The Flesh and the Spirit

The rhymes are mostly perfect rhymes, in which end vowels and consonants are identical: “rear” and “sphere” (Lines 7 and 8); “head” and “led” (Lines 64 and 65); and “gold” and “hold” (Lines 79 and 80). There are also some near rhymes or off rhymes, in which the words are similar but do not rhyme exactly (although some of what we now consider near-rhymes would have been perfect rhymes given 17th-century pronunciation). Examples include “stood” and “flood” (Lines 1 and 2), “on” and “come” (Lines 3 and 4), “made” and “said” (Lines 51 and 52), and “strong” and “stone” (Lines 87-88). “Stood” and “flood” can also be understood as an eye rhyme, in which two words look as if they rhyme because of a similarity in spelling, but are in fact pronounced differently.

A caesura is a pause within a line of poetry. It is usually marked by a punctuation mark of some kind—in this poem, a comma or a question mark. A caesura helps to create variety in the rhythm, since it slows the line down, or mark off a particular phrase or clause: “Dost honour like? Acquire the same” (Line 16). In the following couplet, both lines contain caesuras: “Then let not go, what thou may’st find / For things unknown, only in mind” (Lines 35-36). In these three examples, the caesura occurs exactly in the middle of the line. This is known as a medial caesura. Of the 20 lines in this poem that contain caesuras, the majority are medial caesuras. Caesuras that occur near the beginning of the line are called initial caesuras (“Come, come, I’ll show unto thy sense” [Line 21]), and those that occur near the end of the line are terminal caesuras.