So far as the vital necessities of the popular song go, rhymes may occur regularly or irregularly, with fine effect in either instance, and the rhymes may be precise or not.  To rhyme moon with June is not unforgivable.  The success of a popular song depends on entirely different bases.  Nevertheless, a finely turned bit of rhyming harmony may strike the ear and stand out from its fellows like a lovely symphony of fancy.  If you have given any attention to this point of rhyming you can recall many instances of just what I mean.

5.  Strive for Regular and Precise Rhyming—­If Fitting

If you can be regular and if you can be precise in the use of rhymes in your song-poem, be regular and be precise.  Don’t be irregular and slovenly just because others have been and succeeded.  You will not succeed if you build your lyrics on the faults and not on the virtues of others.  The song-poem that gleams like a flawless gem will have a wider and more lasting success—­all other things being equal.

On the other hand, it is absolutely fatal to strive for regularity and precision, and thereby lose expression.  If you have to choose, choose irregularity and faulty rhymes.  This is an important bit of advice, for a song-poem is not criticized for its regularity and precision—­it is either taken to heart and loved in spite of its defects, or is forgotten as valueless.  As Winifred Black wrote of her child, “I love her not for her virtues, but oh, for the endearing little faults that make her what she is.”

6.  Hints On Lyric Measures

Reference to the lyrics already instanced will show you that they are written in various measures.  And while it is foreign to my purpose to discuss such purely technical points of poetry, [1] permit me to direct your attention to a few points of song measure.

[1] The Art of Versification, by J. Berg Esenwein and Mary Eleanor Roberts—­one of the volumes in “The Writer’s Library”—­covers this subject with a thoroughness it would be useless for me to attempt.  Therefore if you wish to take this subject up more in detail, I refer you to this excellent book.

An individual poetic measure is attained by the use of metre in a certain distinct way.  Because the normal combinations of the emphatic and the unemphatic syllables of the English language are but five, there are only five different poetic measures.  Let us now see how an investigation of the bafflingly unexact measures of our examples will yield—­even though their irregular natures will not permit of precise poetic instances—­the few helpful hints we require.

(a) The first measure—­called by students of poetry the trochaic measure—­is founded on the use of a long or emphatic syllable followed by a short or unemphatic syllable, It has a light, tripping movement, therefore it is peculiarly fitted for the expression of lively subjects.  One of our examples shows this rather clearly: