I agree with this, David, though there are probably worse misjudgements...
end-rhyme in my experience is a means not an "end" (it instigates overall
sound effects).
Erminia might be able to add something here, since I think Eugenio Montale
is one of the masters at combining free-flow with end-rhyme... here's
a rough effort in English where I tried to imitate something I heard in
Montale... it's rather lumpy unless read with a lot of enjambment:
ON VETERAN'S DAY [also: St. Martin's Day]
You were born on St. Stephen's Day;
we used to stone your flinty
opinions, unruly boys, every night
at the dinner table. Flighty
moths, angry at the antique lampshade,
our every word would avoid
your slow midwestern interval -
yawning morning after a carnival
of unofficial nativity,
laughter's rapidity
bearing away your question
on our shoulders (a mob's procession).
On Veteran's Day it's left for me
to understand: the low storm we brewed
(spun top swollen to turbid flood
of iron blades turning under the sea)
- how this was just an echo
of your glide into a maelstrom
of stronger waters: circling time,
one tentative promise before the law.
Not that chaos of dusty rings
below the statue - but broken fingers
of slate, a fossilized Iron Range,
whatever smolders and lingers
in you (those cousins, foolish pride
and the salt sepulchre none can hide).
And what was withheld from us all
was the arrowhead you had found
the day before, in a mossbound pool,
a manger of rocks the size of your hand.
And it's left for me, the years
whittled down to this crossroad, a splinter
crying out in the dream, your mystery.
11.11.87
Henry
>
>What matters in a poem, among other things, is the sound texture entire, the
>couplings of assonance and consonance, as well as rhythmic agitation or
>excitement, and to conflate that with end-rhyme in the name of formality is
>the worst and repeated artistic misjudgement you can make.
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