The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

  Its loveliness increases: it will never

  Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

  A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

  Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

  The first feet of lines 3 and 5 are ‘inverted iambs’ or trochees. What Keats and Shakespeare have employed here is sometimes called trochaic substitution, a technique, like weak endings, too common to be considered a deviation from the iambic norm. It is mostly found, as in the above instances and the following, in the first foot of a line. You could call it a trochaic substitution, or the inversion of an iamb – it amounts to the same thing.

  BYRON: Don Juan, Canto IV, XXVII

  Well have ye judged, well ended long debate,

  Synod of gods, and like to what ye are,

  MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book II

  Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife

  GRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 18

  That’s an interesting one, the last. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet opens in a way that allows different emphases. Is it Shall I compare thee, Shall I compare thee or Shall I compare thee? The last would be a spondaic substitution. You remember the spondee, two equally stressed beats?17 What do you feel? How would you read it out? There’s no right or wrong answer.

  Trochaic substitution of an interior foot is certainly not uncommon either. Let’s return to the opening of Hamlet’s great soliloquy:

  Here, the fourth foot can certainly be said to be trochaic. It is helped, as most interior trochaic switches are, by the very definite caesura, marked here by the colon. The pause after the opening statement splits the line into two and allows the trochaic substitution to have the effect they usually achieve at the beginning of a line. Without that caesura at the end of the preceding foot, interior trochaic substitutions can be cumbersome.

  That’s not a very successful line, frankly it reads as prose: even with the ‘and’ where it is, the instinct in reading it as verse is to make the caesural pause after ‘makes’ – this resolves the rhythm for us. We don’t mind starting a phrase with a trochee, but it sounds all wrong inserted into a full flow of iambs.

  That’s better: the colon gives a natural caesura with which to split the line allowing us to start the new thought with a trochee.

  For this reason, you will find that initial trochaic substitution (i.e. that of the first foot) is by far the most common.

  Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:

  England hath need of thee: she is a fen

  WORDSWORTH: ‘Milton!’

  Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

  KEATS: ‘Ode to Autumn’

  Just as it would be a pointless limitation to disallow unstressed endings to a line, so it would be to forbid stressed beginnings. Hence trochaic substitution.

  There’s one more inversion to look at before our heads burst.

  Often in a line of iambic pentameter you might come across a line like this, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1:

  But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes

  How would you scan it?

  ‘Contracted to thine own bright eyes’ is rather ugly, don’t we think? After all there’s no valuable distinction of meaning derived by hitting that innocent little particle. So has Shakespeare, by only the fifth line of his great sonnet sequence already blown it and mucked up his iambic pentameters?

  Well no. Let’s scan it like this:

  18

  That third foot is now pyrrhic, two unaccented beats: we’ve taken the usual stress off its second element, we have ‘demoted’ the foot, if you like. We have, in metrical jargon, effected pyrrhic substitution. This is most likely to occur in the third or fourth foot of a line, otherwise it disrupts the primary rhythm too much. It is essential too, in order for the metre to keep its pulse, that the pyrrhic foot be followed by a proper iamb. Pyrrhic substitution results, as you can see above, in three unaccented beats in a row, which are resolved by the next accent (in this case own).

  Check what I’m saying by flicking your eyes up and reading out loud. It can all seem a bit bewildering as I bombard you with references to the third foot and the second unit and so on, but so long as you keep checking and reading it out (writing it down yourself too, if it helps) you can keep track of it all and IT IS WORTH DOING.

  Incidentally,Vladimir Nabokov in his Notes on Prosody is very unkind about calling these effects ‘substitutions’ – he prefers to call a pyrhhic substitution a ‘scud’ or ‘false pyrrhic’ and a trochaic substitution a ‘tilted scud’ or ‘false trochee’. I am not sure this is any clearer, to be honest.

  Anyway, you might have spotted that this trick, this trope, this ‘downgrading’ of one accent, has the effect of drawing extra attention to the following one. The next strong iambic beat, the own has all the more emphasis for having followed three unstressed syllables.

  If the demotion were to take place in the fourth foot it would emphasise the last beat of the line, as in this pyrrhic substitution in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which as it happens also begins with a trochaic switch. READ IT OUT LOUD:

  Both the excerpts above contain pyrrhic substitution, Shakespeare’s in the third foot, Owen’s in the fourth. Both end with the word ‘eyes’, but can you see how Shakespeare’s use of it in the third foot causes the stress to hammer harder down on the word own and how Owen’s use of it in the fourth really pushes home the emphasis on eyes? Which, after all, is the point the line is making, not in their hands, but in their eyes. (Incidentally, I think the trochaic substitution in the first foot also helps emphasise ‘hands’. Thus, when read out, the line contrasts hands and eyes with extra emphasis.)

  Owen’s next line repeats the pyrrhic substitution in the same, fourth, foot.

  Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

  A stressed of would be a horrid example of what’s called a wrenched accent, an unnatural stress forced in order to make the metre work: scudding over the ‘of ’ and making the foot pyrrhic does not sacrifice the metre.

  Owen was a poet who, like Shakespeare, really knew what he was doing. These effects are not accidental, the substitutions do not come about by chance or through some carefree inability to adhere to the form and hoping for the best. Owen studied metre and form constantly and obsessively, as did Keats, his hero, as indeed did all the great poets. They would no more be unaware of what they were doing than Rubens could be unaware of what he was doing when he applied an impasto dot of white to give shine to an eye, or than Beethoven could be unaware of what happened when he diminished a seventh or syncopated a beat. The freedom and the ease with which a master can do these things belies immense skill derived from practice.

  Incidentally, when Rubens was a young man he went round Rome feverishly drawing and sketching antique statues and Old Master paintings, lying on his back, standing on ladders, endlessly varying his viewpoint so as to give himself differing angles and perspectives. He wanted to be able to paint or draw any aspect of the human form from any angle, to master foreshortening and moulding and all the other techniques, spending months on rendering hands alone. All the great poets did the equivalent in their notebooks: busying themselves endlessly with different metres, substitutions, line lengths, poetic forms and techniques. They wanted to master their art as Rubens mastered his. They say that the poet Tennyson knew the quantity of every word in the English language except ‘scissors’. A word’s quantity is essentially the sum of the duration of its vowels. We shall come to that later. The point is this: poetry is all about concentration, the concentration of mind and the concentration of thought, feeling and language into words within a rhythmic structure. In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated.


  It may seem strange for us to focus in such detail on something as apparently piffling as a pyrrhic substitution, but I am convinced that a sense, an awareness, a familiarity and finally a mastery of this and all the other techniques we have seen and will see allow us a confidence and touch that the uninformed reading and writing of verse could never bestow. It is a little like changing gear in a car: it can seem cumbersome and tricky at first, but it soon becomes second nature. It is all about developing the poetic equivalent of ‘muscle memory’. With that in mind, here are some more lines featuring these stress demotions or pyrrhic substitutions. I have boxed the first two examples and explained my thinking. Here is one from the Merchant’s Tale:

  You would not say ‘a roaring AND a cry’ unless the sense demanded it. Chaucer, like Owen, shows that a demotion of the fourth beat throws more weight on to the fifth: CRY. Owen demonstrates that it is possible with the second beat too.

  ‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’ seems a bit wrenched. The demotion allows the push here on ‘garg’ and ‘froth’ to assume greater power: ‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’.

  Look at these lines from a poem that every American school-child knows:‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, by Robert Frost. It is the literary equivalent of ‘The Night Before Christmas’, quoted and misquoted every holiday season in the States:

  The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  To read the phrase ‘promisés to keep’ would be an absurd wrench, wouldn’t it? Clearly that’s a pyrrhic substitution too.

  The opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III has a demoted third beat: note that the first line begins with a trochaic substitution:

  Now is the winter of our discontent

  So here is a summary of the six new techniques we’ve learned to enrich the iambic pentameter.

  1. End-stopping: how the sense, the thought, can end with the line.

  2. Enjambment: how it can run through the end of a line.

  3. Caesura: how a line can have a break, a breath, a pause, a gear change.

  4. Weak endings: how you can end the line with an extra, weak syllable.

  5. Trochaic substitution: how you can invert the iamb to make a trochee.

  6. Pyrrhic substitution: how you can downgrade the beat of an interior (second, third or fourth) foot to turn it into a doubly weak or pyrrhic foot.

  Poetry Exercise 4

  You can probably guess what I’m going to ask for here. Sixteen unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The idea is to use pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions (five points for each), weak endings – that extra syllable at the end (two points for each) but all without going overboard and losing the primary iambic rhythm. You can also award yourself two points for every successful enjambment.

  Before you embark upon your own, we are going take a look at and mark my attempt at the exercise. I have sought inspiration, if that is the word, from the headlines on today’s BBC news website and would recommend this as preferable to staring out of the window chewing the end of a pencil awaiting the Muse’s kiss. Four news stories in all.

  Policemen, in a shocking poll revealed

  They have no time for apprehending felons

  Criminals now at last are free to work.

  Why can’t the English play the game of cricket?

  Inside a tiny wooden urn are buried

  The Ashes of a great and sporting nation.19

  Babies are now available in female

  Or male. Hard to decide which sex I’ll pick.

  Maybe I’ll wait till gender is redundant.

  Towards the middle of a mighty ocean

  Squats a forgotten island and its people;

  The sea that laps the margins of the atoll

  Broadcasts no mindless babble on its waves;

  No e-mail pesters the unsullied palm groves

  Newspaper stories pass it quietly by.

  How long before we go there and destroy it?

  I know. Pathetic, isn’t it? I hope you are filled with confidence. Once again, I must emphasise, these are no more poems than practise scales are sonatas. They are purely exercises, as yours should be. Work on solving the problems of prosody, but don’t get hung up about images, poetic sensibility and word choices. The lines and thoughts should make sense, but beyond that doggerel is acceptable.

  GET YOUR PENCIL OUT and mark the metre in each line of my verses. It should be fairly clear when the line starts with a trochee, but pyrrhics can be more subjective. I shall do my marking below: see if you agree with me. P for a pyrrhic substitution, T for a trochaic. H for hendecasyllable (or for hypermetric, I suppose). E is for enjambment.

  That’s a pretty clear pyrrhic in the second foot: no need to stress the ‘in’ and I reckon the rest of the line recovers its iambic tread, so five points to me.

  Straight iambics, just two points for the hypermetric ending.

  Five points for the initial trochee.

  Five for the opening trochee (I think you’ll agree that it is ‘why can’t’, not ‘why can’t’) plus two for the weak ending.

  Iambics: just two for the ending (it’s a bit like scoring for cribbage, this . . . )

  High-scoring one here: five for the trochaic switch in the first foot, five for the pyrrhic in the fourth: plus two for the ending and two for the enjambment. The question is: does it still feel iambic with all those bells and whistles? My view is that it would if it were in the midst of more regular iambic lines, but since it is the first line of a stanza it is hard for the ear to know what is going on. A trochaic first foot allied to a weak ending gives an overall trochaic effect, especially when the middle is further vitiated by the slack syllables of the pyrrhic. Also, the end word ‘female’ is almost spondaic. So I shall deduct five for bad style.

  A trochaic switch mid line for five points: since it follows a caesura the rest of the line picks up the iambic pulse adequately.

  Trochaic of the first with pyrrhic of the fourth again. For some reason I don’t think this one misses its swing so much as the other, so I’ll only deduct three. Then again, perhaps it keeps its swing because it isn’t a real pyrrhic: hard not to give a push to the ‘is’ there, don’t we feel?

  I make my score 106. I’m sure you could do better with your sixteen lines. To recap:

  16 lines of iambic pentameter

  5 points for trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions

  2 points for enjambments

  2 points for feminine endings

  Be tough on yourself when marking. If, in a bid to make a high score, you have lost the underlying rising tread of the iambic pentameter, then deduct points with honesty. Have fun!

  III

  More Meters

  Octameters – hexameters – heptameters – tetrameters – trimeters – dimeters – monometers

  Why five feet to a line, why not four or six? Three or seven? Eight even.

  Why not indeed. Here’s a list of the most likely possibilities:

  1 Beat – Monometer

  He bangs

  The drum.

  2 Beats – Dimeter

  His drumming noise

  Awakes the boys.

  3 Beats – Trimeter

  His drumming makes a noise,

  And wakes the sleeping boys.

  4 Beats – Tetrameter

  He bangs the drum and makes a noise,

  It shakes the roof and wakes the boys.

  5 Beats – Pentameter

  He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise,

  It shakes the roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

  6 Beats – Hexameter

  He bangs the drum and makes the most appalling noise,

  It shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

  7 Beats – Heptameter

  He bangs the wretched drum and makes the most appalling noise,

  Its racket shakes the very roof and
wakes the sleeping boys.

  8 Beats – Octameter

  He starts to bang the wretched drum and make the most appalling noise,

  Its dreadful racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

  I have hardly given more information in the octameter, heptameter, hexameter or pentameter than there is in the tetrameter – of course the boys are sleeping, you can’t wake someone who isn’t, and a very roof is still a roof. I have made up my own nonsense specifically to show the variation in feel when the sense or narrative is broadly the same and the number of feet marks the only real difference. Generally speaking, and I do mean very generally, the pentameter is used for ‘serious’ poetry, for contemplative, epic, heroic and dramatic verse. That doesn’t mean that the other measures can’t be. We will come to how we choose a particular form or line of verse later. At the moment we are more interested in discovering and defining terms than ascribing value or function to them. The technical difference is what concerns us, the stylistic difference is for a later section of the book.

  Six feet give us a hexameter, the line of choice in most classical verse:

  As a single line it works fine. The experience of writing whole poems in hexameters, in six footers, is that they turn out to be a bit cumbersome in English. The pentameter seems to fit the human breath perfectly (which is why it was used, not just by Shakespeare, but by just about all English verse dramatists). French poets and playwrights like Racine did use the hexameter or alexandrine 20 all the time, in English verse it is rare. What’s so different about French, then? I think the most important reason is, as I made clear earlier, that French words tend not to be so varied in their accentuation as English. Why is this relevant? Well, it means that French poetry, since so many words are equally stressed, relies more on what is known as ‘quantitative measure’ – divisions based on the temporal duration of long and short vowels.21 This is how classical Greek and Latin poetry was constructed. Most English verse – as I hope we have discovered – is metred by syllabic accentuation, the rises and falls of stress.