This is a sad tale of thwarted ambition, but it's true—well, sort of true. When I was a lad of thirteen years, I started to write poetry. At least, I considered it poetry. I am sure there are cynics out there who might mumble doggerel under their breath, but it is all a matter of opinion.
Over the next three or four years I poured out a steady stream of poems, and fragments of novels, epic poems (intended), plays, operas, and such. I was wondrously ambitious, although I admit most of those works were set aside after the first few pages. And when I say fragments, I really mean fragments. Tiny little bits of stuff.
But one thing I did was set the operas and sacred songs to music. That is, I wrote notes above the words that meant something to me back then. It must be understood that I couldn't write music then, and I can't write music now. But back then, I at least tried.
My sacred songs are what some might call hymns, but I don't like the word hymn because it comes from Polyhymnia. She was one of the nine muses of Greek myth. She was supposed to inspire religious music, so I suppose that made her a kind of goddess or something. Sometimes in old paintings she didn't wear enough clothes. But that was true of a lot of the ladies in these old paintings. This was before the days of Walmart and those other stores with inexpensive clothes, so I guess they couldn't afford them.
I don't want to complain, but none of these Muses ever saw fit to help me out a little. Anyway, I have a problem calling a sacred song a name that came from a Greek goddess. It just doesn't seem right.
Now the composer part
But like I mentioned, I wrote operas, or what would have been operas if I'd gone on for another two or three hundred pages, and actually had been able to write music. The sad thing is that was back in the 1950s and this is slightly later (by glacial time). The probability of me learning to write music really well, or even at all, seems remote. Unless I get hit by lightning. But I rather suspect that wouldn't work for me either.
What I need is to meet a composer, who knows all about writing music, and knows what all 
these funny things were that Beethoven scratched all over his manuscripts. I wonder if he was just doodling.
But the past is past, more-or-less, so let me just mention what a few of my more recent librettos (libretti?) are about.
Esther, the Queen
It is the story of Esther from the Bible book of the same name, and yes it has been done before, but hasn't everything. She's the girl that was taken from her older cousin to be prepared to marry the ruler of the Persian Empire. They actually took a whole bunch of girls. I wonder how they felt and what happened to the rejects. This is a respectful and serious text. There was a really bad guy who was descended from people who hated the Jews, and he tried to kill them all, but was thwarted by the intervention of Queen Esther.
Dragon Tower
This is intended to be a rock opera, although it may use other kinds of music. In a town in the Old West, a young sojourner who turns up somewhat mysteriously, is urged by the female protagonist to invoke rain for the drought-stricken town. The town leaders promise to pay him, but after the town has received the needed rain, they reneged, mocking the idea that he could have brought the rain. So the rain returns as a downpour that seems without end. This is actually based on a true story that occurred in California in the early 1900s, and there are photographs to prove the disaster it turned out to be.
The Snake Handlers
When her devout father suddenly dies, a teenage girl is sent to live with her only relatives whom her father had always warned her against. They belong to a snake handling cult who base their beliefs and practices on a skewered version of Mark 16. She becomes very close to the girl who is her younger cousin. At first, her relatives are conciliatory, but as time passes they pressure her more and more to adopt their ways, which she had been taught by her father were demonic rites. It all comes to a head, at a wild gathering where her young cousin dies of snakebite. The music is intended to be thematic, with the protagonist and her late father being represented by mountain folk-style songs, and the snake handling cult by expressionistic music.
Legend of the Scots
This is a planned cycle of operas based upon the legendary history of the Scots. To some extent it follows Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) by George Buchanan as well as the ancient manuscripts of John of Fordun and Hector Boece. But there are some important differences.
In Edinburgh castle there sits today the Coronation Stone, usually called the Stone of Scone (pronounced skoon), the Stone of Destiny, or the Lia Fail, which legend has it was brought to Scotland from Tara in Ireland after the year A.D. 500. The Stone of Scone is a simple stone that is said to be the stone upon which Jacob rested his head at Bethel. There is a stone in Tara today, but it is a blatantly phallic image and does not match the stone in the Bible account of Jacob. The account of Jacob and the stone is found at Genesis 28:10-22. According to the legend, the Scots are descended from Jacob or Israel. I have put information about the legend on a separate page. It can be found here.
