The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  Looking back over the last few paragraphs I am aware that you might think me a dreadful, hidebound old dinosaur. I assure you I am not. I am uncertain why I should feel the need to prove this, but I do want you to understand that I am far from contemptuous of Modernism and free verse, the experimental and the avant-garde or of the poetry of the streets. Whitman, Cummings, O’Hara, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Jandl, Olsen, Ginsberg, Pound and Zephaniah are poets that have given me, and continue to give me, immense pleasure. I do not despise free verse. Read this:

  Post coitum omne animal triste

  i see you

  !

  you come

  closer

  improvident

  with your coming

  then –

  stretched to scratch

  – is it a trick of the light? –

  i see you

  worlded with pain

  but of

  necessity not

  weeping

  cigaretted and drinked

  loaded against yourself

  you seem so yes bold

  irreducible

  but nuded and afterloved

  you are not so strong

  are you

  ?

  after all

  There’s the problem. The above is precisely the kind of worthless arse-dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition.2 It took me under a minute and a half to write and while I dare say you can see what utter wank it is, there are many who would accept it as poetry. All the clichés are there, pointless lineation, meaningless punctuation and presentation, fatuous creations of new verbs ‘cigaretted and drinked’, ‘worlded’, ‘nuded’, ‘afterloved’,3 a posy Latin title – every pathology is presented. Like so much of what passes for poetry today it is also listless, utterly drained of energy and drive – a common problem with much contemporary art but an especial problem with poetry that chooses to close itself off from all metrical pattern and form. It is like music without beat or shape or harmony: not music at all, in fact.‘Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,’ Robert Frost wrote. Not much of a game at all, really.

  My ‘poem’ is also pretentious, pretentious in exactly the way much hotel cooking is pretentious – aping the modes of seriously innovative culinary artists and trusting that the punters will be fooled. Ooh, it’s got a lavender reduction and a sorrel jus: it’s a pavane of mullet with an infusion of green tea and papaya. Bollocks, give me steak and kidney pudding. Real haute cuisine is created by those who know what they are doing. Learning metre and form and other such techniques is the equivalent of understanding culinary ingredients, how they are grown, how they are prepared, how they taste, how they combine: then and only then is one fit to experiment with new forms. It begins with love, an absolute love of eating and of the grain and particularity of food. It is first expressed in the drudgery of chopping onions and preparing the daily stockpots, in the commitment to work and concentration. They won’t let you loose on anything more creative until you have served this apprenticeship. I venerate great chefs like Heston Blumenthal, Richard Corrigan and Gordon Ramsay: they are the real thing, they have done the work – work of an intensity most of us would baulk at. Of course some people think that they, Blumenthal, Corrigan et al., are pretentious, but here such thinking derives from a fundamental ignorance and fear. So much easier to say that everything you fail to understand is pretentious than to learn to discriminate between the authentic and the fraudulent. Between lazy indiscipline and frozen traditionalism there lies a thrilling space where the living, the fresh and the new may be discovered.

  Fortunately, practising metre and verse forms is not as laborious, repetitive and frightening as toiling in a kitchen under the eye of a tyrannical chef. But we should never forget that poetry, like cooking, derives from love, an absolute love for the particularity and grain of ingredients – in our case, words.

  So, rant over: let us acquaint ourselves with some of the poetic forms that have developed and evolved over the centuries.

  The most elemental way in which lineation can be taken forward is through the collection of lines into STANZA FORM: let us look at some options.

  II

  Stanzaic Variations

  OPEN FORMS

  Tercets, quatrains and other stanzas – terza rima – ottava rima – rhyme royal – ruba’iyat – the Spenserian stanza

  A TERCET is a stanza of three lines, QUATRAINS come in fours, CINQUAINS in fives, SIXAINS in sixes. That much is obvious. There are however specific formal requirements for ‘proper’ cinquains or sixains written in the French manner. There is, for example, a sixain form more commonly called the sestina, which we will examine in a separate section. Forms which follow a set pattern are called closed forms: the haiku, limerick and sonnet would be examples of single-stanza closed forms. Forms which leave the overall length of a poem up to the poet are called open forms.

  Terza Rima

  Tercets, three-line stanzas, can be independent entities rhyming aba cdc and so on, or they might demand a special kind of interlocking scheme such as can be found in TERZA RIMA, the form in which Dante wrote Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

  The TERZA RIMA mode is very fine,

  Great Dante used it for his famous text;

  It rhymes the words in every other line

  With each thought drawing you towards the next:

  A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C-D . . .

  This middle rhyme is sequently annexed

  To form the outer rhymes of Stanza Three

  And thus we make an interlocking rhyme:

  This subtle trick explains, at least to me,

  Just why this form has stood the test of time.

  As you can see, this linked rhyming can go on for ever, the middle line of each stanza forming the outer rhymes of the one that follows it. When you come to the end of a thought, thread or section, you add a fourth line to that stanza and use up the rhyme that would otherwise have gone with the next. I have done this with ‘rhyme’ and appended the (indented) stop-line ‘Just why this form has stood the test of time’. A young Hopkins used a stop-couplet to end his early terza rima poem, ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’:

  I see long reefs of violets

  In beryl-covered ferns so dim,

  A gold-water Pactolus frets

  Its brindled wharves and yellow brim,

  The waxen colours weep and run,

  And slendering to his burning rim

  Into the flat blue mist the sun

  Drops out and the day is done.

  Chaucer, under Dante’s influence, wrote the first English terza rima poem, ‘A Complaint to his Lady’, but the best-known example in English is probably Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:

  Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,

  Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;

  And, by the incantation of this verse,

  Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

  Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

  Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

  The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

  If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

  It does not matter how you lay out your verse (Shelley used five fourteen-line stanzas) or in what metre (Hopkins wrote in iambic tetrameter and Shelley in pentameter): it is the rhyme-scheme that defines the form.

  In order of ascending line length, the QUATRAIN comes next.

  The Quatrain

  The QUATRAIN is HEROIC and profound

  And glories in the deeds of noble days:

  Pentameters of grave and mighty sound,

  Like rolling cadences of brass, give praise.

  Alas! its ELEGIAC counterpart

  Bemoans with baleful woe this world of strife:

  In graveyards and in tears it plies its art

  Lamenting how devoid of hope is life.

  In equal form the COMIC QUATRAIN’s made,

  But free
to say exactly what it thinks;

  It’s brave enough to call a spade a spade

  And dig for truth however much it stinks.

  There is, of course, no formal difference between those three samples, they are merely produced to show you that quatrains in abab have been used for all kinds of purposes in English poetry. Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is probably the best-known elegiac use quatrains have been put to. Its lines have given the world classic book and film titles (Far from the Madding Crowd and Paths of Glory) as well as providing some memorably stirring phrases:

  Forbade to wade4 through slaughter to a throne,

  And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;

  A cross-rhymed quatrain (perhaps obviously) allows for fuller development of an image or conceit than can be achieved with couplets:

  Full many a gem of purest ray serene

  The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;

  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

  (Gray’s repetition of ‘Full many’ is an example of a rhetorical trope called anaphora, in case you are interested, in case you care, in case you didn’t already know, in case of too much anaphora, break glass. Actually, that was epanaphora.)

  The Rubai

  From Persia comes a quatrain form called the RUBAI (plural ruba’iat or ruba’iyat), rhyming aaba, ccdc, eefe etc.

  In ancient Persia and Islamic lands,

  The price of heresy was both your hands:

  Indeed the cost could even be your head

  (Or burial up to it in the sands).

  The wiser heads would write a RUBAI down

  And pass it quietly round from town to town,

  Anonymous, subversive and direct –

  The best examples garnered great renown.

  Collections of these odes, or RUBA’IYAT

  Showed sultans where progressive thought was at;

  Distributed by dissidents and wits,

  Like early forms of Russian samizdat.

  The Ruba’iyat of Omar, called Khayyam,

  Are quatrains of expansive, boozy charm.

  As found in Horace, Herrick and Marvell,

  The message is:‘Drink! When did wine do harm?

  Too soon the sun will set upon our tents,

  Don’t waste your time with pious, false laments

  Drink deep the wine of life, then drink some more’

  I never heard a poet make more sense.

  The translation of the Ruba’iat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald ranks alongside Burton’s Arabian Nights as one of the great achievements of English orientalism:

  A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, – and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

  Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  . . .

  ’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

  Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

  Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

  And one by one back in the Closet lays.

  The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,

  But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;

  And he that toss’d Thee down into the Field,

  He knows about it all – He knows – HE knows!

  The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

  If that kind of poetry doesn’t make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends. Open forms in sixain also exist in English verse. Wordsworth in his ‘Daffodils’ used the stanza form Shakespeare developed in ‘Venus and Adonis’, essentially a cross-rhymed quatrain closing with a couplet, abab cc:

  For oft when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude,

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the Daffodils.

  Rhyme Royal

  RHYME ROYAL has a noble history

  From Geoffrey Chaucer to the present day

  Its secret is no hidden mystery:

  Iambic feet, the classic English way

  With b and b to follow a b a.

  This closing couplet, like a funeral hearse,

  Drives to its end the body of the verse.

  RHYME ROYAL (or Rime Royal as it is sometimes rendered) is most associated with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde marks the form’s first appearance in English. It was once thought that the name derived from its later use by Henry IV, but this is now, like all pleasing stories (from King Alfred’s Cakes to Mr Gere’s way with gerbils), disputed by scholars. I suppose by rights a seven-line stanza should be called a heptain or septain, but I have never seen either word used. Auden used the ababbcc of rhyme royal in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. You would think that he would choose ottava rima, the form in which the addressee so conspicuously excelled. Auden apologises to his Lordship for not doing so:

  Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper

  The proper instrument on which to pay

  My compliments, but I should come a cropper;

  Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.

  But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,

  At least my modern pieces shall be cheery

  Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory.

  Auden’s reluctance to use ottava rima stemmed, one suspects, from its demand for an extra rhyme. I have always loved this form, however, as my sample verse makes clear.

  Ottava Rima

  OTTAVA RIMA is a poet’s dream,

  The most congenial of forms by far.

  It’s quite my favourite prosodic scheme

  And Byron’s too, which lends it some éclat.

  Much more adaptable than it may seem,

  It plays both classical and rock guitar;

  It suits romantic lyric inspiration,

  But I prefer Byronic-style deflation.

  As you can see, OTTAVA RIMA rhymes abababcc and thus presents in eight lines, hence the ottava, as in octave. It is in effect rhyme royal with an extra line, but just as one or more gene in the strand of life can make all the difference, so one or more line in a stanza can quite alter the identity of a form. The origins of ottava rima are to be found in Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso and it entered English in translations of this and other Italian epics. John Hookham Frere saw its potential for mock-heroic use and it was through his 1817 work Whistlecraft that Byron came to use the form, first in Beppo and then in his masterpiece of subverted epic and scattergun satire, Don Juan.

  As Auden remarks, ‘Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough . . .’. Two pairs of three rhymes and a couplet per verse. Perverse indeed.

  Some of W. B. Yeats’s best loved later poems take the form away from scabrous mock-heroics by mixing true rhyme with the sonorous twentieth-century possibilities opened up by the use of slant-rhyme, finding an unexpected lyricism. This is the celebrated last stanza of ‘Among School Children’:

  Labour is blossoming or dancing where

  The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

  Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

  Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

  O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

  Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

  O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

  How can we know the dancer from the dance?

  I trust you are still reading out loud . . .

  Spenserian Stanza

  Nine lines of verse did EDMUND SPENSER take

  To forge the style that bears his name divine,

  A form that weaves and wanders like a snake

  With art all supple, subtle, serpentine,

  Constructing verse of
intricate design

  Whose coils, caressing with sublime conceit,

  Engirdle and embrace each separate line:

  But Spenser, with an extra final beat,

  Unsnakelike ends his verse on hexametric feet.

  An open form whose qualities have appealed to few in recent times is the SPENSERIAN STANZA, which Edmund Spenser developed from the ottava rima of Tasso and Ariosto for his epic, The Faerie Queen. But you never know, it might be the very structure you have been looking for all these years. The rhyme-scheme is seen to be ababbcbcc, and is cast in eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by an iambic alexandrine. Byron used the form in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, and Keats in ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:

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

  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

  And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

  Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told

  His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

  Like pious incense from a censer old,

  Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,

  Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

  Clive James is one of the few poets I know to have made something new and comic of the Spenserian Stanza: his epistolary verse to friends published in his collection Other Passports contains some virtuoso examples, well worth looking at if you are thinking of trying the form: it includes the excellent admonitory alexandrine, ‘You can’t just arse around for ever having fun.’ Martin Amis, to whom the verse was written, certainly took the advice, as we know. I am aware of few modern serious poems in the form, the last significant work appearing to be Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, although Cambridge University offers an annual5 Spenserian Stanza Competition open to all comers of any age or fighting weight, which ‘fosters and recognizes student excellence in the writing of Spenserian stanzas’ and is sponsored by the International Spenser Society, no less. The past winners appear to have written theirs very much in the style of Spenser himself, complete with phalanxes of recondite archaic Spenserian words and syntax, rather than to have exhibited any interest in demonstrating the form’s fitness for modern use, which seems a pity.