On thought-rhyme; or, parallelism as a poetic technique
Poems don’t need meter, in our free verse age. Indeed a poem shouldn’t be in meter—it’s become a dangerous way to write. Still, now as ever meter—and rhyme, which presupposes meter—signal a poem’s status as poetry. Put a popular ballad, or a sonnet by Shakespeare, in front of a guy on a train, and he won’t doubt it’s a poem, and that’s why.
Biblical poetry is not metric, nor does it rhyme. Not in English anyway. It sets itself off from prose with a different formal device: parallelism, especially “semantic” parallelism, the repetition, not of sound, as in rhyme, but of meaning. Some have called it, in a phrase I love, thought rhyme. Here it is, in the middle of Psalm 6:
I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping.
This repeats (pardon the sacrilegious paraphrase) “I am crying a lot” in three different ways.
Here is more thought rhyme, in Psalm 17:
I have avoided the ways of the violent. My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.
How does parallelism work? On the surface the answer is obvious—just say the same thing twice, more if you like. But—what’s the point, when and why should you use it, what are its distinctive aesthetic effects?
Robert Alter translated the whole Hebrew Bible by himself, and wrote some guidebooks on it too, including The Art of Biblical Poetry. Since I hate “mastering the secondary literature,” I turned to him, as someone who has done it for me. I found that Alter does not like the common wisdom about Biblical parallelism. It assumes
a considerable degree of stasis within the poetic line: an idea or image or action is evoked in the first verset; then forward movement in the poetic discourse is virtually suspended while the same idea, image, or action is rerun for the patient eye of the beholder, only tricked out in somewhat different stylistic finery.
Alter insists, to the contrary, that the repetition in thought rhyme is not mere repetition. Instead of “stasis,” the poetic line exhibits
dynamic movement from one verset to the next.
This “movement” exists because the second, “rhyming” statement of an “idea, image, or action” usually says more than the first, in one of several ways. Most commonly, it is either more specific, or more intense, and sometimes both. In Psalm 6, “moaning” indicates crying; in the next line, “flood my bed with tears” is more intense—that’s more crying, than is suggested by “moaning”; and by mentioning the tears, is more specific. Psalm 25 asks,
Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths.
“Make me to know” and “teach” are basically the same. But from “ways” to “paths” there is a development. “Ways” is abstract—the ways to Carnegie Hall include both Broadway and practicing—while “paths” is concrete and therefore more specific, applying in the first instance to things you may walk on. The specificity of paths is also a metaphor—the ways of the Lord are not literal paths through the land—and in Psalm 17 this metaphor helps distinguish being on the wrong path through deliberate choice (“I have avoided the ways of the violent”), from accident, when a lack of attention, or the narrowness of the route, may cause your feet to slip.
Increased specificity is also here, in Psalm 27: