Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 1. Poetry and its Creation
Section 3. Poetic Technique
Rhyme

Imperfect Rhymes [4]

I never heard of two pronunciations of “lure” and “pure” one of which approximates to “lore” and “pore” — of course they may exist in some dialect, but anything that would make “pure” rhyme with “more” seems to be horribly impure and “lure” rhyming with “gore” does not lure me at all. I am aware of Arjava’s rhyming of “bore” and “law” etc.,— but that is quite new as a permissible imperfect rhyme — “dawn” and “morn” were in my time held up as a vulgarism, the type of all that is damnable. As for “decrease” and “earthiness” that is quite a different matter from “lure” and “more”; the former are long and short of the same vowel sounds, long e sound and short e sound, the latter are two quite different vowel sounds. If you can rhyme a pure long u sound with a pure long o sound, there is no reason why you should not rhyme Cockney fashion “day” with “high”, “paid” with “wide”, and by a little extension why not “jade” with “solitude”. Finally we can come to the rhyming of any word with any word provided there is the same or a similar consonant at the end. Modernism admits imperfect — very imperfect rhymes, but that is really a different principle and cannot be extended to blank verse, mongrelising all similar ending sounds.

22 May 1937