National Poetry Day Reveals How Poetic Craft Built Plain English

National Poetry Day falls on the first Thursday of October, an annual campaign founded in 1994 by William Sieghart to get verse in front of people who might otherwise go a whole year without reading a poem. Three phrases now used in courtrooms, offices and pub arguments trace directly back to the craft the day exists to promote.

When rhyme lost its reason

The phrase rhyme nor reason is a straightforward complaint about bad poetry that got generalised into a complaint about everything else. It is first recorded around 1460, in John Russell’s The Boke of Nurture, in the form “ryme or reson”. By 1548, Nicolas Udall’s translation of Erasmus was using the negative version to describe something with no sense to it at all, writing that there was “nether ryme ne reason” in a piece of faulty logic. The image behind that line is a poem that scans and rhymes correctly but says nothing coherent, verse with the mechanics right and the meaning missing. Shakespeare fixed the modern wording in place. Comedy of Errors, from around 1590, gives the exact phrase “neither rhyme nor reason”, a line he liked well enough to reuse in As You Like It. Once Shakespeare had used it twice, the phrase had nothing left to prove.

Justice served in verse

Poetic justice sounds like it ought to be an old folk idea, something people always believed about stories. It is not. It has an author and a date. The English critic Thomas Rymer coined it in 1678, in an essay called The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d. Rymer was writing about tragedy specifically, and his complaint was that too much of it let virtuous characters suffer and villains go unpunished. He argued that a well-made play should reward good behaviour and punish bad, and gave that principle a name. The phrase outlived the specific argument. Rymer was making a case about how English tragedy ought to be written; what survives is a general expectation, applied now to court cases and sitcom endings alike, that wrongdoing should catch up with the wrongdoer.

Growing into poetic speech

Wax poetic hides an old verb that most speakers no longer use anywhere else. Wax once meant simply to grow or to become, and it was the ordinary word for that idea before grow began replacing it from the fifteenth century onward. The one place wax held its ground was the moon, which still waxes rather than grows. Everywhere else the word faded, except in a handful of set phrases that kept it alive by accident. Wax poetic is one of them, and it turns up in print later than either of the other two phrases here. The earliest known appearance is from 1872, in Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, some decades after the related wax eloquent had already established the pattern in the early nineteenth century.

Between them, the three phrases sketch three different jobs poetry has always done: getting the sound right without the sense, deciding who deserves what by the end of the story, and simply talking with more feeling than the occasion strictly requires. National Poetry Day celebrates the first use. English speakers, mostly without noticing, kept the other two in daily circulation long after the poems that produced them were forgotten.