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Okay, this isn't about the trouble with Harry; it's about the trouble with rhyming. Maybe you don't see the connection, but I do, and I'll come to it. That's because I'm strange. All poets are strange. I won't even qualify that statement. Yes, I will. (I change my mind faster than I can speak it, too.)
All poets who speak in meter and think in rhyme, and insist upon rhyming all their poetry (like I do), when educated elitists (who I have no use for) have been trying to convince us for decades that "good" poetry should no longer rhyme, .... are strange. Nobody ever told Byron, Keats and Shelley that. Nobody would have dared say such a thing to Kipling, Frost or Whitman. And Shakespeare must be rolling in whoever's grave he's in. Who decided that, I'd like to know? Modern "poets", who are too lazy to do much but write short lines with a lot of bad words in them for therapy or shock value, that's who.
Which brings me back to Harry.
It's long been a bone of contention among poets that nothing rhymes with "orange". Well, so what? How many times might one need to use the word "orange" in a poem, anyway? For that matter, not many words rhyme with "apple", either. Who cares? Be creative. If you want food in a poem, write about orange and porringe. Study Ogden Nash.
What gripes me are the several words that are really necessary in poems, which have pitifully few - and stupid - rhymes. It leaves me sputtering in frustration when I want to use "myself", for example. The only rhyme I know is "shelf". It's a bit hard to depart from your introspection in the next line to get "shelf" in there.
"Lives" is another one, long I as in "the lives we live." Live, forgive me, is okay. Lives also forgives; it even occasionally seives. "Lives", long I, gets you "wives or "strives" as "life" is rife with "wife" and "strife". "Strife" is sometimes useable, if one has the kind of life that includes it. I sure do. But I somehow rarely need the word "wife" . One also "drives", of course, in multiple lives, long I, but I do little of that even in this one. Try putting "drives" at the end of a line. "Drives" what?
Which brings me back to Harry.
Harry, while I'm back, has to be somebody of course. A man, a cat, somebody. I once wrote a poem that absolutely had to have a rhyme for a somebody - "calico". (No, not fabric of different colors, a cat of different colors.) Try it. I dare you. I did it, but I'm not going to tell you what I used. It made sense, too. It had five syllables and was a genuine, correctly pronounced word for which even the connotation worked. Took me about six months. No, I'm not going to tell, unless it's your 95th birthday and you ask me sweetly from your wheelchair.
That very sort of problem leaves me three choices: One, leave the unfinished poem laying around for years in hopes somebody will invent a new word. I didn't like that one. Two, invent a new word myself for which the meaning will be apparent and not cause the reader to say "boy, that was a stretch." Three, mangle an old word to get a good rhyme. I usually go with Three. I love to mangle words. Mangled, yes. Rhymes with strangled.
Which brings me back to Harry again.
There was a movie, yea, many years ago, called The Trouble With Harry. Alfred Hitchcock made it. Shirley MacLaine was in it, and she was 19. (Frightening, isn't it?) I was about that age when I saw it in what we called a movie theater in those days. I don't know what they call them now, as I haven't gone to a whatever to see a new movie since 1982. I think Yentl was the last one I saw. Loved it. It rhymes with lentil, rental, any number of things. Some proper names make for wonderful rhymes.
Harry is one of those. Think about it. Start with the alphabet and keep going. Airy, berry, carry, dairy, estuary, fairy, etc. See what I mean? Motherlode.
There was also an old song called "I'm Just Wild About Harry" - maybe that was before your time. It was almost before mine. Then there was a song in the movie, "Calamity Jane" in the 50's - yes, song + movie = Musical. Something they had back in the days of theaters. The song was "It's Harry I'm Planning to Marry". I think. I was, of course, extemely young. It was the song Not sung by Doris Day. She was planning to marry Bill.
Harry seems to be an old-fashioned name these days. Too bad. It's a great name. What poems I could write, if I only knew somebody named Harry.
That's the trouble with it, I guess.
Thanks for reading.