The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  Jan Schreiber in a review of Timothy Steele’s Missing Measures, says this of modern verse:

  The writing of poetry has been made laughably easy. There are no technical constraints. Knowledge of the tradition is not necessary, nor is a desire to communicate, this having been supplanted in many practitioners by the more urgent desire to express themselves. Even sophistication in the manipulation of syntax is not sought. Poetry, it seems, need no longer be at least as well written as prose.

  Personally, I find writing without form, metre or rhyme not ‘laughably easy’ but fantastically difficult. If you can do it, good luck to you and farewell, this book is not for you: but a word of warning from W. H. Auden before you go.

  The poet who writes ‘free’ verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor – dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

  I cannot teach you how to be a great poet or even a good one. Dammit, I can’t teach myself that. But I can show you how to have fun with the modes and forms of poetry as they have developed over the years. By the time you have read this book you will be able to write a Petrarchan sonnet, a Sapphic Ode, a ballade, a villanelle and a Spenserian stanza, among many other weird and delightful forms; you will be confident with metre, rhyme and much else besides. Whether you choose to write on the stupidity of advertising, the curve of your true love’s buttocks, the folly of war or the irritation of not being able to open a pickle jar is unimportant. I will give you the tools, you can finish the job. And once you have got the hang of the forms, you can devise your own. The Robertsonian Sonnet. The Jonesian Ode. The Millerian Stanza.

  This is not an academic book. It is unlikely to become part of the core curriculum. It may help you with your English exams because it will certainly allow you to be a smart-arse in Practical Criticism papers (if such things still exist) and demonstrate that you know a trochee from a dactyl, a terza from an ottava rima and assonance from enjambment, in which case I am happy to be of service. It is over a quarter of a century since I did any teaching and I have no idea if such knowledge is considered good or useless these days, for all I know it will count against you.

  I have written this book because over the past thirty-five years I have derived enormous private pleasure from writing poetry and like anyone with a passion I am keen to share it. You will be relieved to hear that I will not be burdening you with any of my actual poems (except sample verse specifically designed to help clarify form and metre): I do not write poetry for publication, I write it for the same reason that, according to Wilde, one should write a diary, to have something sensational to read on the train. And as a way of speaking to myself. But most importantly of all for pleasure.

  This is not the only work on prosody (the art of versification) ever published in English, but it is the one that I should like to have been available to me many years ago. It is technical, yes, inasmuch as it investigates technique, but I hope that does not make it dry, obscure or difficult – after all, ‘technique’ is just the Greek for ‘art’. I have tried to make everything approachable without being loopily matey or absurdly simplistic.

  I certainly do not attempt in this book to pick up where those poor teachers left off and instruct you in poetry appreciation. I suspect, however, that once you have started writing a poem of any real shape you will find yourself admiring and appreciating other poets’ work a great deal more. If you have never picked up a golf club you will never really know just how remarkable Ernie Els is (substitute tennis racket for Roger Federer, frying pan for Gordon Ramsay, piano for Jools Holland and so on).

  But maybe you are too old a dog to learn new tricks? Maybe you have missed the bus? That’s hooey. Thomas Hardy (a finer poet than he was a novelist in my view) did not start publishing verse till he was nearly sixty.

  Every child is musical. Unfortunately this natural gift is squelched before it has time to develop. From all my life experience I remember being laughed at because my voice and the words I sang didn’t please someone. My second grade teacher, Miss Stone would not let me sing with the rest of the class because she judged my voice as not musical and she said I threw the class off key. I believed her which led to the blockage of my appreciation of music and blocked my ability to write poetry. Fortunately at the age of 57 I had a significant emotional event which unblocked my ability to compose poetry which many people believe has lyrical qualities.

  So writes one Sidney Madwed. Mr Madwed may not be Thomas Campion or Cole Porter, but he believes that an understanding of prosody has set him free and now clearly has a whale of a time writing his lyrics and verses. I hope reading this book will take the place for you of a ‘significant emotional event’ and awaken the poet that has always lain dormant within.

  It is never too late. We are all opsimaths.

  Opsimath, noun: one who learns late in life.

  Let us go forward together now, both opsimathically and optimistically. Nothing can hold us back. The ode beckons.

  How to Read this Book

  THERE IS no getting away from it: in about five minutes’ time, if you keep reading at a steady rate, you will start to find yourself, slowly at first and then with gathering speed and violence, under bombardment from technical words, many of them Greek in origin and many of them perhaps unfamiliar to you. I cannot predict how you will react to this. You might rub your hands in glee, you might throw them up in whatever is the opposite of glee, you might bunch them into an angry fist or use them to hurl the book as far away from you as possible.

