Rymbel?WHAT IS A RYMBEL?WITH FOUR REMARKABLE EXAMPLES BY OLIVER HERFORD, CHARLES HANSON TOWNE, AND THEODOSIA GARRISON
Rymbel?
WITH FOUR REMARKABLE EXAMPLES BY OLIVER HERFORD, CHARLES HANSON TOWNE, AND THEODOSIA GARRISON
The Rymbel is an interesting and newly discovered verse family. It consists of either ten, twenty, or thirty lines, and is sometimes spoken of, not as a rymbel, but as a “tent-twent-thirt.” The first noteworthy example of it in our literature is Mr. Herford’s interesting twent which, with its fine flux of cerebral invention, is printed below.
The Rymbel family is descended from many rhyming ancestors. Its father was a Jingle, its mother a Rondel. The result of this marriage was a feeble-minded daughter. Symbol by name, and four “wanting” sons, Ramble (the eldest), Rondeau and Rhyme (the twins), and Jumble, the baby. They only express themselves in verse, and are usually spoken of as “the eccentric Rymbels.” Deafness is a Rymbel family characteristic.
Whenever the father (who is invariably the family pioneer in matters poetical) is seized by an uncontrollable afflatus, he starts out bravely enough, but usually attenuates at the fifth line of the first stanza. Owing to the deafness of his wife and little ones he shouts this last line in a frantic crescendo, at which point his voice and his intellect give up the unequal contest, and his wife, seizing on the last word as her cue, pursues the theme spontaneously—and in her own misguided way.
The poetical relay proceeds in this manner until the tenth, twentieth, or—in very rare cases—the thirtieth line has been reached. In Mr. Herford’s splendid example of rymbelican verse, for instance, the father’s brain ceased to “mote” after the fifth line, but the crescendoed concept “fall” was bravely but disastrously propulsed into the second stanza by Mrs. Rymbel, who, in turn, gave up the struggle and abandoned the entire enterprise to the twins.
R. Otway Prendergast.
Editor of Arch. Vulg. and Obs. Words in Prendergast’s “Rhyming Rumbels” (Oxford Press—out of print), author of “Wild Verses I Have Met” and “The Stanza in a Savage State.” Brentanos; each, $1.65 net.
Editor of Arch. Vulg. and Obs. Words in Prendergast’s “Rhyming Rumbels” (Oxford Press—out of print), author of “Wild Verses I Have Met” and “The Stanza in a Savage State.” Brentanos; each, $1.65 net.