The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  The point that seems to me most relevant is the notion of quiddity or whatness. I mentioned this when we were looking at Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had been deeply influenced by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus and his concept of haecceity, or thisness. Novels can develop stories and character and much else besides, but poetry uniquely gives itself the opportunity to enter the absolute truth of a phenomenon (whether it be a feeling, an object, a person, a process, an idea or a moment) through language itself. How many times will you, as poet, look at a fly, watch a tap dripping, examine an inner feeling, listen to the wind and grow immensely frustrated at the inability of language exactly to capture it, to become it? All the stock phrases and clichés enter your frantic mind, all the footling onomatopoeia, rhymes and rhythmic patterns that we have heard before and none of them will do. Painters, too, look from their subject to the tip of their paintbrush and their palette of paints and despair.

  That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all.

  So poor J. Alfred Prufrock whines, and so do we.

  Aside from Pound, the works of H. D. (Hilda) Doolittle are perhaps the purest conscious attempt to adhere to the imagist project: here is her ‘Sea Poppies’:

  your stalk has caught root

  among wet pebbles

  and drift flung by the sea

  and grated shells

  and split conch-shells.

  Beautiful, wide-spread,

  fire upon leaf,

  what meadow yields

  so fragrant a leaf

  It fascinates me that a medievalist like Hopkins and a modernist like Doolittle could both arrive at so similar a poetic destination from such utterly opposing points of origin. Doolittle’s technique and effect are wildly different from those of Hopkins, of course, but I am sure you can feel the same striving to enter the identity of experience.

  SILLY, SILLY FORMS

  Enough, already. There are ludic and ludicrous forms, a world away from ideology and ideogram, which play on syllable length, shape and pattern, some of them bafflingly specific. What is the point of RICTAMETERS, one is forced to wonder? They are poems in the shape of a diamond.

  In stricter versions (as if there is any reason to be strict about so childish a form. I mean ferrankly . . .) the diamond is structured by a syllable count of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2. A variation is the DIAMANTE where the purpose, as in some absurd weekend puzzle magazine, is to go from one object or phenomenon to an opposite or complementary one, by way of a succession of related words.

  wolf

  grey shaggy

  slavering howling ripping

  violent hunter innocent quarry

  frisking grazing bleating

  white woolly

  lamb

  The ‘rule’ is that the second line is composed of related adjectives and the third of related participles; the first two words of the middle line are nouns or nominal phrases connected to the top of the diamond, the next pair connect to the bottom. You then repeat the process symmetrically down to your end-word. The whole thing is daffy and hardly qualifies as a form for poetry, but I include it anyway. Something to do on long train journeys.

  Another bizarre form, bizarrely popular if the Internet is anything to go by, is to be found in RHOPALICS. A rhopalic line is one in which each successive word has one more syllable than its predecessor. This sentence cleverly exemplifies rhopalicism. There are variations, like increasing each word in a line letter by letter (I am not sure about trying variant rhopalics) and decreasing rather than increasing the count (stultifying staggering tediously complete bloody waste, fuck off . . .) Or there is this kind of thing:

  My feelings and emotions

  In their restless motions

  Seethe and swell like oceans

  Of the kind a Stoic shuns,

  Better find some calmer ’uns

  The dwindling but aurally congruent rhyme-returns yielded from emotions, motions, oceans, shuns and ’uns constitute DIMINISHING RHYME, which may seem arid and futile, but George Herbert, the deeply religious and verbally playful poet whose ‘Easter Wings’ we have seen, used them with great seriousness in his poem ‘Paradise’:

  I bless Thee, Lord, because I grow

  Among the trees, which in a row

  To Thee both fruit and order ow.

  Certain other pointless forms demand a prescribed diminishing or ascending syllable count. The TETRACTYS asks the poet to produce five lines of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 10 syllables. Where’s the tetra in that, for heaven’s sake, you may be wondering. I believe it may be to do with a ‘mystic tetrad’ in Pythagoreanism and kabbalism and some arse-dribble or other connected to Tarot card layout and the four elements. 1+2+3+4=10 is the sum on which Ray Stebbing, the form’s inventor, based the poetic tetractys. No doubt he meant well by it. Tetractys, appropriately enough, is pronounced to rhyme with wet practice.

  Those

  who choose

  to compose

  tetractyses

  are welcome to them, far as I’m concerned

  and I really cannot see the virtue

  in flipping them:

  too heavy

  on top

  no?

  Mr Stebbing is a serious and accomplished poet, and if he believes his form to be the new native haiku then I wish him well. An even arsier form is the NONET:

  death to

  those

  who compose

  such wastes of breath

  they have no graces

  at least in my poor eyes

  they suggest useless traces

  of ancient forms more pure and wise

  when people start to count, true verse dies.

  The syllabic count starts at one and increases until it reaches nine. Mine, in desperation, rhymes. Syllabics? Silly bollocks, more like.

  ACROSTICS

  ACROSTICS have been popular for years; nineteenth-century children produced them instead of watching television – those who were lucky enough not to be sent down chimneys or kidnapped by gangs of pickpockets did, anyway.

