The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  Avoid ‘wrenching’: a wrenched accent is a false stress applied to a word in order for it to fit the metre, thus:

  He chose a word to force a wrenched accént

  Write in contemporary English, avoiding archaic ‘poetical’ vocabulary, word order inversions, unnecessary (‘expletive’) filler words like ‘did’ and ‘so’ in tortured constructions of this kind:

  The swain did stand ’midst yonder sward so green

  Then heard I wide the vasty portals ope

  I shall do the exercise myself now, adhering to all the conditions, just to give a vague idea of the kind of thing I’m expecting.

  Tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick ...

  Right. This is what I have come up with.

  I wonder why the postman hasn’t come.

  I looked at eight, I’ll look again at nine.

  The curtains closed remind me of my death.

  You might induce excretion using figs.

  Don’t worry if the words don’t make no sense.

  You look at me, your looking turns me on.

  I haven’t time to take your call right now,

  So leave a message when you hear the tone.

  The mind of man can not contain itself.

  Some people eat like pigs and some like birds,

  Some eat like horses nosing in a trough.

  I write the line and feel the metre flow.

  There’s nothing you can say to ease my pain.

  You can’t explain the beauty of a desk –

  That rightness ink and paper seem to breathe.

  The needs of many far outweigh our own.

  Oh Christ, I hate the way you do your hair,

  Expect you feel the same about my tie.

  Your sharpness rips my paper heart in two.

  I’ve been and gone and done a stupid thing.

  I hope that gives you the confidence to see that this exercise isn’t about quality, poetic vision or verbal mastery.

  Your turn now. I’ll give you some blank space. It’s just in case you’ve come without a pad. Well, blow me, look at that line ‘it’s just in case you’ve come without a pad’ – iambic pentameter gets into the system like a germ, as a seasoned Shakespearean actor will tell you.

  By all means refer to the samples of iambic pentameter above: mine or those of the Masters . . .

  It is time to make your metre . . . now.

  How did you do? Did you get any feeling that, crude, elementary, nonsensical and bizarre as some of the lines you’ve written may be, they nonetheless hint at that thing we call poetry? That nothing more than the simplest use of the simplest metre suggested to you a way of expressing thoughts, stories, reflections, ideas and passions that ordinary speech or prose could never offer? Above all, that writing in strict metre doesn’t result in stiff, formal or old-fashioned English?

  I would recommend doing that exercise whenever you can. It is like performing scales on your piano or sketching sugar bowls and wineglasses for practice. You just get better and better and better as the extraordinary possibilities of this most basic form begin to open up.

  ‘Nothing more than taking a line for a walk.’That is how the artist Paul Klee described drawing. It can be much the same with poetry.

  For the next few days, take lots of iambs for a walk and see where their feet lead you. With notebook in hand and a world of people, nature, thoughts, news and feelings to be compressed into iambic pentameter you are taking your first poetic steps.

  II

  End-stopping – enjambment – caesura – weak endings – trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions

  End-stopping, Enjambment and Caesura

  In our first exercise we looked at existing fragments of iambic pentameter:

  The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

  The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.

  And we had a go at producing our own:

  I haven’t time to take your call right now,

  So leave a message when you hear the tone.

  In both examples each line contains a single thought that finishes with the line. This is called end-stopping, which we could mark like this.

  The woods decay, the woods decay and fall

  I haven’t time to take your call right now

  The iambic pentameter would be a dull dog indeed if that were all it could do.

  I have already included (in Poetry Exercise 1) a couplet from Wilfred Owen where the meaning doesn’t stop with the line, but RUNS on through to the next:

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

  No end-stopping there. The term used to describe such a running on is enjambment, from the French enjamber to stride, literally to get one’s leg over . . .

  His mother was a learned lady, famed

  For every branch of every science known.

  BYRON: Don Juan, Canto I, X

  So threatened he, but Satan to no threats

  Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:

  MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book IV

  Look closely at those two examples above. Not only do they feature these run-ons or enjambments, which allow a sense of continual flow, they also contain pauses which break up that flow; in the examples above it happens that these pauses are expressed by commas that serve the office of a breath, or change of gear: I shall render them like this ¶.

  His mother was a learned lady ¶ famed

  For every branch of every science known.

  So threatened he ¶ but Satan to no threats

  Gave heed ¶ but waxing more in rage replied:

  The name for such a pause or break is a caesura 6 (from the Latin caedere, caesum, to cut.7 You’d pronounce it as in ‘he says YOU’RE a fool’).

  Caesuras don’t by any means have to lead on to an enjambment as in the two examples above, however. You can have a caesura in an end-stopped line.

