Rhyme alternance
Reimalternanz ( French alternance of rimes "Reim change") referred to in the Verslehre a form of alternation , in the in which verses a verse the rhyme sex changes regularly, so the male rhyme follows a female and vice versa.
Regular alternation of male and female rhymes has been to be found more frequently in French poetry since the end of the Middle Ages and was then made by Pierre de Ronsard a guiding principle of his poetic practice and also decreed as a poetic regulation in Art poétique françois (1565). The German poets and poets have followed his example since Opitz , while in English because of the predominance, in Italian and Spanish because of the rarity of end-stressed words, the French custom has not prevailed.
From the 20th century onwards, rhyming alternation was paid much less attention to in German poetry and appears mainly in form-oriented poets such as RA Schröder and Carossa , but also in Benn and Brecht , especially in cross- rhymed quatrains and in sonnets , with Schlegel and Goethe used female rhymes throughout, following the Italian model. Nevertheless, there is a nice example in Goethe in the verse form of the cross- rhymed quatrain with Trochaic quatrains and rhyme alternanz, which is called the Column Catastrophe , after the verse form of the cross- rhymed quatrain, which is used repeatedly in the book Suleika of the West-Eastern Divan . Here Hatem begins his courtship for Suleika with the verses:
Opportunity does not make thieves,
you are the greatest thief yourself;
Because she stole the rest of the love that
stayed in my heart.
Here the rhymes of the second and fourth stanzas are masculine and are created by shortening the feminine rhyme (thief → thief; love → [b] dear).
literature
- Otto Knörrich: Lexicon of lyrical forms (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 479). 2nd, revised edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-520-47902-8 , p. 9.