  So you want a dedication then?

  For you I’ll do my very best

  Read the letters downwards, darling, then

  You’ll see I’ve passed your little test.

  What is going on below, you might wonder?

  age is a

  real bugger

  so few years

  ending up white

  wrinkled weak as straw

  incontinence comes and i

  piss myself in every way – stop

  eternity’s too short too short a time

  That is a DOUBLE ACROSTIC, both the first and last letters of each line spell out the same defiance and physical disgust. I haven’t highlighted the letters; you can trace them down yourself. In case you are wondering, I have not reached that stage yet – it is an imaginative leap, we are allowed those from time to time: all functions working smoothly last time I checked. You could in theory spell words down from the middle of a line – this is called a mesostich and is just plain silly.

  The French seem to be the people most interested in acrostics and other poetic wordplay. Salomon Certon wrote a whole sonnet omitting the letter ‘e’: this is known as a LIPOGRAM. Not the same root as liposuction, as it happens, despite the apparent similarity of meaning. These days, you might feel, a poem that never uses an ‘I’ would be a real achievement . . .

  PARONOMASIA is a grand word for ‘pun’: Thomas Hood, whose rich rhyme effusion you have read, was famous for these:‘He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell,’ that kind of thing.

  Keats slips most of the name of his hero into a line in the poem Endymion: this is known as a PARAGRAM:

  . . . I

  Will trace the story of Endymion.

  The very music of the name has gone

  There are those who loathe puns, anagrams and wordplay of any description. They regard practitioners as trivial, posey, feeble, nerdy and facetious. As one such practit
ioner, I do understand the objections. Archness, cuteness, pedantry and showoffiness do constitute dangers. However, as a non-singing, non-games-playing, -dancing, -painting, -diving, -running, -catching, -kicking, -riding, -skating, -skiing, -sailing, -climbing, -caving, -swimming, -free-falling, -cycling, -canoeing, -jumping, -bouncing, -boxing sort of person, words are all I have. As the old cliché has it, they are my friends. I like to say them, weigh them, poke them, tease them, chant their sound, gaze at their shape and savour their juiciness, and, yes, play with them. Some words are made up of the same letters as others, some can fit inside others, some can be said the same backwards as frontwards, some rhyme outrageously, some seem unique and peculiar like yacht and quirk and frump and canoodle. I take pleasure in their oddities and pleasures and contradictions. It amuses me that a cowboy is a boy who rounds up cows, but a carboy is a flagon of acid, that conifer is an anagram of fir cone and esoteric of coteries, that gold has a hundred rhymes but silver has none.20 It saddens me that the French talk of the jouissance of language, its joyousness, juiciness, ecstasy and bliss, but that we of all peoples, with English as our mother tongue, do not. Such frolicsome larkiness may put you off, but if you wish to make poems it seems to me necessary that some part of your verse, however small, will register the sensuousness, oddity and pleasure of words themselves, as words, regardless of their semantic and communicatory duties. Not all paintings draw attention to their brushwork – art can, of course, as validly make transparent its process as exhibit its presence – but each tradition has value and none represents the only true aesthetic.

  In fact, I shall start the final chapter with an exploration of the idea that there are no limits to the depth of commitment to language that a poet can have. Not before you have completed . . .

  Poetry Exercise 20

  Write one PATTERN POEM in the shape of a cross, and another in the shape of a big capital ‘I’ (for ego) (obviously it should be a Roman I with serifs, otherwise it would just be a block of verse). Make the words relevant to their shape. When you have finished that, write a rhyming ACROSTIC VERSE spelling either your surname or forename.

  1 Although, to be fair, he did repent and write:‘the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.’

  2 Incidentally, on the off-chance that you have submitted a poem for any competition that I have judged, or plan to in the future, please don’t think that I will condemn a poem to the bin because it is in free verse or raise one to the top of the pile because it is formal. A good free verse poem is better than a bad sonnet and vice versa.

  3 Actually, I have to confess I quite like ‘afterloved’. . .

  4 You may think ‘forbade to wade’ is a clumsy internal rhyme – actually ‘forbade’ was (and still should be, I reckon) pronounced ‘for-bad’.

  5 Mind you, at the time of going to print the website advertising these glories had not been updated since 2004. I do hope the competition hasn’t been stopped.

  6 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds produced their album Murder Ballads in 1996.

  7 Written at the time of the trial but published posthumously. Another wonderful Housman tirade against sexual intolerance is to be found in ‘The Laws of God, the Laws of Man’.

  8 A dithyramb is a kind of wild choral hymn (usually to Dionysus, the Greek God of wine – Bacchus to the Romans). It now often refers to any rather overblown, uncontrolled verse style.

  9 Someone told me they saw a grave to one John Longbottom, who died at the age of ten. His gravestone read ars longa, vita brevis: a rude epitaph for a churchyard, but witty. Works especially well if you remember that in Latin the ‘s’ is always unvoiced . . .

  10 I don’t want you to go thinking that this is the usual kind of conversation I have, least of all my friends.

  11 Not triplets, which are three-line groups that rhyme with each other aaa, bbb etc.

  12 In its strictest form, the word Sestina should also appear in the envoi. Crazy, huh?

  13 Anthony Holden, in The Wit in the Dungeon, his masterly biography of Leigh Hunt, has this to say about the incident: ‘Whether or not Carlyle’s crusty old wife actually had given Hunt a kiss, let alone leapt from her chair to do so, we will never know; no such unlikely moment is documented in any of the relevant parties’ letters or journals.’

  14 See if you can get hold of ‘A Platonic Blow’ for example.

  15 I mean exotic in its original sense of ‘from far away’ not in the travel brochure sense.

  16 Cracked them! Coconuts, you see. And china plates. Cracked them! Ho, ho. No but really, ho ho.

  17 A manila envelope rhyme?

  18 Jewish readers may wonder why Milton is writing about the tefillin: ‘phylacteries’ here actually refer to religious trinkets used by Presbyterians, whose intolerance the sonnet attacks. Presbyterians, as you may know although Milton probably did not, is an anagram of Britney Spears.

  19 The full manifesto can be read at: http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/concretepoet.htm

  20 Save the rich-rhyme sylva of course . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Diction and Poetics Today

  I

  How I learned to love poetry – two stories – diction

  The Whale, the Cat and Madeline

  I was fortunate in my own introduction to poetry. My mother had, and still has, a mind packed with lines of verse. She could recite, like many of her generation but with more perfect recall than most, all the usual nursery rhymes along with most of A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Struwwelpeter, Eleanor Farjeon and other hardy annuals from the garden of English verse. This standard childhood repertoire somehow slid, without me noticing and without any didactic literary purpose, into bedtime recitations, readings or merry snatches of Belloc, Chesterton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. Then one birthday a godfather gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. This solid, Empire-made anthology (published in 1861, the same year as Mrs Beeton’s Household Management and regarded by some as its verse equivalent) had been updated by the then Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, and included works by Betjeman,Auden and Laurie Lee, but its greatest emphasis was still on the lyrical and the romantic. That year I won the first and only school prize of my life, an edition of the Collected Poems of John Keats. In this I found a line, just one line, that finished the job my mother started and made me for ever a true slave to poetry. I will come to it in a minute, but first, a story about Keats himself and then an instance of poetry in motion.

  THE WHALE

  When Keats was a teenager (so the story goes), he came across a line from Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Not even a line, actually: a phrase:

  . . . the sea-shouldering whale.

  Some versions of the story maintain that Keats burst into tears when he read this. He had never known before what poetic language could do. He had no idea it was capable of making images spring so completely to life. In an instant he was able to see, hear and feel the roar, the plunging, the spray, the great mass and slow colossal upheaving energy of a whale, all from two words yoked together: ‘sea’ and ‘shouldering’. From that moment on Keats got poetry. He began to understand the power that words could convey and the metaphorical daring with which a poet could treat them. We might say now that it was as if he had grasped their atomic nature, how with the right manipulation, and in the right combinations, words can release unimaginable energy. If not nuclear physics, then perhaps a living magick, whose verbal incantations conjure and summon a live thing out of thin air. Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream put it this way:

  And, as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  For Keats the grand plan of The Faerie Queen, its narrative, its religious, metaphysical, political and philosophical allegory and high epic seriousness dwindled to nothing in comparison with the poetic act as realised in two words. He ‘would dw
ell in ecstasy’ on the phrase, his friend Charles Cowden Clarke wrote later. This may sound rather extreme – there goes another typically high-strung nancy-boy poet in a loose neckcloth, swooning at a phrase – but I think the story goes to the heart of poetry’s fundamental nature. I am sure there must have been moments like this for painters struck, not by the composition and grand themes of a masterpiece, but by one brush stroke, one extraordinary solution to the problem of transmitting truth by applying pigment to canvas. Poetry is constructed by the conjoining of words, one next to the other. Not every instance of poetic language will yield so rich an epiphany as Spenser’s did for Keats – there are muddy backgrounds in poems as in paintings – and poetry can never hope to rival the essay, the novel or a philosophical treatise when it comes to imparting thought, story and abstract truths, but it can make words live in a most particular way, it can achieve things like ‘the sea-shouldering whale’. You may not think it the finest poetic phrase ever wrought, but it unlocked poetry for the young Keats. Most of us have an inexplicably best-loved film or book that opened our eyes to the power of cinema and literature, and these favourites may not necessarily be part of the canon of Great Cinema or Great Literature, they just happened to be the ones that were there when we were ready for them. First Love comes when it comes and often we are hard put to explain later just why such and such a person was the object of our ardent youthful adoration when photographs now reveal just how plain they really were.

  THE CAT AND THE ACT

  Let me give you another example, this time it is from a poem by Ted Hughes called ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’. Hughes tells the story, simply and directly, of how Parnell’s Irish Members of Parliament in the late nineteenth century called for a motion to abolish the cat-o’-nine-tails as a punishment in the Royal Navy: