Random Rhyme in Adcock’s The Difficult Wheel

While rhyme has traditionally been used as a way to organize the structure of a poem, rhyme for Betty Adcock functions independent of structure. For her, rhyme is usually used as a way to reinforce meaning, to let the repetitive sound when it occurs increase the impact or explore the nuances of an idea in some significant way. This repetition which may occur within a line or reach across lines within a stanza or even several stanzas, often seems random, a near accident. There is almost a studied effort to avoid pattern, to keep the reader from expectation. Rhyme when it comes bids for the attention of the reader in an arresting way and seems to grow organically out of the poem rather than to call attention to the expertise of the poet.

“One of a Kind,” the poem that announces the title of the volume, is a good example of the predominant technique used in the collection. The vehicle of the poem explores the anomaly of the mule. Approximate internal rhymes are used in the first stanza--“thick as a stump”-- and the next to last stanza--“he works and balks’--to suggest the stubborn nature of the brute beast. He is a sturdy animal, a veritable workhorse, but he cannot be easily moved against his will. “Thick” suggests density of mind as well as physique and “stump” amplifies both the density and immovability and suggests the exact opposite of the flexibility of the branch or shoot from which the tree grew. “Work” and “balk” seem counter opposites and when correlated with the initial pair suggest the positive and negative that resulted in the union of horse and donkey. The paradox figured into these two rhymes is explored in the intervening stanzas.

Additionally, in the first stanza, the approximate rhyme of “colors” and “other” pictorially declare the anomaly. His mottled coat brands him as being somewhere in between, stranded in a kind of no-horse existence. The completeness and the irreversibility of this phenomenon is spelled out in the pure end rhymes in the second and third lines of the next to last stanza: “unknowing” and “one going.” These two stanzas are connected subtly by two highly unusual rhyming adjectives, “knobbled” and “rubbly.” to suggest the brokenness of the pragmatic institution that is the mule.

Contrasting with the dissonant rhymes that describe the mule are the assonance of the pure rhymes of “race,” “trace,” and even “-paced” that describe the horse that does not exist in the mule’s dreams and the future that will not be foaled to continue the lineage of the donkey.

The identical rhymes of “over and over” in the second stanza and “rowing and rowing” in the next to last stanza express the futility of the repetitive cycle in which the mule is caught. Each time a mule is born, his lineage ends with his inability to reproduce himself. The nature and purpose of his existence is equally repetitive and static. His is the fate of the “difficult wheel.” These identical rhymes set up the surprising turn at the end of the poem and the revelation of tenor. The identical rhymes of “whip” and “whip” and “man” and “man” introduce a definitive echo that finds closure in the end rhymes of the final couplet: “whip” and “kinship.” On at least one level, the mule, who was one of a kind, figures the hard-working farmer who is now one of a kind.

Every poem in The Difficult Wheel uses rhyme to a greater or lesser degree in the forms introduced in “One of a Kind.” The first poem, “Prophecy,” shows the greatest incidence of rhyme with every stanza using a variable pattern of end rhymes, while “Illuminations” uses a single identical rhyme near the end of the poem. Generally, rhyme is used sparingly and falls into three broad patterns; identical, internal, and end rhymes. More often than not internal and end rhymes are slant or approximate rhymes.

Adcock’s use of identical rhyme is particularly interesting in its daring to do what some might consider pedestrian repetition or the triteness of Poe’s over-quoted “nevermore.” In Adcock, it seems always the right choice. For example, in “Illuminations,” a poem that describes an ancient yardman from the point of view of the children who feared the mystery they attributed to him, Adcock uses identical rhyme in a combination of end and internal rhyme in the conclusion of the poem: “I believe we thought he’d turn to us and tell it/whatever it was. Or turn on us with it.” The indefinite “it” underscores the mystery, the presence of the man and his mystery in the lives of the children, and the larger sense of unknowing that the poem figures with this man whose walking stick was made of a number of used flashlights soldered together.

In “Time at the Movies,” the communal we have parts in plays “that replay in the minds/ of those we know/know us.” A stanza later “Someone remembers./ If not as you remember.” These rhymes reinforce the communal nature of the dominant figure in the poem and suggest the overlapping of frames that seems part of the celluloid film when viewed in stop-time. The next to last stanza, inches the film forward by the repetitive rhyme.
Now imagine, little by little
the skeins of light, the sounds crisscrossing,
start to scatter and to dim
the way a house will darken bit by bit
as one by one the people there turn in
to dreamless sleep, talk fallen into quiet.
The repetition by small increments sets up the conclusion of the poem, in forgetting the images are forgotten, the mental film becomes blank.

The technique is used as benediction in the “The Bird Woman.” The woman who repairs wings, feeds those who have fledged too young, and sews cat-torn bodies has become one with their world. “And by the ground this woman keeps/ they rise. They rise.” This repetition is both denotative and connotative. It figures the literal act of flying and suggests an equating and perhaps even ironic sense of ascension. In which case, the bird woman becomes a kind of messiah.

“In Another Life . . .” uses the technique as reversal of meaning. The poem explores the might-have-been, the woman the poet would have been had she stayed in the country of her birth. In the next to last stanza, “not” is used as an end rhyme enclosing four lines: “I reach toward what is not . . . reaching toward the woman who is not.” The stanza ends with “She had meant to do that, meant to write./ Oh what was it she had meant to write?” But the rhyme pattern is even denser than this. The last two lines which speak of the might-have-been woman are connected to the writer who reaches for what is not by the repetition of “write” in those enclosing lines: “this woman in the shut room of a city/ who writes with a wall of books behind her,/ writes this.”