Can you relate the imperfect rhyme in the last two lines in whoso list to hunt to the status of the woman in the same poem?

Answer 1

Before you interpret the meaning of the 'imperfect rime' in the closing couplet of 'Whoso list ...', you need to establish that there is an imperfect rime.

Up until the 1380's both rime and alliteration were common structuring devices in English poetry. Looking at major poems of the late Fourteenth Century:- Piers Plowman and the poems of the Perle manuscript use alliteration for the structure; but Chaucer and Gower (in their English poems) use rime.

But Chaucer and Gower were imitating their rime from French models, and according to French rules [served / deserved] is a correct rime (it is called a 'rime riche').

Under modern rules of English riming [served / deserved] is a distressed rime, but modern rules seem to become universally observed around the time of Edmund Spenser - a full generation after Thomas Wyatt senior.

If your teacher knows something that no other English scholar is aware of (that 'served / deserved' would have been noticed as a defective rime inthe 1540's) then this is a valid question.

Otherwise: this is a question that cannot be answered.

Answer 2

In "Whoso List to Hunt," the imperfect rhyme in the last two lines creates a sense of tension or disharmony, reflecting the speaker's struggle to possess the unattainable deer, symbolizing the woman. This imperfection mirrors the woman's constrained status, being hunted and desired by men like a wild animal, unable to fully control her fate. The imperfect rhyme underscores the theme of how power dynamics can limit a woman's agency in a patriarchal society.