disproportioning

Updated: August 23, 2026

If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the preceding stanza?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria