“Idyll over the River”: On the Twinning of Valery Bryusov's Headless Sonnets with Dissonant Rhymes

V. Ya. Bryusov is rightfully considered a legislator and reformer of Silver Age poetry; its basic principles were outlined by him in Experiments on Meter and Rhythm, on Euphony and Consonance, on Stanza and Forms (1918). At about the same time, he wrote a mini-cycle consisting of two decasyllabic poemswith virtuoso dissonant rhymes: “In a quiet brilliance, the fishing line slumbers...” and “Magic is the whole world around...” Both share an identical rhyme scheme: (AbAbAbAbAb), without graphical division into potential strophes. Ambivalently, they can be described either as enlarged by two Sicilian verses (AbAbAbAb+Ab), or as headless sonnets with continuous rhyming (AbAb AbA bAb). Both possible interpretations are almost equally problematic. In the first case, the poet would certainly have found a special niche for them in the stanza, designating it with the appropriate term; in the second, given his adherence to exclusively classical sonnet forms (with the considered set of headless sonnets and 10 references to semistitches — half-sonnets — being unique exceptions), he could create an experimental precedent that was ahead of its time. The phonic structure also supports the second assumption: all ten rhyming pairs are perfectly organized dissonances, and the order of stressed vowels is consistently maintained in both cases: e-i-a-o-u, with the effect of doubling in each pair of even and odd lines.