Mary Ellen Rickey, Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw

Mary Ellen Rickey, Rhyme and Meaning in Richard Crashaw, University of Kentucky Press, 1961

Crashaw obviously not only liked rhyme patterning in general, but he enjoyed repeating certain specific rhyme words. Nearly all Crashaw students have noticed these rhyme words which appear again and again through his verse, recurring both in a single poem and from one piece of verse to another. The problem of these recurrences is a curious one. Do they indicate Crashaw’s lack of facility in contriving rhymes, or possibly a small poetic vocabulary? A consideration of examples of the same rhyme pairs used in different periods of Crashaw’s writing, as well as examination of his extensive revisions, has convinced me that neither of these two suppositions could be true. (3)

Conversely, Crashaw uses many words as staples of the inner part of the line but rarely as endings. See a few … (6) It might at first be thought that these differences in proportion result from the difficulty of finding rhymes for some of the words. This difficulty probably accounts at least partly for the infrequent use of some of them—rich and dark, for instance—although Crashaw usually shows no hesitation to contrive unusual compounds to sustain desired rhyme. Evidently the man would rhyme beauty, duty, and shoo-ty (Wishes to his Supposed Mistress) could have devised some phrase to match happy. Yet scarcity of rhyme counterparts cannot be offered as an excuse in the case of sad, sweet, and seem, or of look, whose rhyme counterpart book appears almost exclusively as a rhyme word. Nor is there any good reason for his using dove, nest, and the like preponderantly as rhymes. One must simply concluded that Crashaw had a special rhyme vocabulary because he chose to do so… (7)