Today’s Poem: Rose-Cheeked Laura

Thomas Campion on what to do when rhyming is too easy

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Portrait of a girl, English, early 17th century (Wikimedia Commons)

In a 1602 treatise, Observations in the Art of English Poesie, the composer-physician Thomas Campion (1567–1620) inveighs against “the vulgar and artificial custom of riming.” What he really objects to, as it turns out, is not rhyme so much as sloppiness. English poets have inherited the patterns of classical meter — Latin wrested out of the Church and into secular use by Thomas More, Erasmus, and “other learned men of that age, who brought the Latine toong out of the hands of the illiterate monks and friars” — but also a native language whose patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are largely uncongenial to those meters. According to Campion, would-be poets attempt to cover their lack of facility in meter by writing in rhyme and hoping nobody will notice the hiccups.

It’s easy enough to rhyme. In fact, that’s the easy way out, says Campion. Anybody can write in rhyme. Rhyme is not an accomplishment. In fact, “…