Verse Vice

Deep in the grickle grass some people say

if you look deep enough you can still see today

where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could

before somebody lifted the Lorax away.

          -The Lorax, Dr. Seuss

Back before having children, I had a yawning apathy towards verse. My highschool English experience to this day seems like it was aimed to kill my love of reading. But I hesitate to blame school for my dislike of verse. No, the problem with verse is that it is archaic, and archaic literature does so very little for me.

But when I cracked open Dr. Seuss for my son, I was won over by the perfect beauty of anapestic tetrameter! For the first time in my adult life I experienced modern English being used in verse in the setting that verse was made for: performance. Verse has to be spoken aloud to be properly appreciated. Spoken aloud, verse makes English so much more accessible that a three-year-old can memorize great swathes of text that would otherwise be far out of his reading level.

At this point I have to restrain myself, because I am like a convert to a religion: I have this desire to grab people and scream into their faces that I HAVE THE TRUTH ABOUT VERSE! No, the rhyming isn't the important part – not by a long shot! Any schmuck can pick up a rhyming dictionary. It's the rhythm that makes or breaks verse.

Verse meant to be read to children must be almost perfectly even and repetitive in its rhythm in order to be readable on the first try. If the rhythm is sloppy, the reader goes tripping and fumbling and stumbling over the words. By comparison, the “verse” of music can throw in extra beats or leave them out willy nilly because music, generally, is practiced to perfection before being performed. But the parent reading to their child is putting on a performance with no rehearsal.

You know a line of verse has failed when you have to go back to read it out loud a second time. A children's book that gets butchered on a first reading would have been better off written in prose.