Rhyme

O NE enigmatic statement about rhyme appears all the time in Victorian poetry criticism. It's this: "Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope." 1 The statement is attributed to Arthur Hallam, the critic whose early death is the subject of Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850). Hallam's idea of rhyme has long been used to explain the form of the In Memoriam stanza; in the forward and backward movement of the abba rhymes, readers keep hearing the melancholy play of memory and hope that Hallam described. allam's statement has become an axiom of Victorianist close reading, but in its original context it described a set of historical phenomena: the migration of rhyme from Arabic to Provenal poetry and the cultivation of rhyme's expressive properties by the troubadours. Hallam, I argue, borrowed his idea from Romantic literary historiography, most directly from J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi's De la littrature du midi de l'Europe (1813; trans. 1823). This intellectual background matters, both for our understanding of Victorian poetics and for our own ways of approaching questions of form. It tells us, surprisingly, that in the nineteenth-century imagination rhyme's effects were tied to its origins: no form without history. It also tells us that there was no such thing as Victorian rhyme if "Victorian" means England and the nineteenth century. Victorian rhyme was a medievalist and orientalist idea about the origin of European poetry, and it arose from Continental aesthetics and literary history writing.