A sybaritic friend of mine Says: "Life's too short to drink cheap wine." Whilst on the whole I do not choose To share his attitude to booze, (He doubtless thinks me a vulgarian For soaking up the red Bulgarian) His words find echoes in my heart When what's in question's lyric art. See - frankly I don't have much time For poets who can't manage rhyme, Though it's been made clear recently How very many don't agree. On rec.arts.poems there's a spate Of postings bubbling with hate For words and lines whose endings chime. To some folk rhyming is a crime. Admirers of the rawly felt Think any polish far too svelte. They value passion more than mind, Energy more than both, and find More beauty in the sprays of chance Than in a neatly formal dance. "Oh cast" they say, "to outer shade What is deliberately made!" A rhyme is shocking evidence That art is artful, a pretence. And yet the action-painter's splash, Exuberantly free and rash, Is something poets cannot make (Though many try - and fail - to fake). Though paint can make a random stain, Words have to travel through a brain. No poem's likely to emerge From letting rip an urge to splurge; The emotion Wordsworth so respected Must, for verse, be re-collected. Craft is needed, and hard graft To rise above the limply daft, And proper verses cannot be Achieved by duff simplicity. (Does anybody still believe That William Blake was just naive? Or that the glories he created Were somehow unsophisticated?) So poets ought to love the tools Through which they work, their lyric rules. Yet I've some sympathy for those Who quite sincerely, I suppose, Have in silent horror crept Away from rhyming that's inept, From the preacher's feelgood vanities, Or from greeting-card inanities. Damp hymnodists afraid of night Adore a rhyme that's tweely trite, But good rhymes are not glib - they're tonic Triste, ironic or Byronic Crazy, neat, precisely vicious, Surrealistic or delicious, Can speak rich summer's harmony, Or voice the darkness of the sea, And can be harder to forget Than Sandra Bullock in "The Net". A rhyme can speak, a rhyme can sing, Can fly or creep, or zing, or sting. Rhymes can sparkle, and achieve A vibrant sense of joie de vivre, Or can be statuesque, immense, Or else destabilised and tense (Two feisty words a rhyme has wed May fight like Sylvia and Ted) Good rhymes may spark fierce passions surging Or set new shapes of thought emerging. They won't allow blasé so-whattery, But, like some shard of ancient pottery, Miraculously seem to cage The ways and values of an age - You think - "This tells me things that matter; All the rest is merely chatter." It's strange, though, when nice kids who've done Creative Writing 101 Attempt an authenticity By copying insanity, By snarling out disordered verses, Wild images, unmetric curses. This raving like they're off their heads Proves that at heart they're nice co-eds. One hardly has the heart to say: "Poetry works the other way. Pope was bitter, Nerval nervy, Coleridge drugged and Verlaine pervy. Their existences were bleak But each had an intense technique. In formal verse a poet strives To grab sense from disordered lives, To steal back something from despair, To make with passion and with care A perfect something that redeems The blasted body and lost dreams. "This gift's reserved for very few - Perhaps not me, perhaps not you, But let us lesser mortals pay Our tributes to the poet's way. Let's love devices such as rhyme That fight against forgetful time. Let's love the art and love the craft That serves our poets as a raft On which from life's most shadowed coast They bring the work we value most." George Simmers