The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  Enjambment and caesura can pack a great comic punch, which Byron demonstrates when he opens his mock epic Don Juan with a savage blast aimed precisely at the Wordsworth of the Prelude above and his fellow Lake District romantic poets, Coleridge and Southey. Byron hated them and what he saw as their pretension and vain belief that theirs was the only Poesy (poetry) worthy of wreaths (prizes and plaudits). Say this out loud:

  You – Gentlemen! ¶ by dint of long seclusion

  From better company, ¶ have kept your own

  At Keswick, and, ¶ through still continued fusion

  Of one another’s minds, ¶ at last have grown

  To deem as a most logical conclusion,

  That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:

  There is a narrowness in such a notion,

  Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean.

  I am sure you have now got the point that pausing and running on are an invaluable adjunct to the basic pentametric line. I have taken a long time over this because I think these two devices exemplify the crucial point that ADHERENCE TO METRE DOES NOT MILLITATE AGAINST NATURALNESS. Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny. Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy. As Auden suggested in his analogy of Robinson Crusoe, some poets might be able to live outside convention and rules, but most of us make a hash of it.

  It is time to try your own. This exercise really is fun: don’t be scared off by its conditions: I’ll take you through it all myself to show you what is required and how simple it is.

  Poetry Exercise 3

  Write five pairs of blank (non-rhyming) iambic pentameter in which the first line of each pair is end-stopped and there are no caesuras.

  Now write five pairs with (give or take) the same meaning in which there is enjambment.

  Make sure that each new pair also contains at least two caesuras.

  This may take a little longer than the first writing exercise, but no more than forty-five minutes. Again, it is not about quality.

  To make it easier I will give you a specific subject for all five pairs.

  1. Precisely what you see and hear outside your window.

  2. Precisely what you’d like to eat, right this minute.

  3. Precisely what you last remember dreaming about.

  4. Precisely what uncompleted chores are niggling at you.

  5. Precisely what you hate about your body.

  Once again I have had a pitiful go myself to give you an idea of what I mean.

  WITHOUT caesura or enjambment:

  1 Outside the Window

  I hear the traffic passing by my house,

  While overhead the blackbirds build their nests.

  2 What I’d Like to Eat

  I’d really like some biscuits I can dunk,

  Unsalted crisps would fill a gap as well.

  3 A Recent Dream

  I dreamt an airport man had lost my bags

  And all my trousers ended up in Spain.

  4 Pesky Tasks Overdue

  I need to tidy up my papers now

  And several ashtrays overflow with butts.

  5 My Body

  Too many chins and such a crooked nose,

  Long flabby legs and rather stupid hair.

  With caesura and enjambment:

  1 Outside the Window

  The song of cars, so like the roar the sea

  Can sing, has drowned the nesting blackbirds’ call.

  2 What I’d Like to Eat

  Some biscuits, dunked – but quick in sudden stabs

  Like beaks. Oh, crisps as well. Unsalted, please.

  3 A Recent Dream

  Security buffoons, you sent my strides

  To Spain, and all my bags to God knows where.

  4 Pesky Tasks Overdue

  My papers seethe. Now all my writing desk

  Erupts. Volcanic mountains cough their ash.

  5 My Body

  Three flobbing chins are bad, but worse, a bent

  And foolish nose. Long legs, fat thighs, mad hair.

  These are only a guide. Go between each Before and After I have composed and see what I did to enforce the rules. Then pick up your pencil and pad and have a go yourself.

  Use the same titles for your couplets that I did for mine. The key is to find a way of breaking the line, then running on to make the enjambment. It doesn’t have to be elegant, sensible or clever, mine aren’t, though I will say that the very nature of the exercise forces you, whether you intend it or not, to concentrate the sense and movement of the phrasing in a way that at least gestures towards that distillation and compactness that marks out real poetry. Here’s your blank space.

  Weak Endings, Trochaic and

  Pyrrhic Substitutions

  Let us now return to Macbeth, who is still considering whether or not he should kill Duncan. He says out loud, as indeed do you: ‘I have no spur . . .

  To prick the sides of my intent, but only

  Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

  And falls on th’ other. – How now! what news?

  Forgetting caesuras and enjambments this time, have a look at the three lines as an example of iambic pentameter. Get that pencil out and try marking each accented and unaccented syllable.

  Eleven syllables! There’s a rogue extra syllable at the end of line 1, isn’t there? An unstressed orphan bringing up the rear. The line scans like this:

  There is more: the next line doesn’t start with an iamb at all! Unless the actor playing Macbeth says ‘vaulting ambition’ the line goes . . .

  The mighty Shakespeare deviating from metre? He is starting an iambic line with a tum-ti, a trochee.

  Actually, in both cases he is employing two variations that are so common and necessary to lively iambic verse that they are not unusual enough even to call deviations.

  We will attend to that opening trochaic foot in a moment. Let us first examine this orphan or ‘rogue’ unaccented syllable at the end of the line. It makes the line eleven syllables long or hendecasyllabic.

  It results in what is called a weak or feminine ending (I hope my female readers won’t be offended by this. Blame the French, we inherited the term from them. I shall try not to use it often). Think of the most famous iambic pentameter of all:

  To be or not to be that is the question

  Count the syllables and mark the accents. It does the same thing (‘question’ by the way is disyllabic, two syllables, any actor who said quest-i-on would be laughed off the stage and out of Equity. It is certainly kwestch n11).

  If you think about it, the very nature of the iamb means that if this additional trick were disallowed to the poet then all iambic verse would have to terminate in a stressed syllable, a masculine ending . . .

  If winter comes can spring be far behind?

  ...would be possible, but

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ev(er)

  ...would not. Keats would have had to find a monosyllabic word meaning ‘ever’ and he would have ended up with something that sounded Scottish, archaic, fey or precious even in his own day (the early nineteenth century).

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ay

  Words like ‘excitement’,‘little’,‘hoping’,‘question’,‘idle’,‘widest’ or ‘wonder’ could never be used to close an iambic line. That would be a ridiculous restriction in English. How absurdly limiting not to be able to end with an -ing, or an -er or a -ly or a -tion or any of the myriad weak endings that naturally occur in our language.

  BUT THERE IS MORE TO IT THAN THAT. A huge element of all art is constructed in the form of question and answer. The word for this is dialectic. In music we are very familiar with this call-and-response structure. The opening figure of Beethoven’s Fifth is a famous example:

  Da-da-da-Dah

  Da-da-
da-Derr

  Beethoven actually went so far as to write the following in the score of the Finale of his String Quartet in F major:

  Muss es sein? Must it be?

  Es muss sein! It must be!

  In poetry this is a familiar structure:

  Q: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  A:Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

  It is common in rhetoric too.

  Ask not what your country can do for you

  But what you can do for your country.

  This is a deep, instinctive property of so much human communication. In the Greek drama and dance it was called strophe and antistrophe, in the liturgy of the Church it is known as versicle and response.

  One might suggest that this is something to do with the in-and-out pumping of the heart itself (systole and diastole) and the very breath of life (inhalation and exhalation). Yin and yang and other binary oppositions in thought and the natural world come to mind. We also reason dialectically, from problem to solution, from proposition to conclusion, from if to then. It is the copulation of utterance: the means by which thought and expression mimic creation by taking one thing (thesis), suggesting another (antithesis) and making something new of the coupling (synthesis), prosecution, defence, verdict.

  The most obvious example of a poem with an if then structure is of course Kipling’s poem ‘If’, regularly voted ‘the nation’s favourite’. It is written in strict iambic pentameter, but with alternating feminine and masculine line endings throughout. He does this with absolute regularity throughout the poem: switching between lines of weak (eleven syllable) and strong (ten syllable) endings, which gives a characteristic swing to the verse. Try reading out loud each stanza (or verse) below, exaggerating the tenth syllable in each line as you read, tapping the table (or your thigh) and really emphasising the last beat. Do you see how this metrical alternation precisely suggests a kind of dialectical structure?

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

  But make allowance for their doubting too,

  If you can dream – and not make dreams your master,

  If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And meet those two impostors just the same;

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

  What’s actually happening is that the wider line structures echo the metrical structure: just as the feet go weak-strong, so the lines go weak-strong.

  You might put the thought into iambic pentameters:

  The weaker ending forms a kind of question

  The stronger ending gives you your reply.

  The finality of downstroke achieved by a strong ending seems to answer the lightness of a weak one. After all, the most famous weak ending there is just happens to be the very word ‘question’ itself . . .

  To be, or not to be: that is the question.

  It is not a rule, the very phrase ‘question-and-answer’ is only an approximation of what we mean by ‘dialectic’ and, naturally, there is a great deal more to it than I have suggested. Through French poetry we have inherited a long tradition of alternating strong-weak line endings, which we will come to when we look at verse forms and rhyme. The point I am anxious to make, however, is that metre is more than just a ti-tum ti-tum: its very regularity and the consequent variations available within it can yield a structure that EXPRESSES MEANING QUITE AS MUCH AS THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO.

  Which is not to say that eleven syllable lines only offer questions: sometimes they are simply a variation available to the poet and result in no particular extra meaning or effect. Kipling does demonstrate though, in his hoary old favourite, that when used deliberately and regularly, alternate measures can do more. The metrist Timothy Steele12 has pointed out how Shakespeare, in his twentieth sonnet ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted’ uses only weak endings throughout the poem: every line is eleven syllables. Shakespeare’s conceit in the poem (his image, or overarching concept) is that his beloved, a boy, has all the feminine graces. The proliferation of feminine endings is therefore a kind of metrical pun.

  Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is another celebrated example of iambic pentameter ending with that extra or hypermetrical unstressed syllable. Note, incidentally, that while you would not normally choose to emphasise a word like ‘and’ in a line of poetry, the beauty of Shakespeare’s iambs here is that the rhythm calls for the actor playing Macbeth to hit those ‘ands’ harder than one would in a line like:

  I want some jam and tea and toast today

  With Shakespeare’s line . . .

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

  . . . the futility and tedium of the succession of tomorrows is all the more manifest because of the metrical position of those ‘ands’. Which of us hasn’t stressed them in sentences like ‘I’ve got to mow the lawn and pick up the kids from school and do the tax returns and write a thank you letter and cancel the theatre tickets and ring the office . . .’?

  An eleven-syllable line was more the rule than the exception in Italian poetry, for the obvious reason that an iambic hendecasyllabic line must have a weak ending, like-a almost-a ever-y word-a in Italian-o. Dante’s Inferno is written in iambic endecasíllabo.

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  An English translation might go, in iambic pentameter:

  Midway upon the journey through our life

  There would be no special reason to use hendecasyllables in translating the Inferno: in fact, it would be rather difficult. English, unlike Italian, is full of words that end with a stressed syllable. The very nature of the iamb is its light-heavy progression, it seems to be a deeply embedded feature of English utterance: to throw that away in the pursuit of imitating the metrics of another language would be foolish.

  Lots of food for thought there, much of it beyond the scope of this book. The point is that the eleven-syllable line is open to you in your iambic verse.

  Why not nine syllables, you may be thinking? Why not dock a syllable and have a nine-syllable line with a weak ending?

  Let’s sit ourselves beside this river

  Well, this docking, this catalexis, results in an iambic tetrameter (four accents to a line) with a weak ending, that extra syllable. The point about pentameter is that it must have five stresses in it. The above example has only four, hence tetrameter (pronounced, incidentally, tetrAmeter, as pentameter is pentameter).

  Writers of iambic pentameter always add an unstressed syllable to make eleven syllables with five beats, they don’t take off a strong one to make four. They must keep that count of five. If you choose iambic pentameter you stick to it. The heroic line, the five-beat line, speaks in a very particular way, just as a waltz has an entirely different quality from a polka. A four-beat line, a tetrameter, has its individual characteristics too as we shall soon see, but it is rare to mix them up in the same poem. It is no more a rule than it is a rule never to use oil paints and watercolours in the same picture, but you really have to know what you’re doing if you decide to try it. For the purposes of these early exercises, we’ll stay purely pentametric.

  Here are a few examples of hendecasyllabic iambic pentameter, quoting some of the same poets and poems we quoted before. They all go:

  OUT WITH YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THEM UP: don’t forget to SAY THEM OUT LOUD to yourself to become familiar with the effect of the weak ending.

  So priketh hem nature in hir corages;

  Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages13

  CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales, General Prologue

  A woman’s face with Nature′s own hand painted

&nbs
p; Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

  SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 20

  That thou shall see the diff’rence of our spirits,

  I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:

  SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1

  How heinous had the fact been, how deserving

  Contempt, and scorn of all to be excluded

  MILTON,14 Samson Agonistes

  Our Brethren, are from Thames to Tweed departed,

  And of our Sisters, all the kinder hearted,

  To Edenborough gone, or Coacht, or Carted.

  DRYDEN: ‘Prologue to the University of Oxford’

  What can enable sots, or slaves or cowards?

  Alas! not all the blood of all the HOWARDS.

  POPE:15 Essay on Man

  It gives to think that our immortal being . . .

  WORDSWORTH:16 The Prelude

  A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

  Its loveliness increases: it will never

  Pass into nothingness;

  KEATS: Endymion, Book One

  And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,

  ROBERT FROST: ‘Spring Pools’

  With guarded unconcerned acceleration

  SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘From the Frontier of Writing’

  There’s far too much encouragement for poets –

  WENDY COPE: ‘Engineers’ Corner’

  Substitutions

  I hope you can see that the feminine ending is by no means the mark of imperfect iambic pentameter. Let us return to Macbeth, who is still unsure whether or not he should stab King Duncan:

  To prick the sides of my intent, but only

  Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself

  And falls on th’ other. – How now! what news?

  We have cleared up the first variation in this selection of three lines, the weak or unstressed ending. But what about this ‘vaulting ambition’ problem? Keats has done it too, look, at the continuation to his opening to Endymion: