Pressed for a definition of poetry, I concluded a while back that poetry was all about cadences, and about imagery. In fact, poetry might be the intersection of cadence and imagery. But what stumped me was rhyme. What does it do? It must do something, because poets in many languages have used rhyme for millennia—perhaps from the origins of human language. While some poets prefer not to use rhyme, or have simply found themselves unable to master it, in those cultures where rhyme is used at all, the poets who have garnered a broad public following have generally used at least some rhyme, some of the time. People respond to rhyme. Properly used, it delights the ear. There is some part of our brain that loves to hear it. But why? This cannot be just a cultural preference, because rhyme is found across a broad range of cultures. What is it that rhyme does to the human brain, and why should we have evolved brain structures hard wired with the software to seek it out and enjoy it?
In pre-literate cultures, rhyme can serve a practical function. It’s a mnemonic—a memory device. When the history of a whole society had to be passed from one generation to another from memory, this would be an easier task if the lines rhymed. But much of Western society has been literate now for 2,500 years, yet we still use rhyme. We like it. We are hard wired to respond to it. This post will attempt to explain why we like it.
If there is any one thing that the human brain has evolved to do, it is to identify patterns. We continually process the incoming stimuli to try to distil patterns from the blur of random events. If all events were random, then there would be little point in learning or remembering anything. If what is happening now has only a random chance of ever happening again, then there would be no advantage in remembering what is happening. But in the natural environment, not every event is random. Some things run in cycles. There are patterns. And there can be a useful, predictive power that comes from understanding and remembering these patterns.
When the tides are at their very lowest level, one can obtain shellfish in some areas just by walking on the beach and picking them up. And tides are not random. A band of migrant hunter-gatherers might increase its food supply if they learned to synchronize their wanderings to the tides, so that they were always near the beach when tides were lowest. Annual human migrations would be affected too. The salmon run next year will be at exactly the same time and place as it was this year, etc. Observing and understanding even more complex patterns would also be useful. If our ancestors noticed that when a leopard stashes a kill in a tree, he eats on it for a while, and then leaves—and is always gone for several hours—this would be an opportunity. It would mean that if, after the leopard leaves, a man were to climb the tree and steal some of the kill, he could get away with it. He would be long gone before the cat returned.
We humans are not the only pattern seeking animals. Any mammal will do this. Once we had a mouse problem, so I set some traps-- and I caught one. When holding the trap with a dead mouse in it, I was at a loss for what to do with it. So I just threw it out the window, into the flower bed below. There was a feral cat about, and she found the mouse and ate it. And it happened that the next day, I caught another one and disposed of it the same way. I’m sure the cat was delighted. Then we found the hole where the mice had been getting in and plugged it. There were no more free mice, but the cat kept coming anyway. Every morning, she would carefully check the area beneath my window. Then about two weeks later, we caught one last mouse and the cat found it. That was it. Intermittent re-enforcement is the strongest kind. The cat was hooked forever. For the rest of her life, she stopped by every morning, looking plaintively toward the flower bed.
But though many animals seek patterns, we humans do it maniacally, often trying to impose patterns on random events. In any culture where people do a rain dance in hopes of bringing rain, what surely happened is that somewhere in the dim, distant past, some ancestor noticed that it happened to rain the day after a dance festival. If this occurred twice in a row, that would clinch it. The rain gods like dance music. An entire religion could spring from the over-interpretation of a few random events.
So what does all this have to do with rhyming poetry? When two written or spoken lines end in the same vowel sound, this creates a pattern. And if the lines are written in the same meter, this creates a very definite pattern. The little “pattern recognition module” in our brain perks up, and we experience a tiny amount of stimulation and pleasure, as neuro-transmitters are released in response to our switching into the “pattern recognition mode.” The amygdala, which decides which experiences to remember, also perks up and probably receives a small shot of dopamine and this also excites us. And why would the amygdala crank up in response to poetry? Random events are generally not worth remembering—but patterns might be. True, the first six lines of a nonsense poem contain no life saving information--but it’s still a pattern. And our mode of operation is to record all patterns first, and then decide at our leisure whether they are important.
If one writes lines with statements that evoke some kind of imagery while also using both a repetitive cadence and rhyme, the images will trigger a stronger emotional response. They will be experienced more deeply, due to the mild state of arousal which occurs as a result of pattern recognition activity. And that’s what makes poetry poetry, though the cadence and imagery alone can trigger the same effect, with no rhyme at all, if used skillfully.
I’m sure some of you will damn me for de-mystifying this, but I assure you: The effect of a poem is in no way diminished by comprehension. A retired earth-science instructor once explained to me, “When I look at a sunset, I know enough about meteorology and physics to know precisely what makes it beautiful. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy it any less."
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