The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4): Hegel's AesthetikHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 4 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Aesthetics
The position of the rhyme is at the conclusion of the lines, in
which the rhyming word, although there is certainly no reason that
it should ever concentrate in itself the ideal expressiveness of the
significance, nevertheless does attract attention to itself so far as
the verbal sound is concerned; and, furthermore, it makes the different
verses or stanzas follow one another either in accordance with the
principle of a wholly abstract recurrence of the same rhyme, or by
uniting, separating, and mutually relating them in a more elaborate
mode of regulated change, and variously symmetrical interweaving of
different rhymes with correspondent relations, sometimes more near,
at others more remote, of every degree of complexity. In such a
process the particular rhymes will at one point stare us in the face
at once, or they will appear to have a game of hide-and seek; so that
in this way our ear, as it listens, will at one time receive instant
satisfaction, at another it will only find it after considerable delay,
wherein the expectation will, as it were, be coquetted with, deceived,
and kept on the stretch, until the assured end from point to point of
artistically arranged recurrence is reached, and with it the hearer's
approval.
Among the various types of the poetic art it is pre-eminently _lyric_
poetry, which, by virtue of its ideality and personal quality of
expression, most readily avails itself of rhyme, and thereby converts
language itself into a music of emotion and melodic symmetry, a
symmetry not merely of time-measure and rhythmical movement, but of
the kind of resonance which finds a responsive echo in the inner life
itself. To promote this, therefore, the art elaborates in its use
of rhyme a more simple or complex system of strophes, every one of
which is part of one organic whole. Examples of such an interplay of
melodic sound, whether steeped in emotion or rich in ingenuity, are the
sonnet, canzonet, triolet, and madrigal. Epic poetry, on the contrary,
so long as it does not mingle lyrical subject-matter with its more
native character, preserves a more equable advance in its construction,
which does not easily adapt itself to the strophe. We have an obvious
illustration of this in the triplet stanzas of Dante's "Divine Comedy,"
as contrasted with the lyrical canzonets and sonnets of the same poet.
However, I must not permit myself to go further into detail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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