The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  Nonetheless, the variations can hardly be said to spoil the poem: the docking of the final trochaic foot matches the standard male endings of the iambic. After all, one could look at it this way: are the odd lines out really iambic, or are they trochees with an extra weak syllable at the beginning? Trochees are the opposite of iambs: if you can pop a weak syllable at the end of an iambic line, why not shove one on to the beginning of a trochaic one? If you read those stanzas above, missing out the unstressed syllables at the start of each iambic line you will see what I mean. It is finally a matter of nomenclature and one’s own ear. For many modern metrists there’s no such thing as the iamb or the trochee at all, there are only lines with a set number of beats or stresses to them. Where the weak syllables come is, for them, irrelevant. They would have us believe that English verse should be treated as if it is accentual, but not accentual-syllabic. I can’t go that far, myself: there is an obvious and to my ear absolute difference between the whole nature of Hiawatha and that of, say, ‘She walks in beauty’. There certainly was to Longfellow and Byron.

  Here is a well-known couplet from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

  A Robin Red breast in a Cage23

  Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

  That is metrically identical to my made-up hybrid line:

  He bangs the drums and makes a noise

  Scaring girls and waking boys

  Heartless to quibble with Blake’s sentiment, but to most ears, trained or otherwise, it is a bit of a dud, isn’t it? This is a naïvety one expects, forgives and indeed celebrates with Blake (‘look at his paintings: couldn’t draw, couldn’t colour in’ as Professor Mackenny of Edinburgh University once excellently remarked) and from any poetic sensibility but his one might wrinkle one’s nose at such childlike versifying. If the poem went on alternating in regular fashion as I suggested with the drum-banging boy one could understand. In fact the next lines are:

  A dove house filled with doves and Pigeons

  Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

  That couplet does conform with the plan, the second line is completely trochaic, with weak ending and all, but now Blake continues with:

  A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

  Predicts the ruin of the State.

  Those are both iambic lines. And the next couplet?

  A Horse misus’d upon the Road

  Calls to Heaven for Human blood

  Well, I mean I’m sorry, but that’s just plain bad. Isn’t it? The syntax (grammatical construction) for a start: bit wobbly isn’t it? Does he really mean that the horse is calling to heaven: the other animals don’t, surely he means the misuse of horses calls to heaven? But Blake’s sentence structure invites us to picture a calling horse. And, my dear, the scansion! Presumably Blake means to elide Heaven into the monosyllable Heav’n (a perfectly common elision and one we might remember having to sing in school hymns), but it is odd that he bothers in earlier lines to put apostrophes in ‘starv’d’ and ‘misus’d’ and even shortens through to thro’ 24 yet fails to give us an apostrophe here where it really would count: he has already used the word Heaven once without elision, as a disyllabic word, six lines earlier: perhaps, one might argue, he felt that as a holy word it shouldn’t be altered in any way. I think this unlikely, he tends not to use capitals for God, although he uses them for ‘Me’ and ‘My’ and just about every word he can (incidentally, why does Horse deserve majuscules here, but not dog, I wonder? Why Pigeon and not dove?). Well, perhaps the unelided ‘Heaven’ is a misprint: if so, it is one that all the copies25 of Blake I have seen repeat. It is fairly obvious that this is how he wrote it in his manuscript.

  No, I think we can confidently state that there is no metrical scheme in place here: Blake seems to be in such a hurry to list the abominable treatment that animals suffer and the dire consequences attendant upon mankind if this cruelty continues that measured prosody has taken a back seat. Well, maybe that’s the point. Any kind of control or cunning in versification would mediate between Blake’s righteous indignation and the conscience and compassion of the reader, resulting in ‘better’ metre perhaps, but less direct and emotionally involving poetry. A more conventional poet might have written something like this:

  Robin redbreasts in a cage

  Put all heaven in a rage

  Dovecotes filled with doves and pigeons

  Shudder hell through all its regions

  Dogs starved at their masters’ gate

  Augur ruin for the state.

  Horses beaten on the road

  Call to Heav’n for human blood.

  There is a loss there: Blake’s point is that a robin, one single caged bird, is enough to put heaven in a rage (admittedly that isn’t true of the dove house, which has to be filled to cause hell to shudder, but no matter). Pluralising the animals for the sake of trochees does alter the sense, so let us try pure iambs:

  A robin redbreast in a cage

  Doth put all heaven in a rage.

  A dove house filled with doves and pigeons

  Will shudder hell through all its regions.

  A dog starved at his master’s gate

  Predicts the ruin of the state.

  A horse misused upon the road

  Doth call to heav’n for human blood.

  Neither, incidentally, solves the curious incident of the dog starved at his master’s gate: trochaic or iambic, the line’s a bitch. Surely it is the starving that needs the emphasis? ‘A dog that starves at’s master’s gate’ would do it, but it isn’t nice.

  We have seen two non-hybrid versions of the verse. Let us now remind ourselves of what Blake actually gave us:

  A Robin Red breast in a Cage

  Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

  A dove house filled with doves and Pigeons

  Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

  A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

  Predicts the ruin of the State.

  A Horse misus’d upon the Road

  Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

  I have mocked the scansion, syntax and manifold inconsistencies; I have had sport with these lines, but the fact is I love them. They’re messy, mongrel and mawkish but such is the spirit of Blake that somehow these things don’t matter at all – they only go to convince us of the work’s fundamental honesty and authenticity. Am I saying this because Blake is Blake and we all know that he was a Seer, a Visionary and an unique Genius? If I had never seen the lines before and didn’t know their author would I forgive them their clumsiness and ill-made infelicities? I don’t know and I don’t really care. It is a work concerned with innocence after all. And, lest we forget, this is the poem that begins with the quatrain (a quatrain is a stanza of four lines) that might usefully be considered the Poet’s Credo or Mission Statement.

  To see a World in a Grain of Sand

  And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

  And Eternity in an hour.

  The metre is shot to hell in every line, but who cares. It is the real thing. I think it was worth spending this much time on those lines because this is what you will do when you write your own verse – constantly make series of judgements about your metre and what ‘rules’ you can break and with what effect.

  Poetry Exercise 5

  It is now time, of course, to try writing your own verse of shorter measure. Here is what I want you to do: give yourself forty-five minutes; if you haven’t got the time now, come back to the exercise later. I believe it is much simpler if you have a subject, so I have selected Television. As usual I have had a go myself. Rhyming seems natural with lines of this length, but if you’d rather not, then don’t. I remind you once again that it is the versification that matters here, not any verbal or metaphysical brilliance. This is what I would like, with my attempts included.

  Two quatrains of standard, eight-syllable iambic tetrameter:

  They’re always chopping bits of meat –


  Forensic surgeons, daytime cooks.

  Extracting bullets, slicing ham

  Detecting flavours, grilling crooks.

  My new TV has got no knobs

  It’s sleeker than a marble bowl.

  I’m sure this suits designer snobs,

  But where’s the damned remote control?

  Two quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter:

  Big Brother’s on the air again,

  Polluting my TV.

  Who was it said,‘Mankind can’t bear

  Too much reality?26

  Sir Noël Coward drawled, when asked

  Which programmes he thought shone:

  ‘TV is not for watching, dear –

  It’s just for being on.’

  Two quatrains of trochaic tetrameter: one in ‘pure trochee’ à la Hiawatha, and one with docked weak endings in the second and fourth lines, à la ‘Tyger’.

  Soap stars seem to do it nightly –

  Slap and shag and rape each other.

  If I heard the plot-line rightly

  Darren’s pregnant by his brother.

  News of bombs in Central London,

  Flesh and blood disintegrate.

  Teenage voices screaming proudly,

  ‘Allah akbar! God is great!’

  So, your turn. Relax and feel the force.

  IV

  Ternary Feet: we meet the anapaest and the dactyl, the molossus, the tribrach, the amphibrach and the amphimacer

  Ternary Feet

  Now that you are familiar with four types of two-syllable, binary (or duple as a musician might say) foot – the iamb, the trochee, the pyrrhic and the spondee – try to work out what is going on metrically in the next line.

  In the dark of the forest so deep

  I can hear all the animals creep.

  Did you get the feeling that the only way to make sense of this metre is to think of the line as having feet with three elements to them, the third one bearing the beat? A kind of Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum triple rhythm? A ternary foot in metric jargon, a triple measure in music-speak.

  In the dark of the for -est so deep

  I can hear all the an -imals creep.

  Such a titty-tum foot is called an anapaest, to rhyme with ‘am a beast’, as if the foot is a skiing champion, Anna Piste. It is a ternary version of the iamb, in that it is a rising foot, going from weak to strong, but by way of two unstressed syllables instead of the iamb’s one.

  Any purely anapaestic line is either a monometer of three syllables . . .

  Unconvinced

  ...a dimeter of six . . .

  Unconvinced, at a loss

  ...a trimeter of nine . . .

  Unconvinced, at a loss, discontent

  . . . or a tetrameter of twelve . . .

  Unconvinced, at a loss, discontent, in a fix.

  And so on. Don’t be confused: that line of twelve syllables is not a hexameter, it is a tetrameter. It has four stressed syllables.

  Remember: it is the number of stresses, not the number of syllables, that determines whether it is penta- or tetra- or hexa- or any other kind of -meter:

  Now look at the anapaestic tetrameter above and note one other thing: the first foot is one word, the second foot is two thirds of a single word, foot number three is two and a third words and the fourth foot three whole words. Employing a metre like the anapaest doesn’t mean every foot of a line has to be composed of an anapaestic word:

  That would be ridiculous, as silly as an iambic pentameter made up of ten words, as mocked by Pope – not to mention fiendishly hard. Nor would an anapaestic tetrameter have to be made up of four pure anapaestic phrases:

  The rhythm comes through just as clearly with . . .

  or . . .

  . . . where every foot has a different number of words. It is the beats that give the rhythm. Who would have thought poetry would be so arithmetical? It isn’t, of course, but prosodic analysis and scansion can be. Not that any of this really matters for our purposes: such calculations are for the academics and students of the future who will be scanning and scrutinising your work.

  Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ is in anapaestic ballad form (four-stress lines alternating with three-stress lines):

  For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

  I suppose the best-known anapaestic poem of all (especially to Americans) is Clement Clarke Moore’s tetrametric ‘The Night Before Christmas’:

  ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

  Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

  The stockings were hung by the chimney with care

  In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

  The second couplet has had its initial weak syllable docked in each line. This is called a clipped or acephalous (literally ‘headless’) foot. You could just as easily say the anapaest has been substituted for an iamb, it amounts to precisely the same thing.

  Both the Poe and the Moore works have a characteristic lilt that begs for the verse to be set to music (which they each have been, of course), but anapaests can be very rhythmic and fast moving too: unsuited perhaps to the generality of contemplative poetry, but wonderful when evoking something like a gallop. Listen to Robert Browning’s ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’:

  I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and he

  I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

  It begs to be read out loud. You can really hear the thunder of the hooves here, don’t you think? Notice, though, that Browning also dispenses with the first weak syllable in each line. For the verse to be in ‘true’ anapaestic tetrameters it would have to go something like this (the underline represents an added syllable, not a stress):

  Then I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and he

  And I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

  But Browning has given us clipped opening feet:

  Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

  Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum.

  instead of the full

  Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty- tum

  Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

  If you tap out the rhythms of each of the above with your fingers on the table, or just mouth them to yourself (quietly if you’re on a train or in a café, you don’t want to be stared at) I think you will agree that Browning knew what he was about. The straight anapaests are rather dull and predictable. The opening iamb or acephalous foot, Da-dum! makes the whole ride so much more dramatic and realistic, mimicking the way horses hooves fall. Which is not to say that, when well done, pure anapaests can’t work too. Byron’s poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacharib’ shows them at their best.

  TAKE OUT YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THE ANAPAESTS HERE (Assyrian is three syllables, by the way, not four):

  The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

  And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

  And the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea,

  And the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

  Byron doesn’t keep this up all the way through, however:

  For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

  And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

  He could have written the anapaest ‘And he breathed . . .’ but I think his instinct to use the clipped ‘And breathed’ instead is exactly right for the conceit. It is a very subtle difference. What do you think? Try saying each alternative aloud. I think the clipping causes us to linger a tiny bit longer on the word ‘breathed’ than we would in strict anapaestic rhythm and this brings the image to life. Now, back to those standard anapaests beating:

  Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty- tum

  Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

  Imagine that, instead of doing what Browning and Byron did and clipping off the head like so:

  Da-dum, titty
-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

  Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

  you started with anapaests and ended with a spondee which, as I mentioned earlier, is a double-stressed foot: Hard cheese. Humdrum.

  Anapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!

  Anapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!

  That might remind you of the gallop from Rossini’s overture to William Tell, famously used for the TV series The Lone Ranger and the three-way orgy in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

  The spondee (inasmuch as it truly exists in English) makes a great full stop, either serious like a tolling bell or comic, as in the famous knocking rhythm that Americans express as:

  Shave and a hair cut, two bits!

  Tum-titty tum tum. Tum tum!

  If you wanted to scan that line, you would say ‘haircut’ and ‘two bits’ were both spondaic. But what is ‘shave-and-a’? When you think about it, it is an anapaest in reverse. Instead of titty-tum , it is tum-titty. . A new ternary foot for us to meet and its name is dactyl.

  THE DACTYL

  As a matter of fact the earliest and greatest epics in our culture, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were written in dactylic hexameters. Remember, though, classical poetry was written in quantitative measure, where those feet were better described as ‘long short short’, — – – ‘wait for it’, ‘cool, not hot’, ‘smooth black pig’ rather than our sprightly tum-titty. The word dactyl comes from the Greek for ‘finger’: fingers have one long joint and two short ones. In reality, Greek metrical units are closer to musical notes in that they tell you their duration: a long syllable takes exactly twice as long to utter as a short one, hence you could say a dactyl for Greekstyle quantitative verse should be written thus:

  Homer’s verse didn’t swing along in a bouncy rhythmic way, it pulsed in gentle lo-o-o-ng short-short, lo-o-o-ng short-short waves, each line usually ending with a spondee. As I hope I have made pretty clear by now, that sort of metrical arrangement isn’t suited to the English tongue. We go, not by duration, but by syllabic accentuation.