  It is important for you to realise now, at this initial stage, that – as I mentioned earlier – most activities worth pursuing come with their own jargon, their private language and technical vocabulary. In music you would be learning about fifths and relative majors, in yachting it would be boom-spankers, tacking into the wind and spinnakers. I could attempt to ‘translate’ words like iamb and caesura into everyday English, but frankly that would be patronising and silly. It would also be very confusing when, as may well happen, you turn to other books on poetry for further elucidation.

  So please, DO NOT BE AFRAID. I have taken every effort to try to make your initiation into the world of prosody as straightforward, logical and enjoyable as possible. No art worth the striving after is without its complexities, but if you find yourself confused, if words and concepts start to swim meaninglessly in front of you, do not panic. So long as you obey the three golden rules below, nothing can go wrong. You will grow in poetic power and confidence at a splendid rate. You are not expected to remember every metrical device or every rhyme scheme: I have included a glossary at the back. Just about every unusual and technical word I use is there, so if in doubt flip to the back where you should find an explanation given by definition and/or example.

  If you already know, or believe you know, a fair amount about prosody (usually pronounced prósser-di, but sometimes prose-a-di), that is to say the art of versification, then you may feel an urge to hurry through the early sections of the book. That is up to you, naturally, but I would urge against it. The course is designed for all comers and it is better followed in the order laid out. Now, I am afraid you are not allowed to read any further without attending to the three golden rules below.

  The Golden Rules

  RULE ONE

  In our age one of the glories of poetry is that it remains an art that demonstrates the virtues and pleasures of TAKING YOUR TIME. You can never read a poem too slowly, but you can certainly read one too fast.

  Please, and I am on my knees here, please read all the sample excerpts and fragments of poetry that I include in this book (usually in indented paragraphs) as slowly as you possibly can, constantly rereading them and feeling their rhythm and balance and shape. I’m referring to single lines here as much as to larger selections.

  Poems are not re
ad like novels. There is much pleasure to be had in taking the same fourteen-line sonnet to bed with you and reading it many times over for a week. Savour, taste, enjoy. Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a child’s milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whisky. Verse is one of our last stands against the instant and the infantile. Even when it is simple and childlike it is be savoured.

  Always try to read verse out loud: if you are in a place where such a practice would embarrass you, read out loud inside yourself (if possible, moving your lips). Among the pleasures of poetry is the sheer physical, sensual, textural, tactile pleasure of feeling the words on your lips, tongue, teeth and vocal cords.

  It can take weeks to assemble and polish a single line of poetry. Sometimes, it is true, a lightning sketch may produce a wonderful effect too, but as a general rule, poems take time. As with a good painting, they are not there to be greedily taken in at once, they are to be lived with and endlessly revisited: the eye can go back and back and back, investigating new corners, new incidents and the new shapes that seem to emerge. We are perhaps too used to the kind of writing that contains a single message. We absorb the message and move on to the next sentence. Poetry is an entirely different way of using words and I cannot emphasise enough how much more pleasure is to be derived from a slow, luxurious engagement with its language and rhythms.

  RULE TWO

  NEVER WORRY about ‘meaning’ when you are reading poems, either those I include in the book, or those you choose to read for yourself. Poems are not crossword puzzles: however elusive and ‘difficult’ the story or argument of a poem may seem to be and however resistant to simple interpretation, it is not a test of your intelligence and learning (or if it is, it is not worth persevering with). Of course some poems are complex and highly wrought and others may contain references that mystify you. Much poetry in the past assumed a familiarity with classical literature, the Christian liturgy and Greek mythology, for example. Some modernist poetry can seem bloody-minded in its dense and forbidding allusion to other poets, to science and to philosophy. It can contain foreign phrases and hieroglyphs. There are literary and critical guides if you wish to acquaint yourself with such works; for the most part we will not concern ourselves with the avant-garde, the experimental and the arcane; their very real pleasures would be for another book.

  It is easy to be shy when confronting a poem. Poems can be the frightening older children at a party who make us want to cling to our mothers. But remember that poets are people and they have taken the courageous step of sharing their fears, loves, hopes and narratives with us in a rare and crafted form. They have chosen a mode of expression that is concentrated and often intense, they are offering us a music that has taken them a long time to create – many hours in the making, a lifetime in the preparation. They don’t mean to frighten or put us off, they long for us to read their works and to enjoy them.

  Do not be cross with poetry for failing to deliver meaning and communication in the way that an assemblage of words usually does. Be confident that when encountering a poem you do not have to articulate a response, venture an opinion or make a judgement. Just as the reading of each poem takes time, so a relationship with the whole art of poetry itself takes time. Observation of Rule One will allow meaning to emerge at its own pace.

  Rule THREE

  Buy a notebook, exercise book or jotter pad and lots of pencils (any writing instrument will do but I find pencils more physically pleasing). This is the only equipment you will need: no cameras, paintbrushes, tuning forks or chopping boards. Poets enjoy their handwriting (‘like smelling your own farts,’ W. H. Auden claimed) and while computers may have their place, for the time being write, don’t type.

  You may as well invest in a good pocket-sized notebook: the Moleskin range is becoming very fashionable again and bookshops and stationers have started to produce their own equivalents. Take yours with you everywhere. When you are waiting for someone, stuck in an airport, travelling by train, just doodle with words. As you learn new techniques and methods for producing lines of verse, practise them all the time.

  Imagine the above-mentioned are the End User Licence Agreement to a piece of computer software. You cannot get any further without clicking ‘OK’ when the installation wizard asks you if you agree to the terms and conditions. Well, the three rules are my terms and conditions, let me restate them in brief:

  1. Take your time

  2. Don’t be afraid

  3. Always have a notebook with you

  I agree to abide by the terms and conditions of this book

  Agree Disagree

  Now you may begin.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Metre

  Poetry is metrical writing.

  If it isn’t that I don’t know what it is.

  J. V. CUNNINGHAM

  I

  Some very obvious but nonetheless interesting observations about how English is spoken – meet metre – the iamb – the iambic pentameter – Poetry Exercises 1 & 2

  YOU HAVE ALREADY achieved the English-language poet’s most important goal: you can read, write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence. If this were a book about painting or music there would be a lot more initial spadework to be got through.

  Automatic and inborn as language might seem to be, there are still things we need to know about it, elements that are so obvious very few of us ever consider them. Since language for us, as poets in the making, is our paint, our medium, we should probably take a little time to consider certain aspects of spoken English, a language whose oral properties are actually very different from those of its more distant ancestors, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek and even from those of its nearer relations, French and German.

  Some of what follows may seem so obvious that it will put you in danger of sustaining a nosebleed. Bear with me, nonetheless. We are beginning from first principles.

  How We Speak

  Each English word is given its own weight or push as we speak it within a sentence. That is to say:

  Each English word is given its own weight and push as

  we speak it within a sentence.

  Only a very badly primitive computer speech programme would give equal stress to all the words in that example. Throughout this chapter I use bold type to indicate this weight or push, this ‘accent’, and I use italics for imparting special emphasis and SMALL CAPITALS to introduce new words or concepts for the first time and for drawing attention to an exercise or instruction.

  A real English speaker would speak the indented paragraph above much, but certainly not exactly, as I (with only the binary choice of heavy/ light available to me) have tried to indicate. Some words or syllables will be slid over with hardly a breath or a pause accorded to them (light), others will be given more weight (heavy).

  Surely that’s how the whole world speaks?

  Well, in the Chinese languages and in Thai, for example, all words are of one syllable (monosyllabic) and speech is given colour and meaning by variations in pitch, the speaker’s voice will go up or down. In English we colour our speech not so much with alterations in pitch as with variations in stress: this is technically known as ACCENTUATION.1 English, and we shall think about this later – is what is known as a STRESS-TIMED language.

  Of course, English does contain a great many monosyllables (many more than most European languages as it happens): some of these are what grammarians call PARTICLES, inoffensive little words like prepositions (by, from, to, with), pronouns (his, my, your, they), articles (the, an, a) and conjunctions (or, and, but). In an average sentence these are unaccented in English.

  From time to time and for as long as it takes.

  I must repeat, these are not special emphases, these are the natural accents imparted. We glide over the particles (‘from’,‘to’,‘and’,‘for’, ‘as’,‘it’) and give a little push to the important words (‘time’,‘long’, ‘takes’).

  Also, we tend to accent the operative part of monosy
llabic words when they are extended, only lightly tripping over the -ing and -ly, of such words as hoping and quickly. This light tripping, this gliding is sometimes called scudding.

  We always say British, we never say British or Brit-ish, always machine, never machine or mach-ine. The weight we give to the first syllable of British or the second syllable of machine is called by linguists the TONIC ACCENT. Accent here shouldn’t be confused either with the written signs (DIACRITICAL MARKS) that are sometimes put over letters, as in café and Führer, or with regional accents – brogues and dialects like Cockney or Glaswegian. Accent for our purposes means the natural push or stress we give to a word or part of a word as we speak. This accent, push or stress is also called ictus, but we will stick to the more common English words where possible.

  In many-syllabled or POLYSYLLABIC words there will always be at least one accent.

  Credit. Dispose. Continue. Despair. Desperate.

  Sometimes the stress will change according to the meaning or nature of the word. READ THE FOLLOWING PAIRS OUT LOUD: