The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

And Mr Rose the surgeon

  He cut Miss Gee in half.

  Casting such lost lives as ballad heroes certainly provides an ironic contrast with which to mock the arid futility of much twentieth-century life. To use the rhythms of the greenwood and the yardarm for the cloying refinement of Leamington or the grimness of Miss Gee’s forlorn little world can indeed point up the chasm between the sterile present and the rich past, but such a mismatch also works in the opposite direction, it raises the lonely spinsters out of their ordinariness and connects them to the tradition and richness of history, it mythologises them, if you like. When an artist paints a prostitute in the manner of a Renaissance Madonna he is simultaneously marking an ironic distinction and forging an affirmative connection. The artists Gilbert and George have done much the same with their skinheads in stained-glass. These are strategies that only work because of the nature of form and genre.

  Poetry Exercise 12

  A poet can be rough and flexible with the ballad, it is the beat and the narrative drive that sustains. Your exercise is to finish the one that I started a few pages ago.

  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.

  Don’t worry about metre or syllable-count – this is a ballad. I have used an a rhyme, by all means drop it from time to time, but do stick to the four-line structure. Enjoy yourself. One thing I can guarantee you: after you have written just one or two stanzas, you’ll be chanting ballad lines to yourself as you make coffee, nip to the loo, walk to the shops and brush your teeth. The ballad has a certain flow, a rhythmic swing and a beat; it makes no difference where you go, you’re sure to tap your feet – well, hush my mouth . . .

  IV

  Heroic Verse

  HEROIC VERSE has passed the test of time:

  Iambic feet in couplets linked by rhyme,

  Its non-stanzaic structure simply screams

  For well-developed tales and epic themes.

  The five-stress line can also neatly fit

  Sardonic barbs and aphoristic wit.

  Augustan poets marshalled their iambs

  To culminate in pithy epigrams.

  Pope, Alexander, with pontific skill

  Could bend the verse to his satiric will.

  The mode continued in this lofty style

  Until – with manic laugh and mocking smile

  New modes emerged, a kind of fractured, mad

  Enjambment turned up. Pauses. Something had

  Gone wrong . . . or right? The stops and starts of human

  Speech burst through. Now, once formal lines assume an

  Unforced, casual air, but nonetheless

  Obey the rigid rules of metre, stress

  And rhyming. Gradually another change

  Takes place. New poets start to rearrange

  The form, unpick the close-knit weave, make room

  For looser threads of consonantal rhyme.

  The modern age with all its angst and doubt

  Arrives, picks up the tab and pays its debt

  To history, precedent and every voice

  That did its bit to mould heroic verse.

  And still today we grudgingly affirm

  There’s life in the old dog; our mangy form

  Still bites, still barks, still chases cats and birds,

  Still wags its tail, still pens and shepherds words,

  And, taken off her leash, this bitch on heat

  Will walk you off your pentametric feet.

  HEROIC VERSE is far from dead. Since its Chaucerian beginnings it has been endlessly revivified: after a playful Elizabethan reshaping it acquired marmoreal elegance in the eighteenth century, only to undergo a complex reworking under John Keats, Robert Browning and Wilfred Owen until it emerged blinking into the light of modern day. At first glance it seems remarkably simple, too simple, perhaps, even to deserve the appellation ‘form’: it is as open as they come, neither laid out in regular stanzas, nor fixed by any scheme beyond the simple aabbccdd of the rhyming couplet. New paragraph presentation is possible either with line breaks or indentation as I have offered above, but in general the verse is presented in one unbroken block. Only the occasional braced triplet will relieve the procession of couplets. To the modern eye this can be forbidding; we like everything in our world to come in handy bite-sized chunks. Yet you might say that handy bite-sized chunks is what heroic verse is best remembered for: Pope’s Essays on Man and on Criticism are veritable vending machines of aphorism.

  A little learning is dangerous thing;

  Not to go back, is somehow to advance,

  And men must walk at least before they dance.

  Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

  The proper study of mankind is man.

  Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

  All are but parts of one stupendous whole.

  One truth is clear. Whatever is, is right.

  True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

  That last apothegm might be the motto of this book. John Dryden, in my estimation, was the absolute master of the heroic couplet; his use of it seems more natural, more assured, more fluid even than Pope’s:

  Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.

  Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.

  For those whom God to ruin hath design’d,

  He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.

  Errors, like straw, upon the surface flow;

  He who would search for pearls must dive below.

  Beware the fury of a patient man

  By education most have been misled;

  So they believe, because they so were bred.

  The priest continues what the nurse began,

  And thus the child imposes on the man.

  But these were poets from a time when poems, like architecture and garden design, were formal, elegant and assured: this was the Age of Reason, of Certitude, Sense, Wit, Discernment, Judgement, Taste, Harmony – of ‘Capital Letter Moralists’ as T. E. Hulme called them. The voice and manner of these Augustans can sound altogether too de haut en bas for our ears, from lofty to lowly, as if delivered from Olympus.

  Their taste and proportion is akin to that of the architecture of the period; by the time of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads their course seemed run, the profusion of nature and the agony of self seemed to become a more proper study of poets, just as the Gothic and picturesque began to entice the architects. Run your eye down the Index of First Lines in an edition of Pope and then of any Romantic poet and compare the number of entries in each which begin with the word ‘I’. The ‘egotistical sublime’ had landed. It would be a pity if, in our instinctive veneration for all things post-classical, Romantic, post-Romantic, Decadent, Modernist and Postmodernist we overlooked the virtues of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century verse. After all, most of us aspire to live in houses of that period, fill them with eclectic fittings and furniture from later eras as we may. The neoclassical harmony and elegance of construction remains our ideal for housing. I think it can be so with verse too. Naturally the discourse and diction, the detail and decor as it were, are of our age, but the rationality and harmony of the Augustans is not to be despised.

  Keats did not abandon the form, but contributed to its development with a new freedom of run-ons and syntactical complexity. This extract from ‘Lamia’ shows how close to dramatic blank verse it becomes, the enjambments almost disguising the rhymes.

  Pale grew her immortality, for woe

  Of all these lovers, and she grieved so

  I took compassion on her, bade her steep

  Her hair in weïrd syrops that would keep


  Her loveliness invisible, yet free

  To wander as she loves, in liberty.

  Robert Browning wrestled with the form even more violently. His much anthologised ‘My Last Duchess’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in heroic verse. It is ‘spoken’ by the Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, who is showing around his palace an ambassador who has come to make the arrangements for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn, as the monologue proceeds, that the Duke had his first wife killed on account of her displeasing over-friendliness. Pointing at her portrait on the wall, the Duke explains how polite, compliant and smiling she was, but to everyone:

  She had

  A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,

  Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

  She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

  Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,

  The dropping of the daylight in the West,

  The bough of cherries some officious fool

  Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

  She rode with round the terrace – all and each

  Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

  In the Duke’s view it was ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift’.

  Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

  Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

  Much the same smile? This grew: I gave commands;

  Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

  As if alive.

  In other words, he had her killed. You can see how different this heavily run-on and paused verse is from the restrained fluency of Augustan heroic couplets. But why has Browning not chosen to write in blank verse, in the Shakespearean or Jacobean manner, we might wonder? I cannot, of course, second-guess Browning’s motives, but the effect is to counter the fluency of everyday speech with the formality of a rhymed structure, creating an ironic contrast between the urbane conversational manner, the psychotic darkness of the story and the elegant solidity of a noble form. The heroic verse is the frame out of which character can leap; it is itself the nobly proportioned, exquisitely tasteful palace in which ignobly misproportioned, foully tasteless deeds are done.

  Wilfred Owen’s use of rhyming couplets in the hell of war provides another kind of ironic contrast. In the same way that the employment of ballad form for the dreary and mundane makes both a distinction and a connection, so the use of heroic couplets both contrasts and unites in Owen’s verse: the august and decorous form in such ghastly conditions is a sick joke, but the death agonies, mutilations and horrors of the soldiers’ lives are raised to heroic status by their incarnation in heroic couplets. Owen’s ‘A Terre: (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)’ uses Browningstyle dramatic monologue in slant-rhymed couplets, casting Owen himself as the visitor to a field hospital where a ruined soldier lies and addresses him.

  Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.

  Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.

  Both arms have mutinied against me, – brutes.

  My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.

  I tried to peg out soldierly, – no use!

  One dies of war like any old disease.

  This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.

  I have my medals? – Discs to make eyes close.

  My glorious ribbons? – Ripped from my own back

  In scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)

  Laurence Lerner, Thom Gunn and Tony Harrison have all written with distinction in heroic couplets, as did Seamus Heaney in ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ and his superb poem ‘The Outlaw’, which might be regarded as a kind of darkly ironic play on an eclogue or georgic – Virgilian verse celebrating and philosophically discoursing upon the virtues of agricultural life.

  You may find yourself drawn to heroic verse, you may not. Whatever your views, I would recommend practising it: the form has compelling and enduring qualities. Move in: the structure is still sound and spacious enough to accommodate all your contemporary furniture and modern gadgets.

  Poetry Exercise 13

  Try a short dramatic monologue, à la Browning, in which a young man in police custody, clearly stoned off his head, tries to explain away the half-ounce of cannabis found on his person. Use the natural rhythms of speech, running-on through lines, pausing and running on again, but within rhymed iambic pentameter. You will be amazed what fun you can have with such a simple form. If you don’t like my scenario, choose another one, but do try and make it contemporary in tone.

  V

  The Ode

  Sapphic – Pindaric – Horatian – lyric – anacreontic

  Deriving from odein, the Greek for to chant, the ode is an open form of lyric verse made Public Monument. In English poetry it was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for ‘poem’.

  Partly this is the due to the popularity of John Keats’s four great odes ‘To Autumn’,‘Ode to a Nightingale’,‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which, together with the odes of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and the rest, turned the form in on itself. Poets today may choose to call their works odes, but rather than suggesting any formal implications this is likely to promise, in the shadow of Keats, a romantic reflection on such themes as nature, beauty, art, the soul and their relationship to the very making of a poem itself.

  There are three main genres of classical ode which do have more formal natures or specific functions however – the Sapphic, Pindaric and Horatian, named after the Greeks Sappho and Pindar, and the Latin poet Horace. Of these, the most formally fixed and the most popular today by a dodecametric mile is the SAPPHIC:

  SAPPHIC

  Let’s hear it for the SAPPHIC ODE

  An oyster bed of gleaming pearls

  A finely wrought poetic mode

  Not just for girls.

  Lesbian Sappho made this form

  With neat Adonic final line

  Her sex life wasn’t quite the norm

  And nor is mine.

  Three opening lines of just four feet

  Create a style I rather like:

  It’s closely cropped and strong yet sweet –

  In fact, pure dike.

  Actually, the above displays the lineaments of the English stress-based imitation as adapted from the classical original, which was made up of four eleven-syllable lines in this metre:

  The symbol stands for an anceps, a metrical unit (or semeion) which in classical verse can be long or short, but for our purposes means can be either stressed or unstressed, according to the poet’s wishes. An anceps offers a free choice of trochee or spondee in other words. So, doggerel that makes a classical Sapphic Ode might go:

  Noble SAPPHO fashioned her odes of high-flown

  Verse in four lines, marked by their classic profile.

  Though she’s now best remembered for her full-blown

  Lesbian lifestyle.

  Not that Ancient Greek Sapphics would be rhymed, of course. English verse in this semi-quantitative classical manner does exist, although practitioners (out of Poe-like disbelief in the spondee) usually render the first three lines as trochee-trochee dactyl trochee-trochee. Ezra Pound managed a superb true spondaic lineend in his Sapphic Ode, ‘Apparuit’:

  Green the ways, the breath of the fields is thine there

  Dear Algie Swinburne wrote Sapphics too:

  All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,

  Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,

  Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron

  Stood and beheld me.

  . . .

  Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing

  Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,

  Songs that break the heart of the earth
with pity,

  Hearing, to hear them.

  The more characteristically English way to adapt the form has been to write in good old iambic tetrameter, as in my first sampler above and Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’:

  Happy the man, whose wish and care

  A few paternal acres bound,

  Content to breathe his native air

  In his own ground

  Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

  Whose flocks supply him with attire,

  Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

  In winter fire.

  The contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson has used the form (and translated Sappho’s own odes). These two stanzas are from her ‘Eros the Bittersweet’:

  no: tongue breaks and thin

  fire is racing under skin

  and in eyes no sight and drumming

  fills ears

  and cold sweat holds me and shaking

  grips me all, greener than grass

  I am and dead – or almost

  I seem to me

  The Sapphic Ode has generally been used for more personal and contemplative uses. I do recommend you try writing a few: the Adonic ending can serve as conclusion, envoi, sting in the tail, question, denial . . . the form, despite its simplicity, remains surprisingly potent. There is no prescribed number of stanzas. If this kind of verse appeals, you might like to look into another Lesbian form, ALCAICS.

  PINDARIC ODE

  Strophe/The Turn

  We hail thee mighty PINDAR’S ODE

  Thou noble and majestic mode!

  You trace your roots to far-off ancient times,

  Yet still survive in modern English rhymes.

  With firm but steady beat,

  You march in rhythmic feet

  Of varied but symmetric length.

  This lends your verse a joyful strength

  That suits it well to themes of solemn weight –

  Disasters, joys and great affairs of state.

  Antistrophe/The Counter-Turn

  Yet some suggest that modern life,

  Enmeshed in doubt and mired in strife,