zodiac7 Oct 2005

Where I live, the people who bother to visit think the Muslim call to prayer is the most beautiful haunting thing ever. This is at least half because it's not usually in any musical key known to the West and because the desert gives it odd echoey effects. The other half is that it rhymes. If they knew the muezzin was just singing "I believe there's no god but God, I believe Mohammed's the prophet of God, hurry up to prayer, hurry up to the harvest, no god but God," they probably wouldn't think it's nearly as tragic and emotive. As it is, they just have a dim awareness of rhyme, especially the part that actually goes "la ilah ila allah". There's a quality to good rhyme beyond the emotive power of words themselves. cf Robert Frost.

In short, you should love rhyme for exactly the reason that you hate it.