“Sin, Men!” A Look at Holorimes
Jean Goudezki
If you’ve mastered the sonnet and want to step up your poetic game, it might be time to try a holorime. While the holorime dates back centuries, it was popularized as a poetic form by Jean Goudezki in his 1892 piece, ‘Invitation’. The structure is simple: a couplet in which each line is composed of homophonic words, so that they sound exactly the same when read aloud but have entirely different meanings.
My favorite (and one of the most famous) is by the French poet and humorist Alphonse Allais—
Par les bois du djinn, où s'entasse de l'effroi,
Parle et bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid.
[In the woods of the djinn, where fear abounds,
Talk and drink gin, or a hundred cups of cold milk.]
Not only does it work as a flawless holorime, but it also creates an entire narrative—albeit, a pretty strange one. And, as a language, French happens to be particularly well-suited to this kind of poetic wordplay, with its fiendish number of homophones. Similarly, across the globe, the intricacies of Japanese pronunciation has led to the analogous ‘ginatayomi’, where a sentence is given two different meanings, depending on what ‘breaks’ the speaker puts between their words.
An oft-quoted example of a ginatayomi phrase, origin unknown, is translated as—
Have you ever made bread? / Have you ever eaten underpants?
In contrast, holorimes written in English are comparatively rare, the most well-known example having been penned by British humorist Miles Kingston. The poem, entitled "A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity", runs like this—
In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?
Inertia, hilarious, accrues, helas!
Miles Kington, photo by Bob Collins
Unfortunately, not only is this fairly nonsensical, but it also only counts as a true holorime if you happen to read it aloud in the particular regional accent which can blur ‘hill areas’ into ‘hilarious’. And even Kingston himself appears to acknowledge the challenges of the poetic structure he’s attempting to work with; in a 2003 article published in the Independent (‘From bad to verse, via pangrams and holorimes’), he notes that he’s been trying ever since to produce a second offering and challenges the reader to do better.
It’s not as easy as it looks. Having tried for approximately three days to write one myself, the best that I’ve been able to come up with is this far-from-coherent couplet—
The lady likes eyes (in men).
The ladylike sighs! Sin, men!
I don’t think mine is significantly worse than Kingston’s, but I’m definitely not about to challenge him for the title of Best English Holorime, either. Still, I think there’s a lot to be appreciated about this poetic form, even if it’s possible that the definitive masterpiece has yet to be written. Why not write it yourself? What better way to leave your mark in history? After all, a holorime is an invigorating challenge for people who like to tinker with words, who drift off to sleep counting syllables instead of sheep—and who don’t mind giving themselves a bit of a headache.