Polyphonic rhyme. 'All the minutiae of his craft.'

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counter-point and all the minutiae of his craft.

What did Ezra Pound mean by polyphonic rhyme? Assonance, alliteration, immediate and simple rhyme all seem fairly self explanatory. Delayed rhyme I would guess covers things like slant rhyme.

Polyphonic rhyme is not a widespread term, but I think we can give it some common sense definition by looking at poems by Keats and Amy Lowell.

There is a simple definition, which is sheer variation, or avoiding 'rhymes that appear too often', as Pound said. But there's more to it. Polyphony in music isn't mere variation. It is a form of musical weaving of 'two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody'.

I think this is about more than end rhymes. Look at this from Keats:

of beechen green and shadows numberless singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Let's read that as just the constituent vowels.

oh ee e ee ah ah ow uh e uh i e oh uh uh i uh o e ee

See how the the 'e' and 'ee' sounds dance along through the lines. That's one strain of melody. Now look at the 'uh' and 'oh' sounds. That's another strain. The lines get part of their rhythm and euphony from the interplay of these two sound groups. It is the harmonic effect in poetry.

You can see how at the start of the first line and the end of the second line the 'e' becomes an 'ee'. This elongation of the vowel sound is a useful trick for poets. It reflects the stress pattern of an iamb, short to long,

Keats uses the same technique in this line from To Autumn:

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind eye air o i e eye uh i ow i i

The stress naturally makes the vowel sound longer in wind, as if the 'i' sound that has been agitating throughout the line escapes on a breeze. Look at the preceding lines.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

ooh ah o ee ee oh a i eye oa uh eye ooh e uh ee a oa ay eye ee i i air e oh uh a a ee oa eye air o i e eye uh i ow i i

The lines resound with polyphony. The 'ee' and 'eye' are never far away from each other. Sitting and lifted pick up the sound introduced by amid, building the sense of cadence when the final words of the quatrain come.

Amy Lowell was a Keats scholar and she was used polyphony in Bath to create the effect of reflection and refraction of sunlight in the bath water.

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.

The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.

Internal rhyme makes the technique more obvious, but she is playing with well established patterns. Look at the way 'It cleaves the water into flaws' echos Wordsworth, 'heaving through the water like a swan'.

There are lathes and planes and other other obvious pairs. Flaws picks up bores and pours and this establishes a resonance that Lowell plays out by using the word water in practically every line. That would have sounded like a monotonous repetition without having the other words earlier on. Any more of them and the effect of polyphony would be lost to a sense of a list of rhyming words. Similarly the repetition of bright throughout the poem is supported and raised to polyphony by lie, light, sunshine, white.