Order Out of Chaos: Pararhyme in Sondheim

A Little Latte Later: Disorder Starts with the Vowels

The Sondheim Hub is proud to present a guest essay today, by Dr. Natalie Gerber. Dr. Gerber is professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, where she teaches courses in professional writing, editing, grammar, style, and 20th-century American poetry and literature. Her research interests include rhythmic structures of the English language and of English-language poetry; linguistic and cognitive approaches to literature; versification; Global Englishes; intonational phonology and poetic structure; and the structure and history of the English language. We are so pleased to be publishing her essay on pararhyme in Sondheim, which begins below:

Stephen Sondheim was a connoisseur of language. Though he may have regarded lyric writing as a craft, not an art, and resisted being pegged as a lyricist, his awareness of the pliable resources and musicality of the English language is deeply enmeshed in his dramatic lyrics.¹ On multiple occasions, he expressed his enduring interest in “the fascinating intricacies of the English language,”² and also considered that “a love of language” and an aptitude to “listen to language more carefully” likely played a role in drawing audiences to his work.³

That close listening is rewarded in Sondheim’s final work, Here We Are, whose title itself is worthy of an entire post reflecting on the self-referentiality of its words.⁴ In “The Waiter’s Song,” we hear the hum of the coming revolution pixelated in this delightfully comedic exchange, which begins with the unavailability of an invented drink, a “decaf latte mocchaniño.”

[WAITER]
I am so sorry, Madam
We have no decaf latte mocchaniños
With soy milk
Today

[CLAUDIA, spoken]
Fine. Skip the soy

[WAITER]
What can I say?

The setting is Cafe Everything, where the impossibly wealthy brunch set arrives, ravenous, and gives its drink orders—expecting to be served “immediately.” However, this Blob’s ability to issue and enforce orders is about to break down, and the unlikely messenger is this singing waiter (a fact unremarkable only in a musical), who exacts great precision and, one suspects, unapparent pleasure in delivering the news, bit by bit, that the cafe is “completely out of food”—“Of any kind.” But rather than make that announcement at the top, the Waiter launches into a bit of vaudevillian wordplay:

[WAITER]

That's not the problem, Madam
The problem isn't just the soy
You see
It's more than just the soy

[CLAUDIA, spoken]
Yeah, so?

Sondheim was a stickler for clarity: lyrics must be clear since, unlike poems, they are heard only once by the audience. Even so, in this dazzling exchange, we are not likely to miss the play among the words soy, see, and so–positioned as they are at four consecutive line endings. Beyond Claudia’s casual, imperious disinterest in why her drink isn’t available and the Waiter’s coy solicitous air in delivering the news, the actual patter(n) takes this exchange out of the realm of routine turn-taking between two speakers with unequal power and turns it into a provocative bit of theatrical subservience, which culminates in this piece de resistance: 

[WAITER]
We're also out of latte

[CLAUDIA, spoken]
What?

[WAITER]
We do expect a little latte later
But we haven't got a lotta latte now.

Once we hear past any echoes of A Little Night Music’s “Always later” and set aside Sondheim’s boisterous rhyming of word parts (“latte”/”what”),⁵ we can examine more closely the playful sequence of “a little latte later,” in which the two outer consonants match but the enclosed vowels differ (say, vs. the same vowels of “got a lotta latte”). 

On first glance, one might think that Sondheim would disapprove of such a device since, after all, it looks a good deal like an ordinary slant rhyme, the kind he rails against in the opening pages of his “Essay on Rhyme” in Finishing the Hat.⁶ And even if this specific set of examples—“a little latte later”—falls within a line, they aren’t the perfect internal rhymes Sondheim praises for giving additional punch to a lyric—like the unobtrusive internal full rhymes (e.g., clutch / touch; caf- / laugh) tucked away in “The Ladies Who Lunch.”

Yet Sondheim on several occasions pointed with approval to his execution of a similar run of carefully alliterated words, calling it “pretty dazzling.” The first of these occurs in the song “Love, I Hear” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim stars the line “Today I woke too weak to walk” and, in a footnote, describes it thus: 

Opportunities to use alliteration, where the initial consonants of each word are alike, simultaneously with consonance, where the final consonants are alike, are rare, which is what makes them effective. My first version of this line was ‘I woke too weak to walk to work,’ which I thought was pretty dazzling until Burt pointed out that the sons of patricians in ancient Rome didn’t work” (Finishing the Hat, p. 88, fn).⁷

Well, work or no work, the line is still pretty dazzling. Consider: in a run of eight syllables, all but two syllables (“-day” and “I”) are either homophones of the word to⁸ (to-, too, to) or combine what Sondheim calls alliteration with consonance (woke, weak, walk). 

Sondheim may not know, or he may choose not to say, the term for this device that once appeared in poetic handbooks and dictionaries.⁹ That term was, and sometimes still is, pararhyme: a rhyme in which “two different syllables have different vowel sounds but identical penultimate and final consonantal groupings (grand / grind).” More commonly today, poetic handbooks, like the most recent edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, or PEPP, lack a separate entry for the term “pararhyme” and instead treat this device within a schema for rhyme taxonomies:

C V C alliteration (bad / boy)
C V C  assonance (back / rat)
C V C  consonance (back / neck)
C V C reverse rhyme (back / bat)
C V C [no standard term] frame rhyme, pararhyme (back / buck)
C V C rhyme strictly speaking (back / rack)
C V C Rich rhyme, rime riche, or identical rhyme (bat [wooden cylinder] / bat [flying creature]) 

- (“Rhyme” in PEPP; emphasis added)

According to PEPP, “This schema presumes that both syllables are identical in all other respects, i.e., their phonological and morphological characteristics—e.g., that both syllables are stressed monosyllables.” (T.V.F. Brogan, S. Cushman, “Rhyme” in PEPP p.1185 in pp.1182–1192). 

Sources other than PEPP point to disyllabic pararhyme, like the kind in “a little latte later.” Consider this from the pararhyme entry in Britannica: “Feminine pararhyme has two forms, one in which both vowel sounds differ, and one in which only one does (ran in / run on; blindness / blandness).” If one differentiates so-called masculine and feminine forms, then “The Waiter’s Song” uses both masculine pararhyme (soy, see, say, so) and feminine pararhyme (little, latte, later), whereas Forum uses only the masculine: woke, weak, walk. Arguably, one can treat examples such as see, so, say and soy as pararhymes even if the final consonantal grouping is empty.¹⁰ After all, the alternative, alliteration, doesn’t cover the careful modulation of vowels and diphthongs. Likewise, while we are used to thinking of /l/ and /r/ as consonants, they, like all sonorants, can function as vowels. (Otherwise, what is the core of the second syllable in the word rhythm or what produces the unstressed syllable in Macbeth’s “Double, double toil and trouble, / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.”)

Whatever the terminology is—frame rhyme, pararhyme, double consonance (a term found in other sources), or a simultaneous occurrence of alliteration and consonance—Sondheim clearly remains fond of this device. In Forum, it gives him a shorthand for conveying the broad tone and humor in his revised opening number where “Something appealing / something appalling” signals the coming dislocations of the evening, while “Something that’s bawdy, / Something for everybody” signals the low comedy (unafraid to pander). In Sunday in the Park with George, the technique foregrounds the wit of the lapdogs Fifi and Spot as they parody the humans and explore the park in their “Day Off”: “What’s the muddle / In the middle? That’s the puddle / Where the poodle / Did the piddle.”¹¹ And in Assassins the mismatch of vowel sounds cues the comedic ineptitude of would-be assassin Sara Jane Moore as she misfires her gun in the middle of the “Gun Song”: “Shit, I shot it!” In the 1985 production of Merrily, in “That Frank,” pararhyme contributes to the celebration of Franklin Shepard as all things au courant: in the pile-on of au courant adjectives, Terry says, ‘He is now–” and Scotty adds, “He is new–” (FTH, p.386). And so forth, and so on across many other comedic occurrences. Well, “now you know”!

Yet this device I’m calling pararhyme also functions seriously. A year before “That Frank,” Sondheim had written in Sunday in the Park with George another passage about the challenges of judging art. Far from a Blob, we have individuals (doubled from the first act) who are as trapped by their roles as passers of aesthetic judgment as are the artists whose livelihoods their judgments threaten to upend. The passage’s complexity requires a fuller transcription:

BOB GREENBERG  (The Museum Director):
It’s not enough knowing good from rotten—

CHARLES REDMOND (A Visiting Curator):
You’re telling me.

GREENBERG:
When something new pops up every day.

REDMOND:
You’re telling me.

GREENBERG:
It’s only new, though, for now—

REDMOND:
Nouveau.

GREENBERG:
But yesterday’s forgotten.

REDMOND:
And tomorrow is already passé.

GREENBERG:
There’s no surprise.

How do we know what’s good from what’s bad? How does what’s new stop being new or nouveau only for now? It’s a little like asking how can we know whether we would rather live in a home with abusive siblings and an at best absentee father but where we are familiar versus as a princess in the castle with the prince, but where we may remain out of place, forever peculiar? That attempt to sort out options in Into the Woods causes the character whose wish sets everything in motion “to stop and take stock / While you’re standing here stuck / On the steps of the palace.” Note the rather remarkable envelope pararhyme here (stop-stock-stuck-steps). 

Indeed, though Sondheim offers a provenance for this device in the work of Yip Harburg—calling it “a technique frequently and flashily used by Harburg, with the insouciant attitude of Porter when dealing with unhappy women in such songs as ‘The Physician’” (FTH, p.236)—there seems to be more than insouciance—i.e., ‘blithe unconcern, nonchalance’—or a “Portrait of the Lyricist on Display” in Sondheim’s usage. Consider “The Story of Lucy and Jessie” in Follies, where pararhyme almost becomes a figure for the women’s desire to switch interiors: “Jessie wants to be juicy”; “Jessie wants to be lacy, / Lucy wants to be Jessie.”¹² Or the device’s appearance in Company when Bobby—finally willing to give up his standing apart—is on to something in “Being Alive”: “Make me confused. / Mock me with praise,” a pair of lines that just might remind us that, etymologically, “confused” comes from the “Latin cōnfūsus, past participle of cōnfundere, to mix together—not a bad word choice for a song contemplating relationships!  Or, in a comic turn, when the Princely brothers in Into the Woods, marinating in misery over being unable to reach their loves, sing: “when the one thing you want / is the only thing out of your reach.” (This example of pararhyme is also a good reminder that the consonant may not even be a written letter, but, like the /w/ in one, may surface in pronunciation.¹³) 

I would argue that, in Sondheim shows, a “showy dose of consonance (rhyming with similar consonants but different vowel sounds, such as ‘Lucy’ and ‘lacy’)” lends itself to moments of possible confusion or derangement and to characters who are, permanently or momentarily, deranged. In Gypsy, there is the triumphant Rose, who—in stark contrast to events—declares, “We’ve got nothing to hit but the heights!” In Follies, there is not only the story of the dysphoric pair of Jessie and Lucy, but also there is the Ben he is today and the Ben he might have been. Is it possible that the near pararhymes embedded in the title of the song “Live, Laugh, Love” and extended through near-rhymes in line endings within the song function like the dissonance in the music in “The Road You Didn’t Take” to point up the disingenuousness of Ben’s speech even before he breaks down? 

Indeed, pararhyme may be particularly well suited for such usage. Sonically, it is decentered just enough to make us, hearing it, question what we are hearing. Consider how pararhyme appears in Anyone Can Whistle. In the cut song “The Lame, the Halt, and the Blind,” the corrupt Town Council members aver, “The sick shall find all the succor they seek”—a line with a likely pun on sucker. Unlike the lovesickness Hero suffers, an internal affliction that harms no one, here an entire populace is hoodwinked by false promises. Even more damningly, in the brilliant number “Simple,” where sorting fails to separate out the allegedly insane Cookies from the allegedly sane townspeople, it’s Police Chief Magruder’s stunning conflation of “Hail!” and “Heil” that reveals his confusion of who the real enemy is and foreshadows the ideological derangements at the core of Assassins and its dissonant uses of Hail to the Chief.  

These examples may also remind us that one origin for pararhyme lies in warfare. For literary scholars, pararhyme is most deeply connected with Wilfred Owen, a World War I poet who perfected a technique of rhymes in which a couplet “ends with the same consonant sounds, but Owen alters the vowel sounds, as described thus:

Each iambic pentameter couplet of “Strange Meeting” ends with the same consonant sounds, but Owen alters the vowel sounds—“hall” and “Hell,” “mystery” and “mastery,” “untold” and “distilled”—in order to create double consonance, or pararhyme. Owen’s pararhyme bends the poetic tradition, creating in the reader an uneasy sense of dislocation… (“Poems [Wilfred Owen],” Modernism Lab) 

Confronted with the tragedy of war (which would claim his life), Owen found in such sonic dislocations some corollary device for the dislocations of internal experience.

