The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  He inclines to project bad vibes

  A project to study the inclines.

  He proceeds to rebel.

  The rebel steals the proceeds.

  Some words may have two stresses but one (marked here with an´) will always be a little heavier:

  ábdicate considerátion.

  Sometimes it is a matter of nationality or preference. READ OUT THESE WORDS:

  Chicken-soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigarette.

  Magazine.

  Those are the more usual accents in British English. NOW TRY THE SAME WORDS WITH THESE DIFFERENT STRESSES . . .

  Chicken-soup. Arm -chair. Sponge -cake. Cigarette.

  Magazine.

  That is how they are said in America (and increasingly these days in the UK and Australia too). What about the following?

  Lámentable. Mándatory. Prímarily. Yésterday. Incómparable.

  Laméntable. Mandátory. Primárily. Yesterdáy. Incompárable.

  Whether the tonic should land as those in the first line or the second is a vexed issue and subject to much cóntroversy or contróversy. The pronunciations vary according to circumstances or circumstánces or indeed circum-stahnces too English, class-bound and ticklish to go into here.

  You may think, ‘Well, now, hang on, surely this is how everyone (the Chinese and Thais aside) talks, pushing one part of the word but not another?’ Not so.

  The French, for instance, tend towards equal stress in a word. They pronounce Canada, Can-a-da as opposed to our Canada. We say Bernard, the French say Ber-nard. You may have noticed that when Americans pronounce French they tend to go overboard and hurl the emphasis on to the final syllable, thinking it sounds more authentic, Ber-nard and so on. They are so used to speaking English with its characteristic downward inflection that to American ears French seems to go up at the end. With trademark arrogance, we British keep the English inflection. Hence the American pronunciation clichÉ, the English cliché and the authentic French cli-ché. Take also the two words ‘journal’ and ‘machine’, which English has inherited from French. We pronounce them journal and machine. The French give them their characteristic equal stress: jour-nal and ma-chine. Even words with many syllables are equally stressed in French: we say repetition, they say répétition (ray-pay-tee-see-on).

  As you might imagine, this has influenced greatly the different paths that French and English poetry have taken. The rhythms of English poetry are ordered by SYLLABIC ACCENTUATION, those of French more by QUANTITATIVE MEASURE. We won’t worry about those terms or what they portend just yet: it should already be clear that if you’re planning to write French verse then this is not the book for you.

  In a paragraph of written prose we pay little attention to how those English accents fall unless, that is, we wish to make an extra emphasis, which is usually rendered by italics, underscoring or CAPITALISATION. In German an emphasised word is s t r e t c h e d. With prose the eye is doing much more than the ear. The inner ear is at work, however, and we can all recognise the rhythms in any piece of writing. It can be spoken out loud, after all, for recitation or for rhetoric, and if it is designed for that purpose, those rhythms will be all the more important.

  But prose, rhythmic as it can be, is not poetry. The rhythm is not organised.

  Meet Metre

  Poetry’s rhythm is organised.

  THE LIFE OF A POEM IS MEASURED IN REGULAR HEARTBEATS.

  THE NAME FOR THOSE HEARTBEATS IS METRE.

  When we want to describe anything technical in English we tend to use Greek. Logic, grammar, physics, mechanics, gynaecology, dynamics, economics, philosophy, therapy, astronomy, politics – Greek gave us all those words. The reservation of Greek for the technical allows us to use those other parts of English, the Latin and especially the Anglo-Saxon, to describe more personal and immediate aspects of life and the world around us. Thus to be anaesthetised by trauma has a more technical, medical connotation than to be numb with shock, although the two phrases mean much the same. In the same way, metre can be reserved precisely to refer to the poetic technique of organising rhythm, while words like ‘beat’ and ‘flow’ and ‘pulse’ can be freed up for less technical, more subjective and personal uses.

  PLEASE DO NOT BE PUT OFF by the fact that throughout this section on metre I shall tend to use the conventional Greek names for nearly all the metrical units, devices and techniques that poets employ. In many respects, as I shall explain elsewhere, they are inappropriate to English verse,2 but English-language poets and prosodists have used them for the last thousand years. It is useful and pleasurable to have a special vocabulary for a special activity.3 Convention, tradition and precision suggest this in most fields of human endeavour, from music and painting to snooker and snow-boarding. It does not make those activities any less rich, individual and varied. So let it be with poetry.

  Poetry is a word derived from Greek, as is Ode (from poein, to make and odein, to sing). The majority of words we use to describe the anatomy of a poem are Greek in origin too. Metre (from metron) is simply the Greek for measure, as in metronome, kilometre, biometric and so on. The Americans use the older spelling meter which I prefer, but which my UK English spellcheck refuses to like.

  In the beginning, my old cello teacher used to say, was rhythm. Rhythm is simply the Greek for ‘flow’ (we get our word diarrhoea from the same source as it happens). We know what rhythm is in music, we can clap our hands or tap our feet to its beat. In poetry it is much the same:

  ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum

  Say that out loud. Tap your feet, drum your fingers or clap your hands as you say it. It is a meaningless chant, certainly. But it is a meaningless regular and rhythmic chant.

  Ten sounds, alternating in beat or accent. Actually, it is not very helpful to say that the line is made up of ten sounds; we’ll soon discover that for our prosodic purposes it is more useful to look at it as five repeating sets of that ti-tum heartbeat. My old cello teacher liked to do it this way, clapping her hands as she did so:

  and one and two and three and four and five

  In music that would be five bars (or five measures if you’re American). In poetry such a bar or measure is called a foot.

  Five feet marching in rhythm. If the foot is the heartbeat, the metre can best be described as the readout or cardiogram trace.

  Let’s give the metre meaning by substituting words.

  He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise

  That line consists of FIVE ti-tum feet:

  It is a line of TEN syllables (decasyllabic):

  Ten syllables where in this metre the accent always falls on the even-numbered beat. Notice, though, that there aren’t ten words in this example, there are only nine. That’s because ‘dreadful’ has two syllables.

  Bangs, drum, makes, dread and noise are those even-numbered accented words (and syllable) here. You could show the rhythm of the line like this:

  Some metrists would call ‘he’,‘the’,‘and’,‘a’ and ‘-ful’ DEPRESSIONS. Other words to describe a non-stressed syllable are SLACK, SCUD and WEAK. The line has a rising rhythm, that is the point: from weak to strong, terminating in its fifth stressed beat.

  The most usual way to SCAN the line, in other words to demonstrate its metric structure and show the cardiogram trace as it were, is to divide the five feet with this mark | (known as a VIRGULE, the same as the French word for ‘comma’ or ‘slash’ that you might remember from school) and use symbols to indicate the accented and the weak syllables. Here I have chosen O to represent the off-beat, the depressed, unaccented syllable, and for the beat, stress or accented syllable.

  There are other accepted ways of marking SCANSION: using – or u or x for an unaccented beat and / for an accented one. If you were taught scansion at school or have a book on the subject you will often see one of the following:

  For the most part I shall be sticking to and however, as I find they represent the ti and the tum more naturally. Besides, the other scan
sion marks derive from classical metre, which was concerned with vowel length rather than stress.

  The Great Iamb

  (and other binary feet)

  The word for a rising-rhythm foot with a ti-tum, , beat like those above is an iambus, more usually called an iamb.

  I remember this by thinking of Popeye, whose trademark rusty croak went:

  I yam what I yam ...

  We will concentrate on this foot for the rest of this section, but you should know that there are three other feet in the same BINARY (two unit) family.

  THE TROCHEE is a backwards iamb, a falling rhythm, tum-ti:

  The trochee obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with poky or choky.

  As a falling rhythm, a tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, it finishes on an unaccented syllable – an ‘and’ if you’re counting and clapping musically:

  The SPONDEE is of equal stressed units: This also obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with the name John Dee. You may feel that it is almost impossible to give absolutely equal stress to two successive words or syllables in English and that there will always be some slight difference in weight. Many metrists (Edgar Allan Poe among them) would argue that the spondee doesn’t functionally exist in English verse. Again, we’ll think about the ramifications later, for the time being you might as well know it.

  The fourth and final permutation is of unstressed units OO and is called the PYRRHIC foot. Don’t bother to think about the pyrrhic either for the moment, we’ll be looking at it later. All the feet possible in English are gathered in a table at the end of the chapter, with examples to demonstrate their stresses.

  The iamb is the hero of this chapter, so let us take a closer look at it:

  Ten syllables, yes, but a count, or measure, of five feet, five iambic feet, culminating (the opposite of the trochaic line) in a strong or accented ending. SAY IT OUT LOUD AGAIN:

  and one and two and three and four and five

  He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise

  It is a measure of five and the prosodic word, from the Greek again, for ‘measure of five’ is PENTAMETER. That simple line is an example therefore of IAMBIC PENTAMETER.

  The Iambic Pentameter

  The rising rhythm of the five-beat iambic pentameter has been since the fourteenth century the most widely used metre in English poetry. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the preponderance of verse by Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Owen, Yeats and Frost, all written in iambic pentameter. It is the very breath of English verse and has earned the title the HEROIC LINE.

  Poetry Exercise 1

  Try reading the following extracts out loud to yourself, noting the varying pulses, some strong and regularly accented, others gentler and more flowing. Each pair of lines is an example of ‘perfect’ iambic pentameter, having exactly ten syllables, five iambic feet (five stresses on the even-numbered beats) to the line. Once you’ve read each pair a few times, TAKE A PENCIL AND MARK UP EACH FOOT. Use a or a / for the accented syllables or words and a or a – for the unaccented syllables or word. I have double-spaced each pair to make it easier for you to mark them.

  I really would urge you to take time over these: savour every line. Remember GOLDEN RULE ONE – reading verse can be like eating chocolate, so much more pleasurable when you allow it slowly to melt inside you, so much less rewarding when you snap off big chunks and bolt them whole, all but untasted.

  DON’T LET YOUR EYE FALL FURTHER DOWN THE PAGE THAN THIS LINE until you have taken out your pencil or pen. You may prefer a pencil so that you can rub out your marks and leave this book in pristine condition when you lend it to someone else – naturally the publishers would prefer you to buy another copy for your friends – the important thing is to get used to defacing this book in one way or another. Here are the rules of the exercise again:

  Read each pair of lines out loud, noting the ti-tum rhythms.

  Now MARK the weak/strong (accented/unaccented) syllables and the ‘bar lines’ that separate each foot in this manner:

  Or you may find it easier with a pencil to do it like this:

  When you have done this, read each pair of lines OUT LOUD once more, exaggerating the stresses on each beat.

  He sit hym up withouten wordes mo,

  And with his ax he smoot the corde atwo,4

  CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales, The Reeve’s Tale

  That time of year, thou mayst in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 73

  In sooth I know not why I am so sad:

  It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

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

  Their wand’ring course, now high, now low, then hid

  Progressive, retrograde, or standing still

  MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book VIII

  Oft has our poet wisht, this happy Seat

  Might prove his fading Muse’s last retreat.

  DRYDEN: ‘Epilogue to Oxford’

  And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

  One truth is clear,‘Whatever is, is right.’

  POPE: An Essay on Man, Epistle 1

  And thus they formed a group that’s quite antique,

  Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.

  BYRON: Don Juan, Canto II, CXCIV

  Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight

  And all the air a solemn stillness holds.

  GRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’

  And certain hopes are with me, that to thee

  This labour will be welcome, honoured Friend!

  WORDSWORTH: The Prelude, Book One

  St Agnes’ Eve – Ah, bitter chill it was!

  The owl for all his feathers was a-cold;

  KEATS: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

  The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

  The vapours weep their burthen to the ground

  TENNYSON: ‘Tithonus’

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

  WILFRED OWEN: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book

  W. B. YEATS: ‘When You Are Old’

  And death is better, as the millions know,

  Than dandruff, night-starvation, or B.O.

  W. H. AUDEN: ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, II

  He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.

  When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,

  ROBERT FROST: ‘The Death of the Hired Man’

  Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

  We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

  SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘Blackberry Picking’

  And praised his wife for every meal she made.

  And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

  SIMON ARMITAGE: ‘Poem’

  Nearly seven hundred years of iambic pentameter represented there. Marking the beats is not a supremely challenging exercise, but remains a good way of becoming more familiar with the nature of the line and its five regular accents.

  Having marked the couplets up, now GO BACK AND READ THEM, either out loud or to yourself. Simply relish them as if you were tasting wine.

  Lines of iambic pentameter are, as I hope you will agree, capable of being formal, strongly accented, flowing, conversational, comic, descriptive, narrative, contemplative, declamatory and any combination of those and many other qualities. I deliberately chose pairs of lines, to show the metre flowing in more than just one line.

  For all that the progression of beats is identical in each extract I hope you also saw that there are real differences of bounce and tempo, rise and fall, attack and cadence. Already it should be apparent that a very simple form, constructed from the
most basic rules, is capable of strikingly different effects.

  Armed with nothing more than the knowledge that an iambic pentameter is a line of five alternating weak-strong beats, it is time to attempt our own!

  Poetry Exercise 2

  What I want you to do in a moment is to put down this book, pick up your notepad and write out at least twenty lines of your own iambic pentameter. If you haven’t time, or you’re in an unsuitable place, then wait until the moment is right or go back and read the samples above again. I don’t want you to read any further until you’ve tried this exercise. Before we begin, here are the rules:

  Write some SINGLE LINES and some PAIRS OF LINES.

  For this exercise, do not use rhyme.

  Write some lines, or pairs, that are conversational, some that are simple, some that are more complicated in construction, some that are descriptive, some that are silly, some that are grave.

  Write with increasing speed: allow the rhythm and line length to become second nature. You will find yourself feeling ten syllables and five accents in an iambic line very quickly. You will hear the feet falling ahead of you to their final stressed syllable.

  By all means revise and rewrite your lines but DO NOT polish or strive for any effect beyond the metrical.

  This is an exercise: even if you already know about enjambment and feminine endings, or trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions avoid them. If you don’t know about them, don’t worry or be put off. You soon will.

  Give yourself about thirty seconds a line. That’s ten minutes for twenty. No more. This is not about quality, it is about developing a feel for the metre and allowing it to become second nature.

  Try to use a variety of word lengths: heed Alexander Pope’s warning against monosyllables:

  And ten low words oft creep in one dull line5