  The woods decay ¶ the woods decay and fall

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

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

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

  Not every comma will signal a caesura, by the way. In Poetry Exercise 1 I included this pair of lines from Paradise Lost:

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

  Progressive, retrograde, or standing still.

  Only the first comma of the first line is a caesura.

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

  Progressive, retrograde, or standing still.

  Commas in lists (serial commas and Oxford commas as grammarians would call them – a now archaic usage of commas, placing them before conjunctions like ‘and’,‘with’ and ‘or’) do not usually herald a caesura; though some readers might argue that the second comma of the second line above could betoken the small pause or breath that defines a caesura.

  How can a scrutiny of such minuscule nuances possibly help you in your writing of poetry? Well, you wait until Exercise 3: I confidently predict that you will astonish yourself.

  The fact is, enjambment and caesura, these two – what shall we call them? techniques, effects, tricks, devices, tools? – however we describe them, are crucial liberators of the iambic line. They either extend or break the flow, allowing the rhythms and hesitations of human breath, thought and speech to enliven and enrich the verse. They are absolutely not a failure to obey the rules of pentameter. Let’s look at the Byron and the Milton again:

  His mother was a learned lady, famed

  For every branch of every science known.

  So threatened he, but Satan to no threats

  Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:

  You might be tempted to believe that for the sake of sense the lines should be written thus:

  His mother was a learned lady,

  Famed for every branch of every science known.

  So threatened he,


  But Satan to no threats gave heed,

  But waxing more in rage replied:

  And Wilfred Owen’s two lines could become:

  If you could hear, at every jolt,

  The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

  This arrangement would enable us to end-stop in our heads or out loud as we read the verse. Surely that’s a better way of organising things? That is the sense after all, so why not therefore break the lines accordingly? This is the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

  NO, DAMN YOU, NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!

  THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE VERSE IS NOT THE

  SENSE BUT THE METRE.

  Metre is the primary rhythm, the organised background against which the secondary rhythms of sense and feeling are played out. This is a crucial point. You may think that the idea of feeling and thought being subservient to metre is a loopy one. Why should poets build themselves a prison? If they’ve got something to say, why don’t they get on and say it in the most direct manner possible? Well, painters paint within a canvas and composers within a structure. It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. Poets sometimes squeeze their forms to breaking point, this is what energises much verse, but if the forms were not there in the first place the verse would be listless to the point of anomie. Without gravity all would float free: the ballet leaps of the poet’s language would lose almost all their power.‘Souls who have felt too much liberty’, as Wordsworth said, welcome form:‘In truth the prison, into which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is.’8

  Back to our caesuras and enjambments. We may not consciously be aware as we listen or read on the page, but the five beats, even when paused or run through, predominate in the inner ear. The fact that the sense runs through, doesn’t mean the lines shouldn’t end where they do.

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

  Although there is run-on, consider in your mind and your poet’s ear the different value that is given to ‘blood’ in the example above and in this:

  If you could hear, at every jolt,

  The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

  READ THEM BOTH ALOUD and note how much more stress is placed on ‘blood’ in the proper, pentametric layout. I’m sure you agree that Owen knew what he was doing and that the line structure should stay.

  There will always be a tiny sense of visual or aural end-stopping at the end of a line no matter how much its sense runs on.

  Shakespeare, as you would expect, in the blank (unrhymed) verse of his plays, uses caesura and enjambment a great deal. They are keys that unlock the dramatic potential of iambic pentameter. Look at this speech from the first scene of The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, crazed by jealousy, believes his wife to have cuckolded him (that she’s slept with another man). Here he is with their small son, Mamillius. Don’t forget to recite or move your lips!

  Go play, boy, play. ¶ Thy mother plays, and I

  Play too; ¶ but so disgraced a part, ¶ whose issue

  Will hiss me to my grave. ¶ Contempt and clamour

  Will be my knell. ¶ Go play, boy, play. ¶ There have been,

  Or I am much deceived, ¶ cuckolds ere now,

  And many a man there is, ¶ even at this present,

  Now, ¶ while I speak this, ¶ holds his wife by th’arm

  That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence,

  And his pond fished by his next neighbour, ¶ by

  Sir Smile, his neighbour. ¶ Nay there’s comfort in’t,

  Whiles other men have gates, ¶ and those gates opened,

  As mine, against their will. ¶ Should all despair

  That have revolted wives, ¶ the tenth of mankind

  Would hang themselves. ¶ Physic for’t there’s none.

