Anne Sexton and learning not to be afraid of rhyme

As I said in my last post, I’ve been reading a lot about Anne Sexton and her poetry lately.

She’s a poet whose work I didn’t know very well until now, though I did read her collection Transformations – which is retellings of fairy tales – when I was writing my masters thesis almost 10 years ago (Fairy Tale Intertextuality in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction).

At the time, I found them too bitter.

This time around I’m enjoying her early work a lot. Her language is deliciously rich and full of metaphor – and often also humour. Admittedly, some of her work can be hard going: she was a pioneering ‘confessional’ poet – a lot of her work draws on her own experience (though generally fictionalised in one way or another) and her experience included severe depression, suicide attempts and hospitalisation. Pretty brave stuff to write about back there in the 50s.

One thing that has struck me about her work is her use of rhyme – or rather, it didn’t strike me, because it’s used so subtly. I read the poem ‘Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward’ all the way through its five stanzas before I realised it rhymes with a strict ABABABABABA scheme.

Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love. At first hunger is not wrong.
The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded
down starch halls with the other unnested throng
in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head
moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong.
But this is an institution bed.
You will not know me very long.
(from ‘Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward’, by Anne Sexton.)

Sexton said she liked to use strict rhyme schemes, particularly in her early work, as a way of containing the strong emotion. The harder something was to write about, the more restrictive the scheme.

Rhyme is something I’ve generally avoided in poetry. I have a suspicion that the probability of a modern poem being bad increases ten-fold if it rhymes. That said, I certainly don’t write rhyming poetry off completely, though the contemporary rhyming poets I most enjoy tend to use rhyme to add humour: people like Wendy Cope, Harry Ricketts and Scott Kendrick (shameless Seraph Press plug):

So I wrote up a letter saying “I can’t pay;
I feel real sick – might die today.”
They sent back, “Oh we thought you knew
Where clause seven dash six one point two
Says: The client shall not be mislead
Into thinking it’s over when they’re dead.
If your soul’s off tripping in a heavenly way
We’ll work it out so you can pay

Your student loan, which as was shown,
Is taut and tight and tanned and toned.
The rivers may cut away the stone,
But nothing’s gonna cut your student loan.”
(from ‘Song of the Student Loan’, by Scott Kendrick)

Until a few years ago, if even an internal rhyme had accidentally slunk into a line of my own poetry, I’d exorcise it as soon as I noticed. But lately I’ve become brave enough to play with internal rhyme deliberately. (Though one editor seemed to assume that my carefully constructed internal rhyme running over three lines was some kind of unfortunate accident.) So you never know, maybe I’m on my own slippery slope to rhymingdom.