When Jeff Bezos defended major layoffs at The Washington Post last week, he reached for poetry. Pressed on why he would not simply subsidise the paper, he argued payment was a “signal” of relevance: “If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product […] It would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy.”

The analogy was mocked almost immediately. A former Washington Post literary critic imagined Poetry magazine rejecting TS Eliot’s The Waste Land for insufficient rhyme. Others responded in the form the occasion seemed to invite:

“Roses are red
Violets are blue
Bezos sucks
And his takes do too.”

But the mockery missed the more interesting point. Bezos was not really talking about rhyme. He was talking about constraint: the idea that without some external pressure – rhyme in poetry, profitability in journalism – the work becomes too easy, too loose, too self-satisfied.

Rhyme is one of the most recognisable features of English verse. It gives pleasure because it returns: a sound goes out and comes back altered. Because it is so easy to hear, rhyme can look like proof of effort. We hear the rule. We hear the poem obeying it. That is exactly why it becomes such a tempting stand-in for seriousness.

In Middle English, “rime” could mean not only...

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