Of course, the device had its critics. As this entry from The Modernism Lab continues,

Some of Owen’s contemporaries, however, were less sure about the technique. After his cousin Leslie Gunston responded with “blunt criticism” to the use of pararhyme in his poem “Miners,” Owen wrote back, “I suppose I am doing in poetry what the advanced composers are doing in music. I am not satisfied with either” (CL 531). (Suhr-Sytsma, “Poems [Wilfred Owen]” Modernism Lab, Yale University)

An advanced composer and lyricist of a later age, Sondheim may have similarly intuited the uses of pararhyme (aka double consonance) in signaling dislocations, not just in love and war, but also in art. Piling pararhyme with its slight dissonance to rhyme—with its drive for clarity and speed—may just create the apt conditions to return us to ordinary reality from the world of artistic creation: “Dizzy from the height / Coming from the hat.” In other words, perhaps pararhyme may be that rare occasion on which Sondheim says “Sometimes breaking the pattern”—or exceeding it—serves a purpose.

1. In his recorded conversations with Mark Eden Horowitz at the Library of Congress, Sondheim remarks on the importance of inflection and how kingdoms have been lost over tiny decisions like whether a single note goes up or down in pitch; likewise, he comments in Finishing the Hat on the aptness of a word like next, with its clash of consonants, to capture the sudden grinding of gears of a belated Westernization of Japan in the finale of Pacific Overtures.

2. Look, I Made a Hat!, p. 3, where Sondheim says that “Studying Latin at George School with an inspiring teacher named Lucille Pollock opened me up to the fascinating intricacies of the English language.”

3. Sondheim is quoted in the late Paul Salsini’s wonderful book Sondheim & Me as reflecting on the “peculiar love” that British audiences have for his work. For the full quote see p.113.

4. Most words are symbols for external content or concepts: thus, playwright, lyrics, etc. Rarer are words that point not to content but to shared reference points: here is such a word–it only has meaning if listener and speaker share a common reference point. We as a pronoun is similarly referential. Are is a bit different, but I leave to a scholar of the philosophy of language to parse apart whether the verb to be is referential or a content-clue.

5. This salvo will issue into a series of comedic breakdowns of words: decaf, itself already a clipping or clipped form, breaks down further into both (a) caff, which finds rhymes with half and laugh; and (b) de-, which rhymes with tea and me, before the whole passage devolves into the idiomatic expletive phrase “shit out of tea.” Not surprisingly, in a show about the end of “[t]he world of private jets and screening rooms,” it isn’t chrysanthemum tea that’s depleted—it’s Earl Grey a tea named for a nobleman, specifically Charles Grey, the ‘Second Earl Grey.’’

6. In this essay, he takes pop song writers to task for laziness and says jokes don’t land without full rhyme.

7. In his May 2, 1971 Lyrics & Lyricists talk for the 92nd St. Y, Sondheim tells the story at 1:28:22.

8. There is to in to-day, once a compound noun; too, the adverb; and to, an infinitival particle.

9. The auction of the Sondheim estate last summer revealed that Sondheim had a considerable poetry collection including some poetic handbooks..

10. The impulse to label these examples as assonance disregards the fact that the vowels differ and assonance is based on repetition of vowels. This could also be termed simply as alliteration, and I might be persuaded of such, except that alliteration could have completely different syllable structures and the pattern co-occurs here with little, latte, later.

11. The second pararhyme is pointed out independently by Sheila Davis in her incomparable article “No Rhyme Before Its Time” in The Sondheim Review (pp. 29, 31). Davis, who is also the author of several books on lyric writing, refers to this device as “consonance: Close repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels” (29). More typically, consonance is said to involve repetition after the vowel only: as in American Heritage Dictionary’s definition, ‘The repetition of consonants or of a consonant pattern, especially at the ends of words, as in blank and think or strong and string.’

12. There is also “Lucy’s a lassie / You pet on the head” as well as a play with the proper noun, the famous canine “Lassie.”

13. By the same token the example “she sits by the hour / Maintaining her hair” is not pararhyme since we don’t pronounce the /h/ in hour.