artistic function of rhyme is in many ways close to the function of rhythmic units. This is not surprising: the complex relationship of repetition and non-repetition is inherent in it in the same way as in rhythmic structures. The foundations of the modern theory of rhyme were laid by V. M. Zhirmunsky, who in 1923, in the book “Rhyme, its history and theory,” in contrast to the school of phonetic study of verse (Ohrphilologie), saw in rhyme not just a coincidence of sounds, but the phenomenon of rhythm . V. M. Zhirmunsky wrote: “Any sound repetition that carries an organizing function in the metric composition of a poem should be attributed to the concept of rhyme”1.
Zhirmunsky's formulation formed the basis for all subsequent definitions of rhyme.
It is necessary, however, to note that such a definition refers to the most common and, undoubtedly, the most significant, but by no means the only possible case - rhyme in verse. The history of Russian rhyme (*68) shows that its connection with poetic speech is not the only possibility. Old Russian poetry - psalms, folk lyrics, epics - not only did not know rhyme, but also excluded it. Poetry of that time was associated with chanting, and between chanting and rhyme there was apparently a relation of complementarity: rhyme was found only in spoken genres and could not be combined with singing. Rhyme in this system was a sign of prose, that ornamental prose, which was structurally separated from poetry and from all types of non-fiction speech: from business and colloquial speech, which stood below art on the scale of cultural values of the Middle Ages, and from cult, sacred, state, historical who stood above him. This ornamental “funny” prose included proverbs, fairground jokes (under its influence, as D.S. Likhachev showed, the style of “The Prayer of Daniil the Sharper” was created), on the one hand, and “twisting of words”, on the other. Here, in particular, the merging of fair and baroque cultures, which we have already written about, was revealed.2
Rhyme united with poetry and assumed an organizing metric function only with the emergence of spoken, declamatory poetry. However, she retained one essential aspect of prose - the focus on content.
Rhythmic repetition - repetition of a position. At the same time, the phoneme, as a unit of a certain linguistic level, is included in the differentiating group of characteristics. Thus, the element to be activated belongs to the plane of expression.
The first rhymes were constructed as grammatical or root rhymes. The bulk of the rhymes were of an inflectional nature:
Dutch doctor
And the good pharmacist
................................................
Transport old women to young people,
And don’t damage their minds in any way.
I completely made the car
And he prepared all his instruments.
Come to me from all countries,
Glorify my science.3
Rhyme is constructed in a similar way in the prose “Vitya sloves”. Let us quote the text of Epiphanius the Wise: “Yes, and I am many sinners and foolish... one who weaves the word and the one who fruits the word and who honors the word with words, from words of praise, both acquiring and interweaving, I again say: that I will call you a guide for those who are lost, a finder for the lost, a mentor for the deceived, a guide a blinded mind, a desecrated cleanser, a wasteful seeker, a war guard, a sorrowful comforter, a hungry feeder, a demanding giver, a senseless indicator (*69), a helper to the offended, a prayer book of warmth, a faithful intercessor, a filthy savior, a curser demon, an idol of the consumer, a trampler of idols, God servant, the wisdom of a steward, the philosophy of an amateur, the truth of the creator, the books of a storyteller, the literacy of a copyist."4
Inflectional and root rhymes, including units of the morphological and lexical level in repetitions, directly affected the area of semantics. Since the elements of the expression plane coincided, and meaning became the differential feature, the connection between structure and content became directly exposed.
The sound of a rhyme is directly related to its surprise, that is, it is not acoustic or phonetic, but semantic in nature. It is easy to verify this by comparing tautological rhymes with homonymous ones. In both cases, the nature of the rhythmic-phonetic coincidence is the same. However, when the meanings do not coincide and are distant (their convergence is perceived as a surprise), the rhyme sounds rich. When repeating both sound and meaning, the rhyme gives the impression of being poor and is hardly recognized as a rhyme.
Again we are faced with the fact that repetition also implies difference, that coincidence at one level only highlights the discrepancy at another. Rhyme is one of the most conflicting dialectical levels of poetic structure. It performs the function that semantic parallelisms played in rhymeless folk and psalmic poetry - it brings poems together into pairs, forcing them to be perceived not as a combination of two separate statements, but as two ways of saying the same thing. Rhyme does at the morphological-lexical level what anaphor does at the syntactic level.
It is with rhyme that the construction of content that constitutes a characteristic feature of poetry begins. In this sense, the principle of rhyme can be traced at higher structural levels. Rhyme belongs equally to metric, phonological and semantic organization. The weak study of rhyme, compared to other poetic categories, is largely due to the complexity of its nature.
The question of the relationship of rhyme to other levels of text organization is not raised at all. Meanwhile, for Russian poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is obvious, for example, that the “loosening” of prohibitions on rhythmic systems was almost always complemented by an increase in prohibitions on the concept of “good” rhyme. The more the rhythmic structure tends to imitate non-poetic speech, the more marked the rhyme becomes in the verse. The weakening of metaphorism, on the contrary, is usually accompanied by a weakening of the structural role of rhyme. Blank verse, as a rule, shuns tropes. A striking example of this is Pushkin’s poetry of the 1830s.5
(*70) Coincidences of sound complexes in rhyme compare words that outside the given text would have nothing in common with each other. This juxtaposition gives rise to unexpected semantic effects. The fewer intersections between the semantic, stylistic, and emotional fields of meaning of these words, the more unexpected their contact and the more significant in the textual structure becomes that intersecting structural level that allows them to be combined together.
Even
gray gelding
wishes
graceful life
and beautiful.
Twirls
playfully
tail and mane.
Always spins
but especially ardently -
If
towards
filly person.
(V. Mayakovsky. “You give an elegant life”)
The convergence between “gray” and “beautiful” immediately sets the main semantic contradiction of the entire poem. The stylistic and semantic incompatibility of these words in their usual linguistic and traditional literary meanings suggests that “beautiful” will receive a special meaning in this text, one through which “gray” shines through (a component of the phraseological unit “gray gelding”, the meaning of which is quite definite ). And it is precisely the unusualness of this second meaning, the strength of resistance that our entire linguistic and cultural experience offers to it, that determines the unexpectedness and effectiveness of the semantic structure of the text. Other rhymes in the text have the same meaning, such as: “crayfish” - “frachy”.
The rhyme “especially ardently” - “person-filly” creates an even more complex relationship. The stylistic contrast between the romantic “ardent” and the familiar “filly” is complemented by the clash of identical sound complexes (in pronunciation “especially” and “special” coincide) and different grammatical functions. For the reader experienced in matters of language and poetry, another effect is revealed here - the contradiction between graphics and phonetics of verse (we should not forget the keen attention of futurists to the Greek appearance of the text). “Playfully” - “and mane” reveals another semantic aspect. In the quoted passage, words of two semantic groups collide: some belong to the human world, the second are associated with the world of horses. The illumination of vulgar meanings through conventionally poetic ones (achieved by the fact that words of one series turn out to be part of words in another, and this, due to the significance of the entire field of expression in poetry, (*71) is transferred to the sphere of meanings) is complemented by the same “shine-through” "horse" semantics through human ones.
1 Zhirmunsky V. Rhyme, its history and theory. Pg., 1923. P. 9. Wed. an earlier formulation in his book “The Poetry of Alexander Blok” (Pg., 1922. P. 91): “We call a sound repetition at the end of the corresponding rhythmic groups by rhyme.”
2 See: Lotman Yu. M. Remarks on the problem of Baroque in Russian literature // Ceskoslovenska rusistika. 1968. T. 13. No. 1. P. 21.
3 Russian folk drama of the 17th-20th centuries / Ed., intro. Art. and comment. P. N. Berkova. M., 1953. S. 84-85. Italics are mine. - Yu.L.
4 Quoted by: Zubov V.P. Epiphanius the Wise and Pachomius the Serb // Proceedings of the Department of Old Russian Literature of the Institute of Literature. M.; L., 1953. T. 9. P. 148-149.
5 The above does not apply to free verse, which is generally regulated by other, still very little studied laws.

Next to the rhythm, and often even before, when defining a verse, rhyme is called:

Rhyme, sonorous friend of Inspired leisure, Inspired work, You fell silent, numb; Oh, did you really fly away, changed forever! In the old days, your sweet babble pacified the trembling of my heart - lulled my sadness, you caressed, you beckoned, and took you away from the world into an enchanted distance.

In this poem, rhyme is called the friend of creative work; the poet talks in loving detail about various situations when rhyme was given easily and naturally or forced the text to be reworked repeatedly. Behind the humorous lines, you involuntarily see the pages of Pushkin’s drafts with endless alterations, crossed out and restored words, and you begin to agree with the idea of the high importance of rhyme. The poem ends with the story of the divine origin of rhyme. Imitating the solemn verse of ancient Greek poets, Pushkin says that her father was the god of poetry Apollo himself, and her mother was the goddess of memory Mnemosyne. Indeed, thanks to consonance, a new line makes one remember the previous one and returns to it.

However, the poem was not published in 1827, when it is dated. This can be explained by many reasons. Perhaps the poet was dissatisfied with the style of his imitation, because the lines written on behalf of the ancient poet sounded too modern and lacked the majesty that characterizes the style of Homer (Omir) or Hesiod. Perhaps Pushkin did not like that the rhymes of this poem, although euphonious, were not connected with the theme. Or maybe the author felt the falsity in the legend he created about the divine origin of the rhyme. As the daughter of Apollo, Rhyme was the embodiment of poetry.

In 1830, a new poem was written called “Rhyme”, in which, very successfully imitating an ancient verse, Pushkin tells a previously invented myth. True, this time Rhyme turned out to be the daughter of Apollo and the nymph Echo. Mnemosyne only helped when she was born. No matter how insignificant such a shade may be, for an artistic image, especially in poetry that requires brevity, because rhythmic repetitions should not tire with their monotony, it led to a direct rethinking of the entire theme. Rhyme lost its divine nature and ceased to command the creative process:

The playful maiden grew up in the choir of aonid goddesses, like a sensitive mother, obedient to strict memory, dear to the muses; on earth it is called Rhyme.

As if symbolizing the poet’s emancipation from capricious autocracy, the poem about rhyme is written in unrhymed verse!

Again, something did not satisfy Pushkin in this charming sketch and forced him to hide it in his desk. Only two years later the poet published “Rhyme”, when the poem “Echo” had already appeared:

Is a beast roaring in the deep forest, Is a horn blowing, is thunder thundering, Is a maiden singing over the hill - To every sound You suddenly give birth to your response in the empty air. You listen to the roar of thunder, And the voice of the storm and waves, And the cry of rural shepherds - And you send an answer; You don’t have any feedback... That’s how you are, a poet!

It may seem that Pushkin turned to a completely new plot, because neither gods nor nymphs appear in the image. An elegant landscape sketch captures the echo as a natural phenomenon. Rhyme is not even mentioned, but it was now that the poet artistically realized the similarity between the repetition of sound in nature - echo, and its repetition in verse - rhyme, which inspired him to compose the legend that Rhyme’s mother was the nymph Echo.

"Echo" amazes with its extraordinary rhyme. The same consonance is repeated four times: dull - thunder - hill - empty, then somewhat updated - again four times: thunder - ramparts - shepherds - this. Identical sounds follow each other in rhyme, just as an echo repeats the same sound several times.

Moreover, Pushkin was able to show the gradual attenuation of sound by rhyming closed syllables: om, ov. The transition from the full-voiced O to the consonant M or B creates the impression of an echo dying in the distance. He even introduced such a subtle nuance: the sound M is replaced by a duller one, quickly turning into noise B, because the first responses are stronger, the last ones are weaker and duller. In addition, the first three consonances follow each other in adjacent lines, and the fourth appears one line later, unexpectedly, when it seemed that the echo had already sounded.

The rhymes of this poem perfectly imitated the poetic phenomenon of nature and created the image of an echo. The image of the echo at the same time was supposed to symbolize the essence of poetry, which reproduces reality. In the early 30s, the poet had already moved to the position of a realistic understanding of art. In articles and works of art, he persistently proves that art is only truly beautiful when it reflects the diversity of life. The contrast in the small tragedy “Mozart and Salieri” is especially instructive in this regard. No matter how hard Salieri tries, having abandoned all the joys of life, to calculate the perfection of harmony, he fails. But Mozart creates works whose genius is recognized even by his cruel rival. At the same time, Pushkin shows with amazing skill that they are born from the composer’s overwhelming love for people and the life around him. In one scene, Mozart even tells the vital content of his music:

Imagine... who? Well, at least I’m a little younger; In love - not too much, but slightly - With a beauty, or with a friend - even with you, I am cheerful... Suddenly: a grave vision, Sudden darkness or something like that... Well, listen.

The small poem “Echo” took part in the historically important struggle for the establishment of realism in Russian literature on an equal basis with other works of greater magnitude. Rhyme also played a role in this, because it was she who depicted how the echo reproduces real sounds!

If the role of rhyme is so significant, then perhaps the answer to the question posed in the previous chapter about the unit, the repetition of which creates poetic rhythm, has already been found? Maybe it is precisely rhyme? It’s not for nothing that the name rhyme comes from the same word that in the language of Ancient Greece meant rhythm and which is translated as proportionality, consistency?

However, if in the analysis we rely only on the figurative material that is provided by the repetition of gradually fading consonances, then the content of the poem will be very poor. The idea of the variety of life phenomena to which the “Echo” reacts, of everything beautiful and peaceful, like the singing of a maiden behind a hill or the cry of rural shepherds, will disappear; cheerful and cheerful, like the sounds of hunting; terrible and menacing, like the roar of thunder. The image of the poet will especially suffer, blurring into something faceless. All words give artistic depth and specificity to a poem, regardless of whether they are part of a rhyming series or not. Consequently, even in such an exceptional case, rhyme is unable to exhaust the content of the poem; it must always be considered in interaction with the word, and then rhyme will help to understand a lot better and more deeply.

For example, the fourth, isolated rhyme includes the word empty. It is not only formally separated from the three previous ones, but also in meaning it transfers to another world. The first rhymes, hastily following each other, gave birth to a multicolored picture. The latter takes you into the world of illusory sound. Echo responses are born in empty air, there is no real life in them, and the pictures created by the artist with the help of words that reflect reality are also illusory. Of course, this idea is not expressed directly in the poem, but the logic of artistic comparisons leads to it even more convincingly than reasoning in a special aesthetic treatise could. Despite its outward simplicity, the poem amazes with its richness of philosophical content; it allowed the poet to characterize the essence of Poetry from various angles. No wonder V. Hugo wrote: “A thought chained in verse immediately becomes sharper and more sparkling. It is iron turned into steel” *.

The language of poetic images is so laconic and capacious that in twelve short lines Pushkin was also able to speak about the poet’s tragedy. The impressions of existence invade his soul, demanding an answer. He sends people a reflection of the world melted by the pain of his heart - oh no. review. This is how the poem, which began with an idyllically bright picture, ends mournfully and sternly.

It is probably no coincidence that Pushkin’s work on a cycle about rhyme parallels his work on a cycle dedicated to the poet. The first, about rhyme, was written simultaneously with the first poems “The Poet”, “The Poet and the Crowd”, and shortly before the poem “Echo” in 1831, “To the Poet” appeared, in which the artist is so strictly instructed to hold accountable for creative achievements to his own conscience , regardless of whether he will be praised or blasphemed:

Improving the fruits of your favorite thoughts, Without demanding rewards for a noble feat, They are within you. You are your own highest court; You know how to evaluate your work more strictly than anyone else. Are you satisfied with it, a discerning artist?

The poet needs to go through a lot and change his mind so that the depth of the content requires him to truly complete the form.

Perhaps the history of work on poems dedicated to rhyme well illustrates what Pushkin meant when he wrote: “Improving the fruits of favorite thoughts.” At the same time, the history of how, reflecting on the purpose of the poet and the essence of poetry, Pushkin determined the place of rhyme in the creative process, evaluating it differently, is important for our contemporaries, because many more poets see the pathos of poetic creativity in inventing extraordinary rhymes and dutifully obeying the “frisky whims” of their “sounding friend,” without thinking about what will happen as a result of her pranks. Meanwhile, rhyme is one of the elements of artistic form, which must reliably serve to express the content. The expressive possibilities of rhyme, as “Echo” shows, are simply amazing, however, as the poem “Rhyme” testifies, you can get by with unrhymed verse.

Returning to the solution to the question of the possibility of recognizing rhyme as a unit of poetic rhythm, we cannot ignore the last fact. How can something that is not always present become a distinctive feature of a poem? And rhymeless verses are not so rare; they even received a special name - blank verse. Pushkin used blank verse, for example, in Pimen’s famous monologue: “One more last legend...” and in many poems of his mature period in the 30s (“Again I visited...”, “He lived among us.”.. ., etc.), and other poets did not neglect this form.

Moreover, it was not by chance that Pushkin deprived the poem “Rhyme” of rhyme. The fact is that the ancient poetry of Ancient Greece and Rome did not know rhyme. Homer and Sappho, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace did not rhyme their poems. Russian folk song, whose roots go back to ancient times, also did without rhymes. Finally, in our time, free verse, or free verse, in which rhyme is undesirable, has become very popular. If it appears, then as an exception:

Spare my heart And strengthen my will, Because I dream of bonfires in the Zaporozhye spring steppe. I hear the horses snoring, I hear the smell of Hot horses, I hear the old songs of Days never lost.

V. Lugovskoy. Bonfires

In this way, the oldest forms of verse and its newest modifications merge with each other; in both cases, verses exist without rhyme.

Consequently, the absence of rhyme, while playing a certain expressive role, does not destroy the poetic form at its core. Poems remain poems, maintaining their exciting elation.

On the other hand, rhymes are found not only in poetry: “In Kitezh I climbed a sunken bell tower and saw from there not only the underwater world, but also Volkhov, and a portage, and somewhere beyond the Volga free felt yurts, and beyond Kiev the lush Dnieper threshold. And I also saw beyond the sea - the city of Stekolny, that is, old Stockholm beyond the epic borders of my Novgorod roads."

"Rubicon"

When you read L. Martynov’s essay, you immediately feel that this is prose, albeit rhythmic. And here in prose rhymes are discovered: the threshold is expensive.

However, it is very eloquent that a careful analysis reveals in the passage a number of more words that are consonant with the rhyming pair: little world, volok, felt, but these consonances are not directly perceived as rhymes. This probably happens because the words threshold and roads complete the sentence, while the word little world, although it stands before the connecting conjunction and, is included in the opposition: not only the underwater world, but also Volkhov, it is not felt as completing word. It is characteristic that the overlap with the word volok is easier to notice than with the word voylok, although they both differ from the word threshold in that the stress is not on the last syllable, but on the penultimate one. But the first is at the end of the enumeration, and the second is closely related to the word yurt that follows it, as defining it. When words with consonant endings find themselves in the middle of a speech segment, their rhyming becomes unnoticeable. Moreover, we can say that in this situation the consonance at the beginning of the words is more likely to be perceived: Volga freemen, free felt. What's especially interesting is what happens to the word glass. It seems consonant with the word Stockholm, because the beginning of both words coincides, while the rhyme for glass is free. In order to make the numerous rhymes of this prose passage accessible to auditory perception, it is necessary to select a special intonation that brings L. Martynov’s rhythmic prose closer to poetry:

And from there I saw an underwater world, But also Volkhov, and a drag, And somewhere beyond the Volga, freemen felt the free felt of yurts.

However, this would completely change the emotional tone of the passage. It would be necessary to slow down the pace of speech on each of the rhyming words, as if the author wanted to imagine the “underwater world” and the details of what is happening on land. Probably, in this case, L. Martynov would have included a poetic piece in his description. Using prose, in which the repetition of the same sounds at the end and at the beginning of words gives the speech a flying, sliding character, the author created a picture where everything seems to be lost in a haze. A sinking, ghostly bell tower is unable to reveal the immensity of the earth's expanses; it gives birth to mirages.

Thus, rhyme itself does not make speech poetic.

But from observations of L. Martynov’s rhythmic prose, another conclusion follows. The most noticeable rhyme is at the end of a statement. If we take a poetic text, then also not every coincidence of sounds will act as a rhyme. Characteristic, for example, is the poem by V. Bryusov:

Bold running intoxicates, White snow blows through, Noises cut through the silence, Tender thoughts about spring. Look at me, look at me! Close, close - and quickly! On skis

The rhymes are quite clearly felt: running - snow, silence - spring, rain - quickly. In addition, in the last couplet the rhyming of the first words is revealed: with a glance - nearby. It is interesting, however, that when repeating the same words, the perception of rhyming disappears, because the second glance is closely connected with the elephant, and next to it - with the conjunction that follows it. In fact, each of the lines reads like two exclamations:

With a glance! Take a look! Near! Nearby - and quickly!

Consequently, the same pattern operates in poetry as in L. Martynov’s prose. Coincidences of sounds do not rhyme when they complete a word that is closely related to the one that follows it.

Intoxicates the brave, Fans the white, Cuts the noises, Softens the thoughts,

then a new series of rhymes will appear. Finally, the rhyming pattern of the first verbs will be revealed if you compose poetic lines only from them:

Intoxicates, Cuts, Fans, Nezhat.

Even an incomplete coincidence of the sounds cut - nezhat will sound like a rhyme.

A similar phenomenon is observed in Mayakovsky’s early poems:

The gloomy rain squinted his eyes. And behind the bars of a clear iron thought of wires is a feather bed. And the rising stars easily rested their feet on it.

If you change the graphics, which suggest a certain intonation when reading, then the original and extremely effective rhymes: eyes - and behind, feather bed - and on - will completely disappear!

The sullen rain crossed the eyes, and behind the bars of the clear iron thoughts of the wires there was a feather bed. And the rising stars easily rested their feet on it.

True, the coincidence of sounds in words with a lattice - clear remains noticeable, but can it be called rhyme in the full sense of an elephant? In addition to rhyme, sound repetition is also known. The theory distinguishes: 1) alliteration - repetition of consonant sounds.

Open your arms to me, Thick, spreading forest!

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds.

Forget me, frantic madman, do not destroy peace: I was created by the soul of your lover, you do not love a ghost!

Sometimes there are more complex forms, repetition of a syllable or even several syllables.

Rhyme is the repetition of sounds at the end of a poetic line. In this definition, a new concept of a poetic line appears. This is a segment of speech between two pauses. The division into poetic lines, as the name itself indicates, is found only in poetry. Moreover, it turns out that the two features inherent in poetic speech interact with each other. Which one is more important? Perhaps poetic lines appear because repeated rhymes divide the flow of speech? Or do rhymes arise due to some qualities inherent in the poetic line?

The first assumption must be rejected, because any poetic text is divided into lines, regardless of whether the poet wrote it in blank verse or provided it with rhymes. But the peculiarity of the structure of a poetic line can explain the appearance of rhyme.

Special equipment that linguists use when studying intonation has helped determine that poetry is read more slowly than prose. The sounds are not just stretched out, but their modulation becomes more complex, it is somewhat closer to singing, due to which speech becomes more sonorous. As a result, the sound structure is exposed, and the reader seems to enjoy the sound of each word. All sound repetitions become noticeable, so alliteration and assonance are most often used in verse.

Line endings are especially slow. The graph shows how long it takes to pronounce stressed vowels in poetry - 1 and in prose - 2. The upper curve - 3 indicates the sound time of the same vowels at the end of a poetic line *.

* (The table is given in the article by L. V. Zlatoustova. Development of applied linguistics at Moscow State University. - Bulletin of Moscow University, 1976, “Philology” No. 3, p. 45. Time is indicated in milliseconds = 0.001 s.)

In this regard, the intonation of poetic speech is the opposite of everyday speech, where the end of the utterance is pronounced quickly because the beginning has already conveyed the necessary information. Therefore, usually in prose, consonances at the beginning of words appear more noticeably, as was the case in L. Martynov’s passage.

Since the end of a poetic line is pronounced with unusual slowness, the consonance included in it acquires special significance. How interesting in their structure rhymes can be in a well-organized poetic line is shown by the beginning of V. Mayakovsky’s poem “Kyiv”:

Christmas tree paws, paws, paws, ears... Everything is covered in snow, but how warm! It’s as if I came to Kyiv yesterday to visit an old, old grandmother. Here I am standing on the hill on Vladimirskaya. Expanse to the fullest - you can’t even sweep away! So once upon a time, beaming in the frost, Perun looked around Kievan Rus. And then - when and by whom, I don’t really remember, I only know that here, over the ice, and also along the water, in the rapids, by dragging - they came with gifts to Dir and Askold. Then the sun beat on the domes on the kettledrums. On your knees, Rus'! Bend and stand. - Until today, Vladimir is driving us to laurels. The lash of the cross is clutched by the stone saint. They came from places that are nowhere more remote - great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers!.. Lots of all sorts of bloody trinkets Here at my grandmother’s along the banks of the Dnieper.

Among the ten rhyming pairs, four stand out first, in which all sounds coincide, starting with the percussion: on the ice - Askold, timpani - laurels, stand - saint, great - Dnieper. Such rhymes are called exact rhymes. In some of them, however, the last syllable is accented, then the rhyme is called masculine, in others - the penultimate. This is a feminine rhyme. At first glance, such a difference seems purely formal, but it is no coincidence that one of the early theorists of Russian verse, Antioch Cantemir, called masculine rhymes stupid, they seem to break off a poetic line on an energetically pronounced syllable. Therefore, for example, Belinsky especially noted the masculine rhyme in the poem “Mtsyri”, the verse of which “falls abruptly, like the blow of a sword striking its victim. Its elasticity, energy and sonorous monotonous fall are surprisingly in harmony with the concentrated feeling, the indestructible strength of a powerful nature and the tragic situation hero of the poem" *:

* (V. G. Belinsky. Poems by M. Lermontov. - Full. collection op. in 13 vols., vol. IV. M., 1954, p. 543.)

I ran away. Oh, I, like a brother, would be glad to embrace the storm! With the eyes of a cloud I watched, With my hand I caught lightning or... Show me what, among these walls, Could you give me in return for That short but living friendship, Between a stormy heart and a thunderstorm?

Female rhyme transitions more smoothly to a pause, as in Pushkin’s first poem about rhyme: girlfriend - leisure.

Although the listed rhymes of the poem “Kyiv” can be classified according to the same principle as the rhymes of Pushkin and Lermontov, Mayakovsky’s consonances seem more effective. This happens because Pushkin rhymes mainly words in similar grammatical forms: thunder-valo-kholm. Occasionally, combinations of a noun with an adverb appear: labor - forever, sound - suddenly, or a noun with an adjective: deaf - thunder. Mayakovsky combines words of a wide variety of grammatical forms.

In addition, Mayakovsky rhymes a larger number of sounds - he looks for words in which the pre-stresses coincide. True, some extra sound may be wedged between them, nevertheless, the consonance is clearly felt, for example: wait - holy, they rhyme despite the extra syllable vya. The same can be said about the pair: timpani - laurels. The sound l takes the consonance deeper into the line.

Askold’s rhyme with two words at once is interesting; the stressed vowel is included in the preposition: on the ice. Such a rhyme is called compound. It was used relatively rarely before Mayakovsky, mainly in humorous and satirical poems:

I say to her reproachfully: “What did you wash? Isn’t it a vest And why isn’t it silk, You hemmed the loops with thread?” Kozma Prutkov The doctor put his pince-nez on his nose; “Nervousness. Weakness. Very early, sir."

Sasha Cherny

Mayakovsky, for example, used the following rhyme in the poem “Naval Love”:

But he managed to hit him on the rib of the destroyer.

Then in satirical ditties:

Darling, a burka and socks were given to me as a souvenir. Yudenich rushes from near Luga like a man full of scum.

When the second word entirely includes two others: socks donated - slopped (o and a when read in this case sound the same), then this type of compound rhyme is called punning. The most famous example of punning rhyme is the poems of D. Minaev:

The realm of rhymes is my element And I write poetry easily. Even the Finnish brown rocks I address with a pun.

At the time when “Kyiv” (1924) was written, Mayakovsky was already widely using compound rhyme in poems with the deepest civic content, and very often.

Most of the rhymes in the above passage differ from the classical ones in that even the part that follows the stressed syllable includes sounds that are present in only one word: lapushki - babushki, what - Kyiv, peru - Perun, wilderness - trinkets. A slight discrepancy in sound - a change in the consonant in the middle or an extra consonant at the end - gives the rhyme a special, unique appeal. Moreover, its expressiveness increases, since a word placed in rhyme focuses attention on itself. Such rhymes are called inaccurate. When only vowels coincide in an imprecise rhyme, it is called assonance, just like a cluster of identical vowels in the middle of a line.

A special type of inaccuracy is made up of unequally complex rhymes: for example, plainly - dragging. (The extra o in the word volokom must be pronounced with sufficient clarity so that it does not turn out to be a wolf, completely distorting the meaning). In principle, it is believed that the last stress in a verse should always be at a specific place in the line. That's why it's called constant - constant. Thanks to this, the line receives completeness, the constant stress emphasizes the inter-verse pause. However, Mayakovsky quite often violates this rule. How frequent Mayakovsky’s violations of constants were is evident from the fact that even in such a small passage there is another unequally syllabic rhyme: Vladimir-freezing.

In the first word of a rhyming pair, the stress falls on the third syllable from the end, and in the second - on the fourth. Rhymes in which the stress falls on the third syllable are called dactylic:

Sow what is reasonable, good, eternal, Sow, the Russian people will thank you from the heart...

N. Nekrasov

Dactylic rhyme is very melodic and helps imitate a song.

In the midst of the world below For a free heart There are two paths. Weigh the forceful strength, Weigh the firm will, - Which way to go?

N. Nekrasov

You are like a riddle, forever unsolved! You are like a stanza, rebelliously unfolding! Your eyes torment your soul with winnowing thoughts, your words entice your thoughts with inconsistencies!

V. Bryusov

The more sounds that match in rhyming words, the more melodic the verse becomes. However, when Mayakovsky rhymed a three-syllable ending with a four-syllable ending, the rhyming words did not acquire a melodious quality, but were highlighted and emphasized.

Here I am standing on the hill on Vladimirskaya. Expanse to the fullest - you can’t even sweep away! So once upon a time, Perun looked around Kievan Rus, beaming in the frost.

Mayakovsky revealed the process of creating imprecise rhyme using the example of the poem “To Sergei Yesenin”. As the poet himself described, he took “the most characteristic sounds of a rhyming word” and looked for consonance with them. In Vladimirskaya's word it is vdmrk. A rhyme in which the consonants coincide is called a consonance. If even a percussion sound (in this case, and - s) is among the discordant sounds, then the consonance is called dissonance. The word vymorozki lacks two consonants: ld, but l is related to the previous one, and the sound d is introduced at the beginning of the line: So once upon a time...

Comparing Mayakovsky's rhymes with the consonances in L. Martynov's passage, I would like to draw attention to the fact that in the latter there was also a sound coincidence corresponding to the imprecise rhyme: by sea - Stockholm, but it was lost among the variety of sounds.

Thanks to the division of poetic speech into lines, even more distant consonances are perceived in it as an imprecise rhyme:

Not reaching the handrail, the Japanese woman stomped, Echoing, hinting, humility. With a sigh. Another dimension.

R. Rozhdestvensky

Consequently, rhyme manifests itself thanks to the poetic line and is a secondary feature of poetic speech, and the poetic line is fundamental, generating the peculiarities of sound. It is not for nothing that poets call each line a verse, as well as the entire type of speech that gives them the opportunity to communicate so cordially with the reader.

A poetic line is a period whose repetition creates a poetic rhythm. It is she who has all the necessary features for this: 1) sufficient emphasis, because she is limited on both sides by pauses, 2) the time of her pronunciation corresponds to the optimal conditions of perception: the most common are 8-12 syllable verses, which require about 5 seconds to pronounce , 3) poetic lines are repeated in a separate work in such quantity that does not evoke a feeling of infinity.

Literature

V. M. Zhirmunsky. Rhyme, its history and theory. - In the book: V. Zhirmunsky. Theory of verse. L., 1975.

D. Samoilov. A book about Russian rhyme. M., 1973.

B. P. Goncharov. Sound organization of verse and the problem of rhyme. M., 1973.

Questions

What is called rhyme?

How is rhyme related to the intonation of a poetic line?

What poems are called white?

In what two ways does alliteration differ from assonance?

Compare the rhymes of Pushkin’s “Message to Siberia” and “Fiery Sounds of Prophetic Strings...” by A. Odoevsky.

Why did M. Lermontov write the poem “Song about the Merchant Kalashnikov” without rhymes?

What is unique about the rhyme of F. Tyutchev's poem ("Be silent, hide and hide...")?

Try to analyze the features of rhyme in Mayakovsky's poem "Brooklyn Bridge".

What are the features of rhyme in L. Martynov’s poem “Harmony”?

What rhymes did L. Martynov use in the poem “Poetry as Magic”?

Rhyme (ancient Greek υθμς “measurement, rhythm”) is a consonance at the end of two or more words, the ends of verses (or hemistichs, the so-called internal rhyme), marking their boundaries and connecting them together. Rhyme helps the reader to feel the intonational division of speech and forces the meaning of the verses that it unites to be correlated.

It developed from the natural consonances of syntactic parallelism; used in European poetry from the 10th to the 12th centuries.

It should be noted that rhyme is not the only sign of the completeness of a rhythm sequence; Due to the presence of a strong pause, final stress and clause, the end of the line (as a rhythmic unit) is determined without rhyme, for example:

"Four Infidel Kings
Don Rodrigo won
And they called him Sid
Defeated Tsars" (Zhukovsky).

But the presence of rhyme emphasizes and enhances this completeness, and in poems of a more free rhythmic structure, where the commensurability of rhythmic units is expressed less clearly (the lines differ in the number of syllables, stress locations, etc.), the rhythmic meaning of R. appears most clearly ( in free and free verse, in raeshnik, etc.)

It is most common in poetic speech and in some eras in some cultures acts as its obligatory or almost obligatory property. Unlike alliteration and assonance (which can occur anywhere in the text), rhyme is determined positionally (by the position at the end of the verse, capturing the clause). The sound composition of a rhyme - or, more accurately, the nature of the consonance necessary for a pair of words or phrases to be read as a rhyme - varies in different languages and at different times.

Types of rhymes

By syllable volume rhymes are divided into:

masculine (emphasis on the last syllable),
feminine (stress on the penultimate syllable from the end),
dactylic (stress on the third syllable from the end),
hyperdactylic (stress on the fourth syllable from the end).
If a rhyme ends with a vowel sound, it is called open; if it ends with a consonant sound, it is called closed.

By the nature of the sound(accuracy of consonances) rhymes differ:

exact and approximate
rich and poor,
assonances, dissonances,
composite,
tautological,
unequally complex,
multi-impact.

By position in the verse There are rhymes:

final,
initial,
internal;

By position in the stanza:

adjacent,
cross
wraparound (or girded)

With regard to the number of repetitions, rhymes are paired, triple, quadruple and multiple.

Poems without rhyme are called white, and imprecise rhymes are called “rhymes.”

There are also the following poetic devices and terms for them:

Pantorhythm - all words in a line and in the next one rhyme with each other (for example, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd words of two lines rhyme, respectively)
Through rhyme - a rhyme that runs through the entire work (for example - one rhyme in each line)
Echo rhyme - the second line consists of one word or short phrase rhymed with the first line.

Rhyme examples

Men's- rhyme with stress on the last syllable in the line:

Both the sea and the storm rocked our canoe;
I, sleepy, was given over to all the whims of the waves.
There were two infinities in me,
And they played with me willfully.

Women's- with stress on the penultimate syllable in the line:

Quiet night, late summer,
How the stars glow in the sky,
As if under their gloomy light
The dormant fields are ripening.

Dactylic- with stress on the third syllable from the end of the line, which repeats the dactyl pattern - -_ _ (stressed, unstressed, unstressed), which, in fact, is the name of this rhyme:

A girl in a field with a willow pipe,
Why did you hurt the spring twig?
She cries at her lips like a morning oriole,
Crying more and more bitterly and more and more inconsolably.

Hyperdactylic- with stress on the fourth and subsequent syllables from the end of the line. This rhyme is very rare in practice. It appeared in works of oral folklore, where size as such is not always visible. An example of such a rhyme goes like this:

The goblin scratches his beard,
He's gloomily trimming a stick.

Exact and approximate rhymes

IN precise enough rhyme match:

a) last stressed vowel,
b) sounds starting from the last stressed vowel.

Exact rhyme A rhyme like “writes - hears - breathes” (Okudzhava) is also considered. Also classified as accurate are the so-called. iotized rhymes: “Tani - spells” (ASP), “again - the hilt” (Firnven).

An example of a stanza with exact rhymes (it’s the sounds that match, not the letters):

It's nice, squeezing the katana,
Turn the enemy into a vinaigrette.
Katana is a samurai's dream,
But better than that is a pistol. (Gareth)

IN imprecise rhyme Not all sounds are the same, starting from the last stressed vowel: “towards - cutting”, or “book - King” in Medvedev. There can be much more imprecise rhymes than exact ones, and they can greatly decorate and diversify a verse.

Rich and poor rhymes

Rich rhymes, in which the reference consonant sound coincides. An example is the lines from A. S. Pushkin’s poem “To Chaadaev”:

Love, hope, quiet glory
Deception did not last long for us,
The youthful fun has disappeared
Like a dream, like morning fog.

In poor rhymes, the overstressed sounds and the stressed vowel partially coincide.

Assonances, dissonances

assonant rhymes in which the vowel stress coincides, but the consonants do not coincide.
dissonant (countersonant) rhymes, where, on the contrary, the stressed vowels do not coincide:

Was
Socialism -
enthusiastic word!

With a flag
With a song
stood on the left

And myself
On the heads
glory was descending

Compound rhymes, where a rhyming pair consists of three or more words, as in lines 2 and 4 by N. S. Gumilyov:

Will you take me in your arms
And you, I will hug you,
I love you, prince of fire,
I want and wait for a kiss.

Tautological rhyme - repetition of the same words: “I curtained the window - look out the window again” - Blok).

Truncated rhyme- a rhyming technique when one of the words rhymed at the end of a verse does not completely cover the consonances of another word. In Russian classical verse U. r. a rhyme with a truncation of the sound “th” (short “and”) is considered:

So what? The sad God believed.
Cupid jumped for joy
And on the eyes with all his strength
I tightened the update for my brother.

In poetry of the 20th century. sometimes called truncated rhyme irregular rhyme:

Whistling arias in a low voice,
Drunk with the shine and noise,
Here on the night sidewalk,
She's a free bird!
Childishly playing with the curl,
Curling boldly to the eyes,
Then suddenly he leans towards the windows,
Looks at the rainbow trash.

(V. Bryusov)

In unequally syllabic rhymes, the post-stressed part has a different number of syllables (externally - pearls).

IN multi-stress rhymes The sounds of rhymed words coincide, but stressed vowels occupy different positions in them (about glasses - butterflies).

Iotated rhyme is one of the most common examples of truncated rhyme; so in it, as the name suggests, the sound “th” becomes an additional consonant sound. This type of rhyme is used in this poem by A. S. Pushkin in lines 1 and 3:

The clouds are rushing, the clouds are swirling;
Invisible moon
The flying snow illuminates;
The sky is cloudy, the night is cloudy...

Types of rhyme

ring(encircling or enveloping) rhyme abba,

adjacent(pair) rhyme aabb,

cross rhyme abab and, less commonly, through rhyme aaaa.

Adjacent- rhyming of adjacent verses: the first with the second, the third with the fourth (aabb) (the same letters indicate the endings of verses that rhyme with each other).

This is the most common and obvious rhyming system. This method can be used even by children in kindergarten and has an advantage in the selection of rhymes (the associative pair appears in the mind immediately, it is not clogged with intermediate lines). Such stanzas have greater dynamics and a faster reading pace.

The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake,
On the forest, wood grouse are crying with ringing sounds.
An oriole is crying somewhere, burying itself in a hollow.
Only I don’t cry - my soul is light.

The next method is cross rhyme- also appealed to a large number of the writing public.

Cross - rhyme of the first verse with the third, the second with the fourth (abab).

Although the scheme of such a rhyme seems to be a little more complicated, it is more flexible rhythmically and allows you to better convey the necessary mood. Yes, and such poems are easier to learn - the first pair of lines, as it were, pulls out of memory the second pair that rhymes with it (while with the previous method everything breaks up into separate couplets).

I love thunderstorms at the beginning of May,
When the first thunder of spring
As if frolicking and playing,
Rumbling in the blue sky.

Third way - ring(in other sources - girded, enveloping) - already has less representation in the total mass of poems.

Ring (girdled, enveloping) - the first verse - with the fourth, and the second - with the third. (abba)

This scheme can be somewhat more difficult for beginners (the first line is, as it were, erased by the subsequent pair of rhyming lines).

I looked, standing over the Neva,
Like Isaac the Giant
In the darkness of the frosty fog
The golden dome glowed.

And finally, intertwined rhyme has many schemes. This is the general name for complex types of rhyming, for example: abvbv, abvvba, etc.

Far from the sun and nature,
Far from light and art,
Far from life and love
Your younger years will flash by
Living feelings die
Your dreams will be shattered.

Internal rhyme- consonance of hemistiches:

“Your children’s shoulders tremble,
Children's eyes are bewildered,
Moments of meetings, hours of rendezvous,
A long hour, like an age of languor"

The semantic role of rhyme

Along with the rhythmic, rhyme also has a great semantic meaning. The word located at the end of the line, underlined by the pause following it and highlighted with the help of sound repetition, naturally attracts the most attention and occupies the most advantageous place in the line. For inexperienced poets, the desire for rhyme leads to the pursuit of sound repetition and to the detriment of meaning; rhyme, as Byron said, turns into “a mighty steamship that makes poetry sail even against the tide of common sense.”

The emergence and development of rhyme

Rhymed hemistichs, which the theory sometimes dwells on, are in essence ordinary verses, rhymed according to a pattern and printed in pairs on a line. — The appearance of rhyme in the poetry of European peoples has not been fully elucidated; it was assumed that it came here from Semitic poetry, where it is very common, through the Spanish Arabs, in the 8th century; but it is hardly possible to insist on this after becoming acquainted with the Latin poetry of the first centuries before Christ. Already in Ovid, Virgil, Horace there are rhymes that cannot be considered random. It is very likely that rhyme, known to the Roman classics and neglected by them as an unnecessary toy, acquired significance among the minor poets of the decline, who paid exclusive attention to the game of formal tricks. In addition, the displacement of strictly metrical versification by elements of tonic versification required a more clear distinction between individual verses, which was achieved by rhyme.

In the verses of Christian poets of the 4th century. Ambrose of Milan and Prudentius, the assonances sometimes turn into full-sounding rhymes. However, rhymes were fully introduced into Latin poetry in the 5th century. poet Sedulius, who was the “deaf child” and “crazy black man” whom Paul Verlaine considered the inventor of rhyme.

The first entirely rhymed work is the Latin “Instructiones” of Commodian (270 AD); here there is one rhyme throughout the poem. Rhyme, varied and changing with each couplet, appears in the so-called Leonine hexameter, where the first hemistich rhymes with the end; then from 600 we find it in ecclesiastical Latin poetry, where from 800 it becomes obligatory and from where it passes into the secular poetry of the Romanesque and then Germanic peoples.

