by Stephen Fry
ADOPTING AND ADAPTING
Other stanzaic forms are mentioned in the Glossary, the VENUS AND ADONIS STANZA, for example. Of course it remains your decision as to how you divide your verse: into general quatrains or tercets and so on, or into more formal stanzaic arrangements such as ottava rima or ruba’iat, or any self-invented form you choose. Ted Hughes wrote his poem ‘Thistles’ in four stanzas of three-line verse. Tercets, if one wishes to call them that, but very much his own form for his own poem.
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands
of men
Thistles spike the summer air
Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decaying Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey, like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
You may think that this is arbitrary – enjambment between stanzas two and three shows that each does not wholly contain its own thought. Hughes is following no closed or open form, why then should he bother to set his verse in stanzas at all? Why not one continuous clump of lines? All kinds of neat arguments could be made about the poem itself needing, as the ground does, to fight the random aggression of its thistling, bristling words, to be farmed; then again, maybe four stanzas reflect the four seasons of the thistles’ birth, flourishing, death and rebirth; or one might think the stanzas in their short definitive shape chime with the plainly laid down statements Hughes makes, but I do not think such sophistry, even when it convinces, is necessary. We see, we feel, we know that the layout is just plain right. Imagine the same lines in one group: something is lost. Perhaps Hughes wrote it as a single stream of lines and then realised that they needed arrangement into four groups of three much as an artist might realise that he needs to regroup his landscape, rubbing out a tree in the background, foregrounding that clump of bushes, moving the church spire to the right and so on. The artist does not consult a book on composition or apply absolutely set rules learned at art school, he just feels, he just knows. Experience and openness, instinct and a feel for order, these are not taught, but they are not entirely inborn either. Reading, preparation, concentration and a poetic eye that is every bit as attuned as a poetic ear all contribute to the craftsmanship, the poetic skill that might, in time, make such judgements second nature.
If, then, you wish to use your own stanzas, rhyming or not, organised in traditional or personal ways, allow yourself to feel that same sense of composition and rightness, just as you might when arranging knick-knacks and invitations on a mantelpiece or designing a birthday card. It is not a question of right and wrong, but nor is it a question of anything goes. Incidentally, do allow yourself to enjoy Hughes’s use of the word ‘fistful’ – a fabulous consonantal and assonantal play on ‘thistle’, rhyming back to the first word of the second line. Is it not divine?
An open quatrain form whose qualities are sui generis enough to deserve a whole section on its own is the ballad. It is our next stop – once the following exercise is done.
Poetry Exercise 11
As you can see I have headed each section above with my own attempts to describe each stanza form under discussion in its own dress. Your exercise is to do the same but better. I look forward to bumping into you one day in the street or on a train and hearing you recite to me in triumphal tones your self-referential rhymes royal and auto-descriptive Ruba’iyat.
III
The Ballad
In fours and threes and threes and fours
The BALLAD beats its drum:
‘The Ancient Mariner’ of course
Remains the exemplum.
With manly eights (or female nines)
You are allowed if ’tis your pleasure,
To stretch the length to equal lines
And make a ballad of LONG MEASURE.
Well, what more need a poet know?
In technical prosodic parlance we could say that most ballads present in quatrains of alternate cross-rhymed iambic tetrameter and trimeter. However, since the ballad is a swinging, popular form derived from song and folk traditions it is much better described as a form that comes in four-line verses, usually alternating between four and three beats to line. The word comes from ballare, the Italian for ‘to dance’ (same root as ballet, ballerina and ball).
The ballad’s irresistible lilt is familiar to us in everything from nursery rhymes to rugby songs. We know it as soon as we hear it, the shape and the rhythm seem inborn:
There’s nothing like a ballad song
For lightening the load –
I’ll chant the buggers all day long
Until my tits explode.
A sweetly warbled ballad verse
Will never flag or tire
I sing ’em loud for best or worse
Though both my balls catch fire.
I’ll roar my ballads loud and gruff,
Like a lion in the zoo
And if I sing ’em loud enough
’Twill tear my arse in two.
Or whatever. Old-fashioned inversions, expletives (both the rude kind and the kind that fill out the metre) and other such archaic tricks considered inadmissible or old-fashioned in serious poetry suit the folksy nature of ballad. The ballad is pub poetry, it is naughty and nautical, crude and carefree. Its elbows are always on the table, it never lowers the seat for ladies after it’s been or covers its mouth when it burps. It can be macabre, brutal, sinister, preachy, ghostly, doom-laden, lurid, erotic, mock-solemn, facetious, pious or obscene – sometimes it exhibits all of those qualities at once. Its voice is often that of the club bore, the drunken rogue, the music hall entertainer or the campfire strummer. It has little interest in descriptions of landscape or the psychology of the individual. Chief among its virtues is a keen passion to tell you a story: it will grab you by the lapels, stare you in the eyes and plunge right in:
Now gather round and let me tell
The tale of Danny Wise:
And how his sweet wife Annabelle
Did suck out both his eyes.
And if I tell the story true
And if I tell it clear,
There’s not a mortal one of you
Won’t shriek in mortal fear.
How could we not want to know more? Did she really suck them out? Was Danny Wise asleep? Was Annabelle a witch? How did it all turn out? Did he get his revenge? Is the teller of the tale poor Danny himself? Sadly, I have no idea because the rest of it hasn’t come to me yet.
While the second and fourth lines should rhyme, the first and third do not need to, it is up to the balladeer to choose, abab or abcb: nor is any regularity or consistency in your rhyme-scheme required throughout, as this popular old ballad demonstrates:
In Scarlet Town, where I was born,
There was a fair maid dwellin’
Made every lad cry wellaway,
And her name was Barbara Allen.
All in the merry month of May,
When green buds they were swellin’,
Young Jemmy Grove on his deathbed lay,
For love of Barbara Allen.
A quatrain is by no means compulsory, a six-line stanza is commonly found, rhyming xbxbxb, as in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand:
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
‘If this were only cleared away,’
They said, ‘it would be grand.’
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
; Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Although more ‘literary’ examples may favour a regular accentual-syllabic measure, ballads are perfect examples of accentual verse: it doesn’t matter how many syllables there are, it is the beats that matter. Here is Marriot Edgar’s ‘Albert and the Lion’, which was written as a comic monologue to be recited to a background piano that plunks down its chords on the beats of each four- or three-stress line. Part of the pleasure of this style of ballad is the mad scudding rush of unaccented syllables, the pausing, the accelerations and decelerations: when Stanley Holloway performed this piece, the audience started to laugh simply at his timing of the rhythm. I have marked with underlines the syllables that might receive a little extra push if required: it is usually up to the performer. Recite it as you read.
There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,
That’s noted for fresh-air and fun,
And Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom
Went there with young Albert, their son.
A grand little lad was their Albert
All dressed in his best; quite a swell
’E’d a stick with an ’orse’s ’ead ’andle
The finest that Woolworths could sell.
Or there’s Wallace Casalingua’s ‘The Day My Trousers Fell’, which has even more syllables to contend with:
Now I trust that your ears you’ll be lending,
To this tale of our decadent times;
There’s a beginning, a middle and an ending
And for the most part there’s rhythms and verses and
rhymes.
My name, you must know, is John Weston,
Though to my friends I’m Jackie or Jack;
I’ve a place on the outskirts of Preston,
The tiniest scrap of a garden with a shed and a hammock
round’t back.
. . .
I was giving the fish girl her payment,
The cod were ninety a pound –
When, with a snap and a rustle of raiment
My trousers, they dropped to the ground. Con-ster-nation.
Border ballads, like ‘Barbara Allen’ and those of Walter Scott, became a popular genre in their own right, often like broadsheet ballads expressing political grievances, spreading news and celebrating the exploits of highwaymen and other popular rebels, rogues and heroes: subgenres like the murder ballad still exist,6 often told from the murderer’s point of view, full of grim detail and a sardonic acknowledgement of the inevitability of tragedy.
