The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  Autumn as chill as rising water laps

  and files us away under former stuff

  thinly disguised and thrown up on a screen;

  one turn of the key lifts a brass tumbler –

  another disaster probably averted, just,

  while the cadence drifts in dark and old.

  Voices of authority are burning an old

  car on the cobbles, hands on their laps,

  as if there was a life where just

  men slept and didn’t strut their stuff

  on stage. I reach out for the tumbler

  and pour half a pint behind the screen.

  The whole body is in pieces. Screen

  memories are not always as sharp as old

  noir phenomena. The child is like a tumbler

  doing back-flips out of mothers’ laps

  into all that dark sexual stuff

  permanently hurt that nothing is just.

  I’m telling you this just

  because I dream of watching you behind a screen

  taking your clothes off for me: the stuff

  of dreams, of course. Tell me the old, old

  story, real and forgetful. Time simply laps

  us up, like milk from a broken tumbler.

  A silent figure on the stage, the tumbler

  stands, leaps and twists. He’s just

  a figure of speech that won’t collapse

  like the march of time and the silver screen;

  like Max Wall finally revealing he was old

  and then starting again in that Beckett stuff.

  I’d like to take my sense of the real and stuff

  it. There’s a kind of pigeon called a tumbler

  that turns over backwards as it flies, old

  and having fun; sometimes I think that’s just

  what I want to do, but I can’t cut or screen

  out the lucid drift of memory that laps

  my brittle attention just off-screen

  away from the comfortable laps and the velvety stuff

  I spilled a tumbler of milk over before I was old.

  What seems like a silly word game yields poetry of compelling mystery and rhythmic flow. What appear to be the difficulties of the form reveal themselves, as of course they should, as its strengths – the repetition and recycling of elusive patterns that cannot be quite held in the mind all at once. Much in experience and thought deserves a poetic form that can bring such elements to life.

  Poetry Exercise 15

  Well, all you have to do now is write your own. It will take some time: do not expect it to be easy. If you get frustrated, walk away and come back later. Let ideas form in your mind, vanish, reform, change, adapt. The repetition of end-words in the right hands works in favour of the poem: it is a defining feature of the form, not to be disguised but welcomed. You might harness this as a means of repeating patterns of speech, as we all do in life, or in reflecting on the same things from different angles.

  You can do it, believe me you can. And you will be so proud of yourself!

  THE PANTOUM

  The slow throb of an old pantoum

  1 A

  Resounding like a distant gong

  2 B

  To summon us to certain doom!

  3 C

  Repeating fragments of its song,

  4 D

  Resounding like a distant gong,

  2 B

  The pantoum tolls in solemn weight.

  5 E

  Repeating fragments of its song,

  4 D

  It sounds the measures of our fate.

  6 F

  The pantoum tolls in solemn weight

  5 E

  Ringing changes and shifting gear.

  7 G

  It sounds the measures of our fate.

  6 F

  In chimes of ancient bells we hear,

  8 H

  Ringing changes and shifting gear

  7 G

  To summon us to certain doom.

  3 C

  In chimes of ancient bells, we hear

  8 H

  The slow throb of an old pantoum.

  1 A

  How to explain the rules of this strict fifteenth-century form? A PANTOUM (pronounced pan-tomb) must be composed in full crossrhymed quatrains: abab, cdcd and so on. It must begin and end with the same line, and this is how the scheme unfolds – draw breath. The second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third lines of the second stanza, the second and fourth lines of the second stanza become the first and third of stanza three and so on until you reach the end. Where the end comes is up to you: unlike the sestina or the sonnet there is no prescribed length to the form, but when you do end you must use the two lines you will not yet have repeated, the first and third of the opening stanza, they are reversed in order and become the second and fourth of the final quatrain. It sounds loopy, but if you look up and see what I have done it really isn’t that hard to follow. I have numbered and lettered the lines to make it clearer.

  The effect, as my example suggests, can be quite hypnotic or doom-laden. It can seem like wading in treacle if not adroitly handled. Such a form seems to suit dreamy evocations of time past, the echoes of memory and desire, but it need not be limited to such themes.

  How the pantoum arrived in France from the Malayan peninsula in about 1830 I am not entirely sure – its importation is attributed to Victor Hugo. I believe the original form, still alive and well in the Far East, uses an abba rhyme-scheme and insists upon eight syllables a line and thematic changes in each quatrain. I have managed the syllable count but stuck to the more usual crossrhymes and consistency of subject matter. Since its first European use by Hugo, Baudelaire and other French practitioners it became moderately well-known and popular in England and especially America, the best-known examples being by Anne Waldman, Carolyn Kizer, John Ashbery, Donald Justice and David Trinidad. The playwright Peter Shaffer, who clearly relishes the challenge of old forms (he has experimented with villanelles, and sestinas too) composed an excellent pantoum entitled ‘Juggler, Magician, Fool’.

  Here is the opening of Carolyn Kizer’s ‘Parents’ Pantoum’. She eschews rhyme which, given the lexical repetition demanded by the form, seems perfectly permissible. Note that enjambment and some flexibility with the repeated lines is helpful in refreshing the mood of the piece: the line ‘How do they appear in their long dresses’ reappears as ‘In their fragile heels and long black dresses’ for example, and there are additional buts and thoughs that vary the iterations. All this is usual in the modern, Western strain of pantoum.

  Where did these enormous children come from,

  More ladylike than we have ever been?

  Some of ours look older than we feel.

  How did they appear in their long dresses

  More ladylike than we have ever been?