Rhyme is already characteristic of the oldest Welsh texts, but their dating presents significant difficulties. Thus, the surviving copies of the poem “Goddin”, based on paleographic data, date back to the 9th century, but after the works of the classic of Welsh philology Ivor Williams, it is generally accepted to attribute almost its entire text, as well as some works attributed to Taliesin, to the 6th century. In this case, the Welsh rhyme - determined by a fixed stress on the last (from the 9th or 11th century - on the penultimate) syllable - is the earliest systematically used rhyme in Europe.

In Irish poetry, rhyme begins to be systematically used in poetic genealogies dating back to the linguistic data of the 7th century, which also indicates an “advance” of continental trends.

“Celtic rhyme,” characteristic of both Irish and Welsh poetry (in the latter, however, the name odl Wyddeleg, “Irish rhyme,” was adopted for it), was very free: all vowels, voiceless and voiced variants of consonants rhymed with each other ( k/g, t/d, p/b), smooth and nasal (r/l, m/n), and even consonants that have and have not undergone various mutations characteristic of Celtic languages (b/bh[v]/mb [m], t/th[θ], d/dh[ð], m/mh[v], с[k]/ch[x], etc.). Alliteration was arranged in a similar way.

Rhyme was introduced into German poetry under the influence of Romanesque forms. “Insinuating Italian or French melodies found their way into Germany, and German poets substituted German texts for them, as the Minnesingers and Renaissance poets later did; With such melodies, songs and dances came rhyme. We first meet it on the upper Rhine, from where it probably originally spread.”

The fate of rhyme in French poetry was connected with literary movements that attached special significance to the form. Already Ronsard and Du Bellay, not being carried away by metrical verse, which was unusual for the French language, avoided unrhymed verse, demanding precise, rich, but by no means refined rhyme, and forbidding it from sacrificing a happy turn or precision of expression. Malherbe made even more stringent demands on rhyme: he prohibited easy and banal rhymes - a prohibition that found such brilliant application in the poems of his contemporaries and even more so in the poetry of romanticism. The importance of rhyme in French - syllabic - versification determines the severity in its application, unknown in other languages: here - despite complete consonance - it is forbidden to rhyme the plural with the singular, a word ending with a vowel with a word ending with a consonant (canot and domino, connus and parvenu ) etc.

The very emergence of rhyme in European literature, as one might think, is associated with the sound organization of verse. Initially disorganized sound repetitions, if they coincided with the words most clearly highlighted at the end of the rhythmic unit, sounded most sharply and noticeably; Thanks to this, a certain attraction was created for them towards the ends of lines or hemistiches. This attraction was also intensified by syntactic parallelism, that is, the repetition of homogeneous parts of speech with similar endings. At the same time, the transition from oral poetic systems with a musical-rhythmic organization to written verse, weakening the clarity of the rhythmic organization of the verse, caused a search for new rhythm-forming elements, and in particular, rhyme appeared, essentially unknown to either ancient or folk versification (although sporadically she appeared in them). The complex of these conditions, in each given case historically unique, underlies the appearance of rhyme in new poetry.

In Russia, rhyme appeared sporadically in epics, as well as in written monuments of the 17th century. as a result of the coincidence (with parallelism of verses) of grammatical endings:

“We propose an end to this writing.
We never forget great things.
Let's find the real thing,
Let’s write this lengthy story.” etc.

But basically rhyme gets its development in syllabic verses, starting with Simeon of Polotsk (1629-1680) and other poets, for whom it developed under the influence of Western poetry and primarily Polish poets. This influence itself was based on the process of creating written verse to replace oral verse, which took place in the 17th century. in Russia and was caused by dramatic social and cultural changes.

Blank verse

Blank verse is verse that has no rhyme, but, unlike free verse, has a certain meter: white iambic, white anapest, white dolnik. Refers to lyroeropics.

The term blank verse passed into Russian poetics from French - vers blanc, which, in turn, is taken from English poetics, where unrhymed poems are called blank verse (blank - smooth out, erase, destroy), i.e. poems with erased, destroyed rhyme . Ancient poets wrote poems without rhymes.

Blank verse (more precisely, rhymeless verse) is most common in Russian folk poetry; The structural role of rhymes here is played by a certain clause. In book Russian poetry, blank verse, on the contrary, is less common.

The use of this term is possible only for those national poetry for which both meter and rhyme are characteristic, system-forming features: thus, in relation to ancient Greek poetry, in which something similar to rhyme arose only as an exception, it is not customary to talk about blank verse.

In Russian poetry, blank verse enjoyed significant popularity in certain periods (mainly at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries); This is especially true of iambic white, which was widely used in poems and poetic dramas.

The pre-syllabic and syllabic periods of Russian poetry are characterized by the poets’ special attention to rhyme. But already V. Trediakovsky, seeing the basis of the verse not in rhyme, but in rhythm, meter, disdainfully called the rhyme “a child’s nozzle.” He was the first to write hexameters in blank verse, without rhyme.

Following him, A. Cantemir translated in blank verse “Anacreon’s Songs” and “Letters” of Quintus Horace Flaccus - a fact of great importance, indicating that the syllabic poets considered the main thing in verse not rhyme, but, as Cantemir wrote, “a certain measured agreement and a certain pleasant ringing,” i.e., metric rhythm, foot time.

If blank verse of hexameter and other ancient meters were accepted in Russian book poetry without controversy, then blank verse in other meters did not immediately take root in the practice of poets.

The most decisive defender of blank verse at the beginning of the 19th century. was V. Zhukovsky. He was supported by A. Pushkin, A. Koltsov, and partly M. Lermontov; and then blank verse ceases to be a rare phenomenon in Russian poetry.

For B. s. characterized by astrophy or poor stanza, since strophic diversity in foot verse is determined by a varied rhyme system. However, the absence of rhyme does not deprive blank verse of its poetic merits; the main components of the verse - rhythm, imagery of language, clause, etc. - are preserved in it. Blank verse in particular remains the most accepted in dramatic works—usually iambic pentameter. Here are some examples:

Iambic tetrameter:

There is a lamp in the Jewish hut
In one corner the pale is burning,
An old man in front of a lamp
Reads the Bible. Gray haired
Hair falls on the book...
(A. Pushkin)

Iambic pentameter:

Everyone says: there is no truth on earth.
But there is no higher truth. For me
So it's clear, like a simple scale.
I was born with a love for art...
(A. Pushkin)

Trochee tetrameter:

The bird catcher's job is difficult:
Learn the habits of birds
Remember flight times
Whistle with different whistles.
(E. Bagritsky)

In the 20th century, the use of blank verse in Russian poetry began to decline, and its appearance usually indicates conscious stylization.

Rhyme and its varieties

Rhyme is the repetition of more or less similar combinations of sounds that connect the endings of two or more lines or symmetrically located parts of poetic lines. In Russian classical versification, the main feature of rhyme is the coincidence of stressed vowels. Rhyme marks the end of a verse (clause) with a sound repetition, emphasizing the pause between lines, and thereby the rhythm of the verse.

Depending on the location of stress in rhyming words, rhyme can be: masculine, feminine, dactylic, hyperdactylic, exact and inaccurate.

Masculine rhyme

Masculine - rhyme with stress on the last syllable in the line.

