Rhyme

The early poems use rhymes quite frequently; the later ones only occasionally and for special effect, like giving a solid core to a stanza. When her rhymes were frequent, Marianne Moore deliberately alternated unstressed, unimportant words with stressed, important ones. In an early poem called“The Fish”she writes:

Opening  and shutting itself like

an

Injured fan.

Where“an”rhyming with“fan” is slurred over as a grammatical connection rather than a word carrying meaning. Sometimes she would rhyme a stressed syllable with an unstressed one, as in“An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle…”:

                                                     the fish

Whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their

                                polish.

More remarkably, and to the annoyance of many of her critics, she would split a word at the end of the line in order to form rhyme with an inside syllable of a word.“In the Days of Prismatic Colour”abounds in such tricks:

                                                     that all

truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it always has been－

or,

                                －at the antipodes from the initial great truths.“Part of it was crawling, part of it was about to crawl….”

Instead of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables as in traditional meter, Marianne Moore rather uses stressed and unstressed rhymes.