Some time back, while taking an English class at the local college, the class was introduced to an older man who held an enormous grudge against a President who had died some forty years previously. He also held an enormous dislike of rhymed poetry. Did I mention that he was head of the local poetry society? He was not alone in his opinions as some poetry journals refuse to publish rhymed poetry. Why? They think they know, but they don't. But I who can see into the hearts and souls of men do know why. Okay, I can't really see into your heart and soul, but it sounds good, and anyway, if I could, do you think I would tell you?
The Real Reason Some Poets Don't Like to Rhyme
The Scottish poet James Hogg (1770-1835) had a peculiar start to his career in writing poetry. At the age of five or six he had just started school when his father went bankrupt, and the wee laddie was put out to work herding sheep. It was not a dangerous job since there were no dangerous wild animals in Scotland, but it was a lonely job since he only saw another human every few days when they brought him his food. While he has been called illiterate, he likely knew his alphabet well, and could read letters from his family.
Back where he lived, the shepherd was the title of the person in charge of all the sheep on the farm. When Hogg was in his late teens he was promoted to the position of shepherd and thus worked in the farm owner's house, where there was a decent library that he was allowed to use.
The library had books of poetry, but when he attempted to read them he had a problem. Poetry was strange to him and didn't make sense. That might seem peculiar to us because few people realize that poetry is an acquired taste and reading it is an acquired ability. We might compare it to music. Different cultures have different sorts of music. A person from the Middle East might love one sort of music, and someone from Appalachia a totally different sort, and so it is around the world. While there are some other factors, these likes and dislikes show that the liking for various kinds of music comes from what we have grown up with. Our ear, or in reality our brain, has been trained to like those often drastically different sorts of music.
So too with poetry which unlike prose usually has rhythm and cadence, and structure that differs from common prose. That can include rhyme. Until his late teens, James Hogg had never encountered poetry, at least not to any degree, so it sounded strange to him and was not pleasing. Today, many have grown up, like Hogg, unexposed to much in the way of rhymed poetry. Their ears are not attuned to it. Even its rhythms are strange to them. Their ears—in fact, their brain is not wired for traditional poetry, so they are genuinely uncomfortable with it, not realizing why, although they do encounter it from time to time.
There is another problem that they don't realize. It is very difficult to write good rhymed poetry. Quite a few years back, I took a writing course at NPC with a very good teacher. She had assigned us to write poetry, so I composed six poems and wrote them in free, modern style verse. Then I rewrote them in rhyme, so each one had a free verse version and a version in rhyme. She read some to the class, and then said to them, "Don't you think the unrhymed poems were better."
I don't think she realized the significance of that comment. Of course, the free verse poems were better, but not because free verse poems are better than rhymed poems but because it takes greater skill to write a good poem in rhyme.
It is similar to writing good song lyrics, and then adding music. Writing lyrics is a skill and so is writing good music. To write a free verse poem, what they once called vers libre, takes skill as a poet, and to write it in good rhyme takes talent and skill as a rhyme-spinner. While most everyone can come up with ryhmes, they cannot do it well. So the true reason most poets do not write in rhyme is because they cannot, or more sadly, they will not put forth the effort. Rhymes introduce a pattern of sound into a poem that is not only harmonious, but introduces a form of harmonics that scares them away.
One famous poet, whose poems oddly are not my favorites, but never-the-less demonstrate a remarkable skill, was William Wordsmith. While his poetry doesn't attract me a great deal, yet I fully acknowledge his genius. He did two things in his poems. He made the words sound as natural as everyday conversation, and totally unforced or manipulated, and his rhymes blended with the words in a beautiful and natural way. Pause to take a close look, and examine, his famous poem "Daffodils."
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
It is almost as if you were with him and his sister on that spring evening in 1802 up in the lake district of England. But what he did in that poem is much, much more difficult than it seems. So if you want to be a poet, start off with the same type of poems that others write; poems that you like and feel are good, and when you are convinced you have mastered the style, or when you think that you have at least got a good grip on what is involved, try writing a poem with rhyme, not just any rhyme, but those that add that magical sound that carries your poem to a higher and more splendored height. Your rhymes will oil your lines with the mystical balsam that blends what you write into something truly great. Others will only write ordinary poetry.
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