  Fourteen lines, but sixteen caesuras and seven enjambments: the verse in its stop-start jerking is as pathological and possessed as the mind of the man speaking. Compare it to another fourteen lines, the fourteen lines of the famous Eighteenth sonnet: out loud, please, or as near as dammit:

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

  And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

  And every fair from fair sometime declines,

  By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

  Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade

  When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.

  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, ¶ and this gives life to thee.

  No run-ons at all, and just one caesura,9 an absolute killer example, which gives weight to the grand and glorious resolution of the sonnet delivered by those three final feet: ‘and this gives life to thee’. The perfectly end-stopped verse, unbroken by caesura up until that point, perfectly reflects a sense of assurance, just as the broken, spasmodic breaks and runs of Leontes’s ravings perfectly reflect the opposite: a crazed and unstable state of mind.

  Macbeth, considering whether or not to kill Duncan and grasp his destiny, is in something of a dither too. Say this:

  – 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?

  Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7

  How insupportably dull and lifeless dramatic verse would be if made up only of end-stopped lines. How imponderably perfect a poem can be if it is all end-stopped.

  I should mention here that in performance many Shakespearean actors will give a vocal (and often almost imperceptible) end-stop to a line, even when there is clear run-on in its sense. In the same way that the verse works better to the eye and inner ear when the metric structure is in clear pentameters, so spoken verse can work better when the actor represents each line with a faint pause or breath. It is a matter of fashion, context and preference. Some theatre directors hate dramatic end-stopping and are determined that meaning should take precedence over metre, others insist upon it (sometimes at the expense of clarity). An actor friend of mine, unaware of the jargon, was very alarmed on his first day as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company to hear an old hand ask the director before the first read-through of a new production: ‘Are we end-stopping, darling?’ Took him three weeks to dare to ask what it meant: he had imagined it was something to do with rehearsal tea breaks.

  Robert Browning, some of whose most memorable verse took the form of the dramatic monologue (not verse written for the stage, but poems written as if spoken by a first-person narrator), was an absolute master of the interior rhythmic play possible within the wider structures of the metre. Out loud:

  No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why!

  The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,

  Is not to fancy what were fair in life

  Provided it could be, – but, finding first

  What may be, then find how to make it fair

  Up to our means; a very different thing!

  BROWNING: ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’

  I’ll let you mark that with caesuras and enjambments yourself. It is a marvellously complex and animated series of clauses and subordinate clauses, yet all subservient to the benign tyranny of pure iambic pentameter. Not a syllable out of place, not a ‘cheat’ (rogue extra syllable or rogue docked one) anywhere. A complicated and disgracefully self-justifying point is being made by the bishop, who is excusing h
is life of cheating, double-dealing and irreligious selfishness by means of subtle and sophisticated argument. The pauses, inner rhythms and alterations of momentum provided by the use of enjambment and caesura echo this with great wit and precision.

  Doubt, assertion, reassurance, second thoughts, affirmation, question and answer, surprise and the unstable rhythms of thought and speech are some of the effects that can be achieved with these two simple devices, caesura and enjambment, within verse that still obeys the ‘rules’ of iambic pentameter.

  I wouldn’t want you to believe that they are only for use in dramatic verse like Shakespeare’s and Browning’s, however. After all, it is unlikely that this is the kind of poetry you will be writing yourself. Verse as reflective and contemplative as that of Wordsworth’s Prelude makes great use of them too. MARK THE CAESURAS AND ENJAMBMENTS HERE: I shan’t let you read on till you’ve fished out a pencil and begun, saying out loud as you go:

  Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to make

  A present joy the matter of a song,

  Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains

  That would not be forgotten, and are here

  Recorded: to the open fields I told

  A prophecy: poetic numbers came

  Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe

  A renovated spirit singled out,

  How did it go? You might have found as I did that it was tricky to decide precisely whether or not there were caesuras in the third and seventh lines and whether there was more than one in the first. I have put the doubtful ones in brackets.

  Thus far, O Friend! did I, ¶ not used to make

  A present joy the matter of a song,

  Pour forth that day my soul (¶) in measured strains

  That would not be forgotten, ¶ and are here

  Recorded: ¶ to the open fields I told

  A prophecy: ¶ poetic numbers came

  Spontaneously (¶) to clothe in priestly robe

  A renovated spirit singled out,

  If you read the poem to yourself I think the bracketed caesuras do indicate the faintest of breaths or pauses which would in turn suggest the bracketed run-ons. It is not an exact science despite the claims of some scholiasts and poetasters.10 Of course, it is only of importance or interest to us here because we are examining the verse as budding poets eager to think about how life and variation is given to an otherwise over-drilled regiment of foot; we are not marking verse up either for performance or for correction by a teacher.