ENGLISH 111
Inversion, Expansion, and Compression to Satisfy Rhyme and Rhythm
In older poetry, before the 1930s, and more and more the further back we go,
poets often use inversion for rhyme or rhythm, as in Donne’s “Thy beams, so reverend
and strong / Why shouldst thou think?” (“The Sun Rising”) or Shakespeare’s “As any she
belied with false compare” (which means “as any woman misrepresented by a flase
comparison,” the last line of Sonnet 130). Let’s consider some of the difficulties you
might face in reading poems by Shakespeare, Donne and other earlier poets.
These difficulties are partly a consequence of the desire to heighten the concentration and
the pattern of the poetic line (see Verse versus Prose on Cecil), especially through
controlling rhythm and rhyme; partly a consequence of changes in language; and partly a
consequence of a change of taste. Since early last century it has come to seem bad
(conventional, unnatural, lazy, clumsy, naïve and so on) in poetry in English to alter the
natural order of words or the form or length of a single word for the sake of a rhyme. But
that wasn’t the attitude until the 20C.
Until then, it was felt that the pattern of the poetic form—the line, the rhyme, the
rhythm—was worth a few minor adjustments, in word order, word length, word usage.
Word order was much more flexible in Old English (to about 1150) and in Middle
English (to about 1470) than it is in Modern English (which linguists date from 1470 or
so, so that Shakespeare and Donne are regarded as Early Modern English, certainly not
Old English). Even in Modern English, we have some flexibility in word order, especially
in conversation (“I thought that silly” but also “That I thought silly”), and this inversion is
essential for some senses, like changing a statement to a yes-no question (“That is silly”;
“Is that silly?”). Shakespeare and most of the other earlier poets use inversion often for
the sake of rhyme or rhythm: in sonnet 130, a mild one at line 9: “I love to hear her
speak, yet well I know” rather than “I know well.” With a little practice, you’ll find that
although you might have to do a mental flip, it takes less and less of a flip, it becomes as
smooth as it was for writers and readers of the time.
Another common adjustment to keep to the rhythm and sometimes the rhyme was to
subtract a syllable or add a word.
In line 1, Shakespeare says “My mistress’ eyes” rather than “My mistress’s eyes” to keep
to the rhythm. Common examples are “o’er” for “over”; more extreme is sonnet 18, line
10: “Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st” where “ow’st” actually means “ ownest”
(modern “owns”) but has to rhyme with “grow’st”; and it’s made more difficult because
“that fair” here actually means “that fairness”. Shakespeare takes risks, he doesn’t
confine himself to the way that language usually works, so here he drops a syllable from
“fairness,” or asks us to read “fair” (the adjective) as “fairness” (the noun).
Which brings us to the compressed last line of sonnet 130: “And yet, by heaven, I think
my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.”
Shakespeare takes risks with language; more risks than any other writer ever, probably;
he created more new words than any single other writer in the history of English, some of
them which we couldn’t do without, others which nobody else has ever used. He opened
up new possibilities again and again by turning nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns,
adjectives into nouns, and so on. That’s what he does here are the end of sonnet 130,
using the verb “compare” as a noun to mean “comparison,” one that hasn’t caught on
and that he uses only to rhyme with “rare.”
But the real sticking point is earlier in the line, that “she belied.”
What the line means is “As any WOMAN (anyone we could call she) who is belied
(misrepresented, oversold) by false comparison.” Now it would be easy to take “she” as
referring to the mistress (since she has been the subject of the sonnet) and “she belied” as
referring to a verb and an active subject (she has belied) rather than a participle meaning
“any she [who is] belied.”
But it just won’t work, we have to do another of those horse-past-the barn flips. In fact
Shakespeare makes it easy to get the right sense, in three different ways:
1) it’s the sense that we expect of this line anyway: “Any yet, by heaven, I think my love
as rare” as any woman who’s had all sorts of false claims made for her. I stressed in
Lecture 5 that language underspecifies; that we use language not as self-sufficient, but as
the basis for understanding what someone intends by what they say.
Speakers always take risks; someone who wanted to spell out “time flies like an arrow”
so that no one could misunderstand and said something like “time in general travels as
swiftly as any arrow flies swiftly through the air” would seem dull and pedantic, a robot
who didn’t trust your mind, rather than a person; Shakespeare takes huge risks, and pays
us the compliment of trusting that we know more or less what he might have in mind, and
gives us enough to work with.
2) There’s another way he makes it easier for us. The da-DUM da-DUM rhythm makes
us expect that the line will read “As ANy SHE beLIED” rather than “As ANy she
beLIED.”
3) And there’s a third way. If our expectation of the sense doesn’t help us, and our
expectation of the rhythm doesn’t help us, and we just read but it as “any (person that)
she (my mistress) belied,” it just doesn’t make sense. We cannot accept a reading that
“my love is as rare as any [person] (or any love) that she misrepresented by false
comparison,” since we have no reason to believe that she has overpraised anybody
(especially any woman) or would want to. So we do a horse-past-the barn flip, and see
“she” as any WOMAN (any she) THAT IS belied.
Shakespeare takes risks; he compresses, in the sonnets, for the sake of keeping the
concentration of form; occasionally, he twists and strains, and no one gets it immediately;
but he trusts our understanding of the general sense to work it out, and just as in “the
horse raced past the barn fell,” we do.
See also Glossary and Guide under inversion.