Life & Wisdom Quote by Victor Hugo

Rhyme arrives here dressed like royalty and treated like a captor: an "enslaved queen" whose power is undeniable, even when it limits what a poet can do. Hugo is writing from inside the great 19th-century argument about what French poetry should be. In his century, rhyme was not just a stylistic choice; it was a social contract, a signal of legitimacy enforced by the Academy and by readers trained to hear polish as proof of seriousness. Calling it a queen flatters that tradition. Calling it enslaved hints at the paradox: rhyme rules, but it also has to be served, dragged into line, made to obey the poem's demands.

The phrase "supreme charm" acknowledges why poets keep returning to it. Rhyme is pleasure with a snap: it rewards the ear, it closes lines with a click that feels like certainty. Hugo understands that seduction can become dependency. Once you commit to rhyme, you risk letting sound dictate sense, choosing the obedient word over the truthful one. That is the subtext of "creator of our meter": rhyme doesn't merely decorate French verse; it organizes it, practically manufactures the poem's architecture.

Coming from Hugo, the statement reads less like conservative piety than a Romantic's double-edged homage. He helped expand what French verse could hold: slang, politics, the grotesque, the sublime. This line captures the tension at the heart of that project: to keep the magic of rhyme while refusing to let the magic set the limits.