Rhyme and Remembering

So strong is the association between rhyme and poetry that we often conflate the two. Yet rhyme has other applications, particularly in aiding memory. Children first learn their ABCs via a nursery rhyme, while many mnemonics (including those employed by medical students) rhyme. In the aptly titled “Memorial Day,” rhyme serves in both these capacities, as lyrical organizer of language and portal to remembering. The end-rhymes of the second and fourth lines of each stanza first become touchstones for the speaker in recalling vivid details about a dear patient who has died. As the quatrains progress, we learn that medical error may have contributed to her death. Notably, the speaker has dubiously preserved her “Expired” medical chart in which she is merely documented, while she is more properly memorialized in rhymed verse. The careful deployment of rhyme thus ironically comes to signal respect for rules in the face of having strained them: “…into light” is rhymed with “wrong and right” and “…re-live the dying” with “keep trying,” each pair expressing regret for whatever clinical misstep occurred as well as ethical misgivings for saving the chart as a memento of her, while their sonic sureness, both pleasing and earnest, casts a spell that seems to reanimate the deceased while restoring order to what has gone awry. Ultimately, as “something/there is in a presence…a thing of substance/that helps us to return” echoes solemnly throughout the poem, we too hope healing is yet possible through resonant rhymes and reverent remembrance.