Formal Variation in the Rhymes of Robert Pinsky’s the Inferno of Dante

Rhyme is commonly defined as the repetition of certain final sounds. In English poetic practice, however, even within single poems, the extent of the repetition often varies, sometimes involving more similarity than definitions of the form suggest, and sometimes less, often as a means of creating aesthetic effects. As noted by Zwicky (1976) and more recently developed by Holtman (1996), such variation raises both descriptive and theoretical questions about the form: out of the full range of imaginable variations in rhyme, which are actually used by poets, and why? Here a close study of the variations used by Robert Pinsky in his slant-rhyme translation of Dante’s Infernoidentifies practices which turn out to be shared with other English poets, and to reflect phenomena in English phonology itself. Rhymes may match melodic structure only, reflecting the separation of melodic structure from rhythmic structure which phonological theory has hypothesized. Rhymes may differ in distinctive features – specifically voice in obstruents, place in nasals, and possibly height in vowels – reflecting the way those features are sometimes altered to satisfy constraints of English phonology. Rhymes may differ in one member having an extra final [s/z], reflecting the possibility of such an appendix in English syllable structure (Golston, 1997). These practices support the suggestion by Kiparsky (1973, 1987), building on Jakobson (1960), that the constraints that define poetic forms refer to the same structures that grammars do.