On Rhyme as the Unifying Factor in Music

As a child, I grew up reading Dr. Seuss. I managed to be fascinated with page after page of his rhymes about cats, hats, tubs, and clubs. The absurd pictures that were sometimes painted is surely a thing of creativity. It would take someone as creative as Dr. Seuss to think of an elephant sitting on an egg until it hatches, or to spend an entire book dedicated to feet and another to the nose. These unique stories were certainly catalysts that led me to think up creative inventions that were, of course, impossible and useless.

Now, Dr. Seuss certainly communicates his absurdity effectively. The completely random nature of his rhyme allows him to change thoughts capriciously, without giving heed to the sense of the story. Furthermore, Dr. Seuss accentuates his writings with invented words with no apparent purpose other than to fit with the rhyme and rhythm of the story.

A couple of years ago, my roommates and I had a wonderful time late at night with making up senseless rhymes. One of us spoke a line and whoever was the quickest came up with the next line to fit with the meter and rhyme of the last speaker. There was no message being communicated other than the common chit-chat. Nevertheless we rhymed away, laughing until our stomachs ached.

The unifying factor in both of the previous paragraphs is that rhyme induces laughter. Dr. Seuss and our room's jesting had no other purpose than to induce laughter. The content communicated by silly rhymes is subordinated to the entertainment factor. In some ways, a rhyme can actually shift from being an embedded feature of a piece of literature to the focal point. When rhyme is in the background it aids memory, but when it becomes the focus the message is forgotten and only the fun of the moment remains.

I participated in a reader's theater production my sophomore year in college. The opening section was an entire scene of rhyme. In between sections of acting, we would resume the rhyme. In order to keep a serious tone, we were taught to deliberately break up the rhyme. It proved difficult to break up the rhyme, because the parts were so sing-songy. During practices, however, we occasionally made the rhyme stand out. When someone did make the rhyme stand out, the drama moved from being sober to hilarious.

Many songs written in the past century-and-a-half seem to be unified by the element of rhyme. Theological cliché phrases are mixed up and strewn throughout the prose to compose a song. In order not to drag anyone else through the mud, I will share a few lines of the song I wrote:

My heart overflows with your goodness, O Lord/Your grace is sufficient and free/Your mercy endures forever/And your love abounds toward me./I will praise your name, Holy Father/Lift up your name on high/For you are Jehovah Almighty/And the apple of my eye.

Perhaps you will note that there is no direct logical or conceptual connection between lifting up God's name and the apple of my eye, and the connection between Jehovah Almighty and the apple of my eye is based upon the fact that it rhymes--I know, because I wrote it! It was very simple for me to sit down and compose this song, because I had only to merge these cliché phrases together in a way that fit both the rhyme and meter of the poem. To my own taste, there is no aesthetic beauty in this poem, though the words are certainly true and reflected my feelings toward God after I heard of a great number of people's conversions.

I will put a disclaimer on my evaluation, because I have not done thorough enough research to verify my hypotheses. I wonder if there is a connection between entertainment and rhyme and song. That our culture thrives on entertainment is self-evident. Television, amusement parks, and the music industry scream entertainment. Perhaps rhyme. rhythm and meter are part of the fruit of an entertainment-driven society. The combination of these elements in rap music especially can cause even very somber subjects to become objects of jesting. I am sometimes shocked to hear that people will actually laugh at the profanities that, if spoken in everyday speech would cause everyone to shudder, but since they are put to a rhyme, will cause laughter instead. On a less serious level, who does not laugh at Dr. Seuss? I suppose those who have heard the same story repeatedly as well as the ones who detest the very concept to begin with would not.

Perhaps I have just become tired of the rhymes, or perhaps I just lost the taste for repetitious clichés which resemble more of Dr. Seuss than God's Word, but I wonder if our balance is quite right. Is employing rhyme really the best and most effective way to communicate truth? Is it necessary for us to use rhyme to attract the attention of those who seek the world's entertainment with rhyme, or does God's Word really have inherent power? I do not yet have answers, but my question stands: Should rhyme be what ties our music together?