Musing

I've been dipping into Stephen Fry's The Ode Last Travelled over the last week or so with much pleasure and some profit. I thought I'd had a generally traditional sort of education in literary matters but he sometimes uses terms I've never come across (or particularly noticed) before. It turns out that 'rich rhyme' is what you call it when a writer uses full rhymes on homophones as rhymes. A clever poem by Thomas Hood is used to illustrate the idea beginning with the snappy: If I were used to writing verse / And had a muse not so perverse…, which manages to sound almost like a proper rhyme, but isn't. This was a reminder of how technically excellent Hood is. He's the kind of writer who you meet solely through anthologies and invariably find yourself thinking very highly of. I remember doing Bridge of Sighs (I think that's the right title, it appears in Palgrave) when in the sixth form and loving the rhythms and feminine rhymes - tenderly/slenderly. I really must look for a collected edition one of these days.