After writing fiction for about two decades I found myself writing poetry all of a sudden. I do not know if this happened as a result of some grief that I had been pushed into. Within six months or so I wrote a hundred and seven poems. I was writing these in between my fiction, never giving more than twenty minutes to a poem. I knew that I was not a poet.  Spending too much time on poetry meant wasting it. Yet poems were coming, virtually flowing into my mind, as if from nowhere. I never had to think, or if I did think the thought-content was the least part of the poem. When I read the poem after some time had passed I found that there was a considerable part of thought-content in it. This had entered my poetry without my quite knowing it. I had used words that I could not recollect having read or heard ever before and yet the dictionary corroborated my usage. Then I was struck by the presence in it of something that, for the lack of a better phrase, I have chosen to call, “run-on-rhyme”. It is the fusion of rhyme and run-on-lines. This too was getting into a number of my poems unconsciously.

Run-on-rhyme is what probably happens to someone (fond of the rhyme and chime or the distinct rhythm of verse) who is trying to suppress rhyme in his verse. Instead of coming at the end of a line the rhyme runs on to the middle of the next line. It seems to me that this takes away the negative aspects of rhyme and allows the lines to come nearer speech-rhythms. I will quote the last poem I wrote to illustrate its use. I wrote it on April 17, 2014 and the time taken to write it in, inclusive of the revision, was between seven to nine minutes.

Summer in Allahabad

Summer in these parts sears, scars and scares.

Outdoors no one dares, till the sun’s gone to bed,

We are nearly dead. We darken our homes.

During daytime no one ever roams; night becomes day.

At night people play. The one for nightly crime,

Needs to change his time. The streets burn in silence,

The taps run dry. Crows thirsty, beaks open and wide open eye

Search for rotting cucumbers the vendors discard.

Mornings are the saviours, with perfuming flowers.

Colours cry out loudly, flaming up forests

Bougainvillea trees dispel all others

And say, ‘only we.’

In my humble opinion, rhyme is an essential part of poetry unless it can be replaced with an impressive category of rhyme-less rhythm. Those who have fallen into the trap of believing, with the Moderns, that rhyme is unnecessary or even harmful forget that the Moderns were trying to paint a shattered universe; a world dilapidated by two world wars and a nihilistic world-view. Rhyme and rhythm indicate the presence of a more undisturbed and unbroken world in which the poet writes; perhaps a less self-conscious world as well. The music of the poem helps the poet to transcend the obstacle of the self. It is one of the agents of impersonality. Those who gave up rhyme in blind imitation of the Moderns little realized that in the process they were keeping back the wax and throwing away the honey of poetry.

Even before the Moderns poets have chosen to discard rhyme but that was only to use a more requisite substitute. Today poets are tending to forget that in a number of situations rhyme helps rather than hinders truly felt experience. Of course thousands of budding poets are using rhyme, unconscious of what the theories of poetry have projected, but they are doing that only because poetry is essentially co-existent with rhyme. Their lines have not been contaminated with preconceived notions of what is right and what is wrong in poetry. They are most of the time unaware of what the Moderns thought of rhyme. Some of the Moderns reserved rhyme merely for comic effect. There was the exceptional Modernist who did use rhyme in spite of everything. Perhaps for those who have read views freely expressed against rhyme, run-on-rhyme is the answer in a number of cases because it outwardly gives up rhyme while still retaining its use and essence.