Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Rhyme

Rhyme

What makes a musical is the music… DUH! When I think about poetry I think about words put to song--- or is it song put to words? (Must be another example of the chicken or the egg thing.) It’s interesting to ponder however, does the music come first and then the words or the other way around?

Anyway, songs have a lyrical quality and the words often rhyme in a glorious and nonsensical sort of way. I love that lyrical and rhyming quality. I wonder why all these modern poets and literary scholars hate it so much… Ask them and they will tell you that free verse is the ultimate poetic expression and lyrical, rhyming verse is a bunch of Dr. Seuss.

I wonder sometimes about free verse. I hope this doesn’t seem too harsh but when I read it I think about a monkey with finger paints. If a poet can’t write something lyrical they can always jot down some thought fragments and call it poetry. To me these little piles of words have an unfinished quality. Whatever happened to Rudyard Kipling? Now there was a poet! Gung-Din blows the socks right off my feet every time I read it.

The liberals have consigned him to the outhouse of political incorrectness, for his use of the “N” word but I really think it was because his poetry rhymed. Intellectual elitists hate meter and rhyme and I suspect the reason is because they are totally unable to work the forms without sounding inept and heavy handed. So they conclude that because they can’t write it, then somehow it’s inferior to their preferred… unconstrained, uninhibited, free flowing form.

Most free verse makes me want to gag! Still despite efforts to suppress it, rhyming and metered poetry persists in song. People like songs that rhyme. People like stage dramas with music. They are called musicals and some of the lyrics are spell binding.

“Maria… I’ve just met a girl named Maria… and suddenly that name will never be the same to me.
Maria… I’ve just kissed a girl named Maria… and suddenly I’ve found how wonderful a sound can be…”

Or how about...

“What do you get when you fall in love…? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia…
And when you do she’ll never phone you…”

The list goes on and on. Rhyming, melodious, lyrical, metered poetry survives in song despite all the elitist efforts to suppress it. All these socialist thinking self-proclaimed educators and literary experts have tried to strangle the baby in the crib but it hasn’t happened yet. There is still a joy to life and try as they do to make our lives as miserable as their own… they can’t quite manage it.