GOD BLESS SHILLITOE
By JAN STRUTHER
THERE are many poets who declare that they never use a rhyming dictionary ; there may even be a few who really do deny themselves the aid of this admirable invention : but such pride or such pig-headed- ness is not for me. Time and energy get more precious every day, and it is sheer folly not to conserve them. Why work out sums in your head when you can buy a ready-reckoner ? Why sweep floors by hand when a vacuum-cleaner will do it better ? And why mutter laboriously to yourself "bat, cat, fat, hat, mat" (for- getting, as one always does, "brat," " chat," and " flat ") when a glance at Shillitoe's Poetical Lexicon will give you, in a neat column, no less than fifty-eight rhymes There are others, but Shillitoe is the one which hap- pened, many years ago, to come into my possession. It was left to me by an aunt, whose own poetry must have been either anonymously published or discreetly overlaid at birth. I met her very seldom, but through the medium of Shillitoe I have come to know her quite well. She was, it seems, almost fanatically genteel ; for when she found the word " blouse " placed under " arouse " she put a neat firm line through it, wrote a little "No 1" of horror in the margin, and added it to the " ooze " column instead. And she must have been delicate-minded to the verge of prudery, for she has taken the trouble to scratch out several of Shillitoe's robuster suggestions, including one of the very few available rhymes to "jelly."
Not that Shillitoe himself, though sometimes biblical, is ever coarse : in fact, I often think that he would turn over in his grave, while my aunt would do a perfect somersault in hers, if they could see some of the rhymes which I have added to the volume since I owned it. After all, we are a plain-speaking generation, and one never knows. My own niece, to whom I shall leave the book, will probably put in a whole lot more of which I have never even heard. And she in her turn, I suppose, will try to deduce my character from my marginalia. "A pedantic Scot," she will murmur when she comes to the word " loch " savagely struck out from the column of rhymes to "rock." And "Oh, a lore-poet ! " she will say with an indulgent smile (for she herself, if the present trend of poetry continues, will be writing about nothing whatever but pylons and politics) when she sees the dog-eared and finger-marked state of page 204.
As a matter of fact, some of the finger-marks are my aunt's. She too, it appears, had a romantic temper- ament; she, too, laboured beneath that great handicap of English poets—the fewness and irrelevance of the rhymes to "love." (How much easier it must be for the French, whose love rhymes with the day, with eternity, and with courtship itself ; how fortunate are the Spanish, whose language perpetually invites them to say it with flowers. . . .) In England, the situation is appalling. Consider—I give them in Shillitoe's formation—the choices open to us ;
self-love shove true-love turtle-dove unglove above boxing-glove dove glove lady-love light-o'-love
Seven of these must be dismissed as mere variants : it was thoughtful of Shillitoe to put them in, but they do not really help. That leaves only four—" above," "dove," "glove," and "shove." To use the first, you must either drag in a reference to Heaven, which, though ennobling, soon pails; or else change the locale of your wooing to the open air, which in these urban days is often impracticable. The second—" dove "—is of even less use. The two outstanding characteristics of a dove are its greyness and its softness. Only one of these can with courtesy be transferred to your beloved if you are a male poet, and neither if you are a female one. The following well-known quotations will show to what lengths even the finest poets will go in sheer despair. Tennyson plunges into irrelevant and far-fetched ornitho- logy:
"In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove [whew .f] In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love."
Wordsworth frankly cheats : his Lucy, he arbitrarily tells us, is one of the Derbyshire Lucies, and we can believe it or not :
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love."
Can you beat that for low cunning ?
"Glove," again, is not inspiring. It will pass well enough in a triolet, a rondeau, a villanelle—any of those little velvet-lined caskets in which sophisticated philan- derers delight to convey the highly-polished trinket of their esteem. But passion in the raw is seldom gloved ; and for a really heart-felt declaration the word simply will not do.
There remains only "shove." And, just as the last candidate was too refined, so is this one too crude, too vulgar, too redolent of the football crowd and the fun fair. Love poetry, I have always instinctively felt, should steer a middle course between the Scylla of St. -James's Street and the Charybdis of Hampstead Heath. In this important matter, then, Shillitoe fails you : but on other occasions he can be superb. Take, for example, the moon, which is, I suppose, the world's second greatest incentive to the writing of verse. Left to yourself, you are apt to depend for ever upon those three tried henchmen, "June," " soon " and " swoon " ; adding, if you are not over-scrupulous, "tune." But apply to Shillitoe and he will beat up a whole regiment of supporters. Seventy-three, to be precise, True, many of them are too martial in their import to be of much use—" dragoon," for instance, and " frigatoon " ; " mus- ketoon," " picaroon," " rigadoon," " spadroon " and " spontoon " : while some of the others, such as " gambroon," " ratoon," and " seroon," have a curiously swashbuckling air, even if they turn out to mean nothing more stirring than a twilled cloth of worsted, cotton or linen, a new shoot from the root of a sugar-cane, and a crate in which figs or raisins are packed. There is always the chance, though, that you may one day find yourself writing a sword-and-cloak melodrama in rhymed couplets ; and in the meanwhile there are plenty more to choose from.
But (say Shillitoe's detractors) will not the sight of so many enticing possibilities deflect the poet from his original purpose ? Will it not, in short, go putting idea.s into his head ? I do not deny that there may be something in this : I have often' wondered whether mildness (which is by no means the same thing as humility) would ever have gained such prestige as a Christian virtue if the hymn-writers had not been at their wits' end for a rhyme to "child." This objection, however, applies not only to Shillitoe but to the primitive method of going through the alphabet in your head, and indeed to the whole practice of rhyming. And it might equally well be argued that in rhymes, as in marriage, the wider the choice the greater the chance of ultimate compatibility. Away with scruples, then, and God bless Shillitoe,
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