OBSERVATIONS OF THE RHYME IN POLIZIANO'S POETRY

The present essay offers a study of the rhyme in the three poetic works of Politiano, Stanze, Rime and Fabula di Orfeo. It aims first of all to point out the incidence of the six rhyme categories in our texts, namely the ones defined respectively as consonant, vocalic, geminate, proparoxytone and oxytone rhymes, and those occurring in hiatus. Secondly, the research intends to draw a comparison between every single work and, on the one side, the poetic 'illustrious' tradition, on the other, the chivalric, bucolic and comic-realistic literature. Such a statistic and at the same time comparative method, when extended also to some aspects concerning the rhymes quality ( e.g. the frequency of 'easy' rhymes between identical grammatical suffixes or identical verb endings, or the incidence of rhymes considered 'difficult' because rare and phonetically rich), allows more importantly to enlighten the multifaceted, perhaps even antithetic stylistic profile of our three works. However, the belonging to one specific stylistic register ( either 'elevated' in the Stanze, or 'not elevated' in the Rime, or 'middle' for the fabula satyrica) is almost always univocal and clear, since the writer himself explicitly marks it. A huge amount of rhymes results in a mosaic of 'quotation pieces' which, although extremely rich and various, shows, in every single work, an uniform and coherent poetic background.