Asnyk’s notebook of rhymes

Abstract

The material basis for the article was Adam Asnyk’s notebook, which is presently owned by The Jagiellonian Library in Kraków (Manuscript Archive, 7185I, no. 16261). The notebook contains 56 pages handwritten by Asnyk on both sides of a sheet. Asnyk wrote down the words which rhymed. He made use of the notebook when he needed set rhymes as a tool while composing poems. The list of these words demonstrates a high frequency of words borrowed from Latin, Greek, and French. They apply to abstract nouns, antiquity, literary classics, as well as proper nouns related to world geography and history. All indicates the intellectual and intelligentsia model of his poetry. The sets of words often included associations which emphasised Asnyk’s irony towards Romanticism. The rhymes were not accidental sets of words phonetically similar but instead they indicated grammatical and semantic fields. The analysis of Asnyk’s notebook enabled the following conclusions: 1) in spite of some scholars’ opinions, in his rhymes Asnyk used noninflectional grammatical forms (infinitives, adverbs); and 2) partial rhyme in Polish poetry had appeared earlier than it was commonly assumed (the end of the 19th century).