Frankie and Johnny were lovers,
O Lordy, how they could love;
They swore to be true to each other,
Just as true as the stars above.
He was her man but he done her wrong.
Robert Service, the English-born Canadian poet, wrote very popular rough’n’tough ballads mostly set around the Klondike Gold Rush; you will really enjoy reading this out, don’t be afraid (if alone) to try a North American accent – and it should be fast:
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute
saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time
tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s
known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the
din and glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and
loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely
the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for
drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we
searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous
Dan McGrew.
To observe the regularity of the caesuras in this ballad would be like complimenting an eagle on its intellectual grasp of the principles of aerodynamics, but I am sure you can see that ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’ could as easily be laid out with line breaks after ‘up’ and ‘box’ in the first two lines, ‘drink’ in the last and as the commas indicate elsewhere, to give it a standard four-three structure. We remember this layout from our examination of Kipling’s ballad in fourteeners, ‘Tommy’. A. E. Housman’s ‘The Colour of his Hair’,7 a bitter tirade against the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, is also cast in fourteeners. I can’t resist quoting it in full.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his
wrists?
And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their
fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.
Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see
and stare,
And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.
Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,
And the quarry-gang on portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the god that made him for the colour of his
hair.
There is also a strong tradition of rural ballad, one of the bestknown examples being the strangely macabre ‘John Barleycorn’:
There were three men come out of the West
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn should die!
They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn was dead!
They let him lie for a very long time
’Til the rain from Heaven did fall,
Then Little Sir John sprung up his head,
And so amazed them all.
After being scythed, threshed, pounded, malted and mashed, John Barleycorn (not a man of course, but a crop) ends his cycle in alcoholic form:
Here’s Little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,
And brandy in a glass!
And Little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl
Proved the stronger man at last!
For the huntsman he can’t hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn,
And the tinker can’t mend kettles nor pots
Without John Barleycorn!
There are ballad operas (John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera being the best known), jazz ballads and pop ballads culminating in that revolting genre, the power ballad – but here we are leaking into popular music where the word has come to mean nothing much more than a slow love song, often (in the case of the American diva’s power ballad) repulsively vain and self-regarding, all the authentic guts, vibrancy, self-deprecation and lively good humour bleached out and replaced by the fraudulent intensity of grossly artificial climaxing. I acquit country music of these vices. American ballads, cowboy ballads, frontier ballads and so on, were extensively collected by the Lomax family, much in the same way that Cecil Sharpe had done for rural and border ballads and other native British genres of folk and community music. Shel Silverstein came up with the ever-popular ‘A Boy Nam
ed Sue’ for Johnny Cash, who also wrote and performed his own superb examples, I would especially recommend the ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ if you don’t already know it.
One of the great strengths of the ballad in its more literary incarnations is that its rousing folk and comic associations can be subverted or ironically countered. Its sense of being somehow traditional, communal and authorless contrasts with that individuality and strong authorial presence we expect from the modern poet, often so alone, angst-ridden and disconnected. Both John Betjeman and W. H. Auden used this contrast to their advantage. The strong ballad structure of Betjeman’s ‘Death in Leamington’ counters the grim, grey hopelessness of suburban lives with a characteristically mournful irony:
She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the evening star
That shone through the plate glass window
From over Leamington Spa.
[ . . . ]
Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,
At the grey, decaying face,
As the calm of a Leamington evening
Drifted into the place.
She moved the table of bottles
Away from the bed to the wall;
And tiptoeing gently over the stairs
Turned down the gas in the hall.
While Auden does much the same with the less genteel ‘Miss Gee’:
Let me tell you a little story
About Miss Edith Gee;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace
At Number 83.
. . .
She bicycled down to the doctor,
And rang the surgery bell;
‘O doctor, I’ve a pain inside me,
And I don’t feel very well.’
Doctor Thomas looked her over,
And then he looked some more;
Walked over to his wash-basin,
Said,‘Why didn’t you come before?’
Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,
Though his wife was waiting to ring,
Rolling his bread into pellets;
Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.’
. . .
They laid her on the table,
The students began to laugh;