Both the sea and the storm rocked our canoe;

I, sleepy, was given over to all the whims of the waves.

There were two infinities in me,

And they played with me willfully.

Feminine rhyme

Feminine - with emphasis on the penultimate syllable in the line.

Quiet night, late summer,

How the stars glow in the sky,

As if under their gloomy light

The dormant fields are ripening.

Dactylic rhyme

Dactylic - with stress on the third syllable from the end of the line, which repeats the pattern of dactyl - -_ _ (stressed, unstressed, unstressed), which, in fact, is the name of this rhyme.

A girl in a field with a willow pipe,

Why did you hurt the spring twig?

She cries at her lips like a morning oriole,

cries more and more bitterly and more and more inconsolably.

Hyperdactylic rhyme

Hyperdactylic - with stress on the fourth and subsequent syllables from the end of the line. This rhyme is very rare in practice. It appeared in works of oral folklore, where size as such is not always visible. The fourth syllable from the end of the verse is not a joke! Well, an example of such a rhyme goes like this:

The goblin scratches his beard,

He's gloomily trimming a stick.

Depending on the coincidence of sounds, accurate and inaccurate rhymes are distinguished.

Rhyme accurate and inaccurate

Rhyme - repetition of more or less similar combinations of sounds at the ends of poetic lines or symmetrically located parts of poetic lines; In Russian classical versification, the main feature of rhyme is the coincidence of stressed vowels.

(O.S. Akhmanova, Dictionary of Linguistic Terms, 1969)

Why was Dunno wrong when he claimed that “stick - herring” is also a rhyme? Because he did not know that in fact it is not sounds that rhyme, but phonemes (sound is a particular realization of a phoneme) (R. Yakobson), which have a number of distinctive features. And the coincidence of some of these features is enough to make rhyming sound possible. The fewer coinciding features of a phoneme, the more distant and “worse” the consonance.

Consonant phonemes differ:

1) by place of education

2) by method of education

4) by hardness and softness

5) by deafness and voicedness

These signs are obviously unequal. Thus, the phoneme P coincides with the phoneme B in all respects, except for deafness-voicedness (P - voiceless, B - voiced). This difference creates an “almost” exact rhyme: trenches - individuals. Phonemes P and T differ in the place of formation (labial and anterior lingual). OkoPe - osoTe - is also perceived as a rhyming sound, although more distant.

The first three features create phoneme differences that are more significant than the last two. We can designate the difference between phonemes according to the first three characteristics as two conventional units (cu); for the last two - as one. Phonemes that differ by 1-2 units are consonant. Differences of 3 or more units do not retain consonance to our ears. For example: P and G differ by three units. (place of formation - 2, voiceless-voiced - 1). And trenches - legs can hardly be considered a rhyme in our time. Even smaller are trenches - roses, where P and W differ by 4 cu. (place of education, method of education).

So, let's mark the rows of consonant consonants. These are, first of all, pairs of hard and soft: T - T", K - K", S - S", etc., but such substitutions are resorted to quite rarely, for example, of the three pairs of rhymes, “otkoS”e - roSy ", "slopes - dew" and "slopes - roses" the second and third options are more preferable.

The substitution of voiceless-voiced voices is perhaps the most common: P-B, T-D, K-G, S-Z, Sh-Zh, F-V (for God - deep, bends - linPakh, dragonflies - braids, people - raid ).

The stops (mode of formation) P-T-K (voiceless) and B-D-G (voiced) respond well to each other. The corresponding two rows of fricatives are F-S-SH-H (voiceless) and V-Z-ZH (voiced). X has no voiced counterpart, but goes well and often with K. B-V and B-M are equivalent. M-N-L-R in various combinations are very productive. Soft versions of the latter are often combined with J and B (Russian[rossiJi] - blue - strength - beautiful).

So, concluding our conversation about exact and imprecise rhyme, we repeat that exact rhyme is when the vowels and consonants included in the consonant endings of the verses basically coincide. The accuracy of the rhyme is also increased by the consonance of the consonant sounds immediately preceding the last stressed vowel in rhyming verses. An imprecise rhyme is based on the consonance of one, or less often, two sounds.

Rhyme systems

Previously, in a school literature course, the basic methods of rhyming were necessarily studied in order to give knowledge about the variety of positions in a stanza of rhyming pairs (or more) of words, which should be a help to anyone who writes poetry at least once in their life. But everything is forgotten, and the majority of authors are somehow in no hurry to diversify their stanzas.

Adjacent - rhyming of adjacent verses: the first with the second, the third with the fourth (aabb) (the same letters indicate the endings of verses that rhyme with each other).

The scarlet light of dawn was woven on the lake,

On the forest, wood grouse are crying with ringing sounds.

An oriole is crying somewhere, burying itself in a hollow.

Only I don’t cry - my soul is light.

The next method - cross rhyme - also appealed to a large number of the writing public.

Cross - rhyme of the first verse with the third, the second with the fourth (abab)

I love thunderstorms at the beginning of May,

When the first thunder of spring

As if frolicking and playing,

Rumbling in the blue sky.

The third method - ring (in other sources - girded, enveloping) - already has less representation in the total mass of poems.

Ring (girdled, enveloping) - the first verse - with the fourth, and the second - with the third. (abba)

This scheme can be somewhat more difficult for beginners (the first line is, as it were, erased by the subsequent pair of rhyming lines).

I looked, standing over the Neva,

Like Isaac the Giant

In the darkness of the frosty fog

The golden dome glowed.

Finally, woven rhyme has many patterns. This is the general name for complex types of rhyming, for example: abvbv, abvvba, etc.

Far from the sun and nature,

Far from light and art,

Far from life and love

Your younger years will flash by

Living feelings die

Your dreams will be shattered.

In conclusion, it is useful to note that one should not always adhere so rigidly, strictly and dogmatically to certain canonical forms and templates, because, as in any form of art, there is always a place for the original in poetry. But, nevertheless, before rushing into the unbridled inventing of something new and not entirely known, it always does not hurt to make sure that you are still familiar with the basic canons.

Stanzas

Stanza - from Greek. strophe - revolution, circling. Such a complex rhythmic unit of poetic works as the stanza is based on the order of rhymes in poetry.

A stanza is a group of verses with a specific rhyme arrangement, usually repeated in other equal groups. In most cases, a stanza is a complete syntactic whole.

The most common types of stanzas in classical poetry of the past were: quatrains, octaves, terzas. The smallest of the stanzas is a couplet.

There are also stanzas:

Oneginskie

ballad

odic

limericks

Quatrains

Quatrain (quatrain) is the most common type of stanza, familiar to everyone from early childhood. Popular due to the abundance of rhyming systems.

Octaves

An octave is an eight-line stanza in which the first verse rhymes with the third and fifth, the second verse with the fourth and sixth, and the seventh verse with the eighth.

Octave scheme: abababvv

At six years old he was a very cute child

And even, as a child, he played pranks;

At twelve he looked sad

And although he was good, he was somehow frail.

Inessa said proudly,

That the method changed his nature:

A young philosopher, despite his years,

He was quiet and modest, as if by nature.

I must confess to you that I am still inclined

Don't trust Inessa's theories.

Her husband and I were friends;

I know, very complex excesses

An unsuccessful family is born

When the father is a rake in character,

And mommy is a prude. Not without reason

The son's inclinations take after his father!