Mirrored Rhyme in ACIM – Courtesy of Lee Flynn
Primer
By Doug Thompson
As most everyone knows, ACIM was not delivered in writing, it was delivered in speech, and was later written down. Spoken language is usually subtly different than written language, and ACIM is no exception. The ear can often sense elements of this material which are not at all visible to the eye when scanning the printed words on a page.
While the basic pattern of Iambic Pentameter was noticed quite early in ACIM’s history, Lee Flynn has recently detected other aural patterns in the ACIM material. This little primer is an attempt to explain what he’s found and the notation he’s developed to describe it.
Look at the next oddly typed sentence from chapter 31:
Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn
presented once again, so where you made
a faulty choice before you now can make
a better one, and thus escape all pain
which what you chose before has brought to you.
What are we looking at? Each unique stressed vowel sound is assigned a unique color and/or font. We’ll get to why in a moment. To listen to what we’re talking about, double click the play button.
The basic “blank verse” poetry in much of ACIM was discovered by Thetford and Shucman, the original Scribes, and is mostly Iambic Pentameter with some Iambic Tetrameter. The above two lines are Iambic Pentameter. That means there are ten beats (syllables) per line, alternating between stressed and unstressed beats. In some cases the “stress” may be debatable or arbitrary since not all words have “natural” stresses. Most one syllable words can be either stressed or unstressed, but all “natural stresses” must fall in the right place for it to be Iambic. For instance, in the word “forgiving” the middle syllable is always stressed when spoken. Should the stress fall on a different syllable, this would not be Iambic Pentamter.
Some time ago Lee Flynn was looking at these vowel configurations and noticed some surprising patterns. This little web page is an attempt to show you the kind of patterns he found and explain them a bit. When we were proofreading and copy-editing the HLC manuscript, we often found surprising differences between versions which could be explained as typos, but also might have been corrections by the scribes. In a number of cases doing the “poetry analysis” showed that in one variant there was a poetry pattern and in other variants there was not. Generally we felt that a change by the scribes which disrupted a previous poetic pattern was likely a typing error while one that resulted in a poetry pattern where none had previously been present was probably a correction initiated by the Author. This was never the only evidence we considered but was, in a few cases, decisive in our evaluation of what was the most likely original reading. Mostly it confirmed what other evidence was suggesting.
The color coding assigns a specific colour and/or font to
each unique vowel sound so that we can SEE on the page what normally can only
be HEARD by the ear. It is then that the patterns shown below start to
appear in many places in ACIM.
First let’s take our example sentence and render it in IP:
Here’s the sentence as it appears in the Urtext manuscript in chapter 31 …
“Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you.”
Now let’s set that in basic IP, ten beats per line.
Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn
presented once again, so where you made
a faulty choice before you now can make
a better one, and thus escape all pain
which what you chose before has brought to you.
The next step is to mark the Iambs, or stresses.
Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn
presented once again, so where you made
a faulty choice before you now can make
a better one, and thus escape all pain
which what you chose before has brought to you.
And now we mark all similar stressed vowel sounds with a unique color:
Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn
presented once again, so where you made
a faulty choice before you now can make
a better one, and thus escape all pain
which what you chose before has brought to you.
In some cases words can be spoken as one or two syllables. “Trials” for instance can be spoken “try-alls” with two, or just as a single syllable, rather like TR + aisle with the “ia” syllable sound being merged into a single beat as with the word “aisle” or “isle” or even I’ll, which all have the same vowel sound. I know, English spelling is exceptionally weird.
The color coding works like this: each coloured syllable is an emphasized one, each grey syllable is not. Each color represents one particular vowel sound. Of course the spelling in English is erratic, the same sound can be spelled several different ways. What’s key here is the actual sound. Thus “are” and “faul” in “faulty” rhyme.
Now let’s listen to that … start the audio and scroll up to the top
It is our belief that this pattern of mirrored rhyme which shows up frequently in ACIM is quite unique to ACIM, and is not a pattern known elsewhere in English literature. We can’t be entirely sure of that since so far as we know no one has ever looked for it in any other work of literature!