  But they moan about their aging more than we do,

  In their fragile heels and long black dresses.

  They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

  They moan about their aging more than we do,

  A somber group – why don’t they brighten up?

  Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity

  They beg us to be dignified like them

  If you are a nerdy, anagrammy, crossword puzzler sort of a person, as I tragically and irredeemably am, you will be especially drawn to the pantoum. The art, as with other lexically repetitive and patterned schemes, is to choose ‘open-ended’ repeating lines allowing ambiguity and room for manoeuvre. It is one thing, of course, to write them as a fun exercise, quite another to make a poem of readable qualities for others. Technically the ideal is to push the normative requirements of the mode hard, sometimes to breaking point. Therein lies the knack – stretching the bubble until just before it bursts. Without hard pressure on the inner walls of its membrane the pantoum – and this holds true of the other complex forms – can seem a flaccid, futile exercise in
wordsmanship.

  THE BALLADE

  BALLADE is not an easy form to crack

  No other rhymes, but only A or B;

  The paeon, dactyl and the amphibrach,

  The antispast, molossus and spondee

  Will not assist us in the least degree

  As through the wilderness we grimly hack

  And sow our hopeful seeds of poetry.

  It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

  But let me be Marvell, not Kerouac

  The open road holds no allure for me.

  A garden path shall be my desert track,

  The song of birds my jukebox melody,

  The neighbour’s cat my Neil Cassidy.

  With just a mower for a Cadillac

  I won’t get far, but nor will they. You see –

  It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

  A hammock is my beatnik bivouac

  My moonshine bourbon is a cup of tea.

  No purple hearts, no acid trips, no smack

  My only buzz the humble honeybee.

  So let them have their free-verse liberty

  And I shall have my handsome garden shack

  We’ll see which one of us is truly free,

  It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

  Envoi

  Prince and peasant, workers, peers or bourgeoisie

  McGonagall, Lord Byron, Pasternak

  Of mongrel stock or high born pedigree —

  It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

  The BALLADE, not to be confused with the ballad (or with the musical ballade devised by Chopin), is a venerable French form of some fiendishness for English poets. The difficulty arises, not from any complexity of patterning or repetition such as is to be found in the sestina, but from the number of rhyme sounds needed. It ends with an envoi which, tradition dictates, must be addressed to a Prince. Indeed the very word ‘Prince’ is usually the envoi’s first word: this happy convention, maintained even by modern poets like Dorothy Parker, is a nod to the royal patronage enjoyed by early practitioners such as François Villon and Eustache Deschamps. Those who elected to write sacred ballades would begin their envois with the invocations ‘Prince Jesus!’, or ‘Prince and Saviour!’. Each stanza, the envoi included, ends with the same refrain or rentrement. Early ballades were often composed in three seven-line stanzas, but these days an eight-line stanza with an envoi of four lines seems to have been settled upon by English-language poets. The usual rhyme scheme is ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA, in other words ten a rhymes (and a refrain, A, to rhyme with them) and fourteen b rhymes. This is no doubt a doddle in French but the very bastard son of a mongrel bitch in English. G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Ballade of Suicide’ is one of the better-known examples:

  The gallows in my garden, people say,

  Is new and neat and adequately tall;

  I tie the noose on in a knowing way

  As one that knots his necktie for a ball;

  But just as all the neighbours – on the wall –

  Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘Hurray!’

  The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all

  I think I will not hang myself to-day.

  To-morrow is the time I get my pay –

  My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall –

  I see a little cloud all pink and grey –

  Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call –

  I fancy that I heard from Mr Gall

  That mushrooms could be cooked another way –

  I never read the works of Juvenal –

  I think I will not hang myself to-day.

  The world will have another washing-day;

  The decadents decay; the pedants pall;

  And H. G. Wells has found that children play,

  And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,

  Rationalists are growing rational –

  And through thick woods one finds a stream astray

  So secret that the very sky seems small –

  I think I will not hang myself to-day.

  Envoi

  Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,

  The tumbrels toiling up the terrible way;

  Even to-day your royal head may fall,

  I think I will not hang myself to-day.

  It reminds me of Fagin’s song ‘I’m Reviewing the Situation’ from Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! the refrain to which,‘I think I’d better think it out again’, forms a similarly memorable decasyllabic chorus. Bart’s number is not a ballade, of course, but the similarity demonstrates the form’s derivations from, and yearnings towards, music. One of the more successful and regular tillers of the ballade’s rhyme-rich soil was the Round Table with Dorothy Parker. Here is her ‘Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals’:

  Love is sharper than stones or sticks;

  Lone as the sea, and deeper blue;

  Loud in the night as a clock that ticks;

  Longer-lived than the Wandering Jew.

  Show me a love was done and through,

  Tell me a kiss escaped its debt!

  Son, to your death you’ll pay your due –

  Women and elephants never forget.

  Ever a man, alas, would mix,

  Ever a man, heigh-ho, must woo;

  So he’s left in the world-old fix,

  Thus is furthered the sale of rue.

  Son, your chances are thin and few –

  Won’t you ponder, before you’re set?

  Shoot if you must, but hold in view

  Women and elephants never forget.

  Down from Caesar past Joynson-Hicks

  Echoes the warning, ever new:

  Though they’re trained to amusing tricks,

  Gentler, they, than the pigeon’s coo,

  Careful, son, of the cursèd two –

  Either one is a dangerous pet;

  Natural history proves it true –

  Women and elephants never forget.

  L’Envoi

  Prince, a precept I’d leave for you,

  Coined in Eden, existing yet:

  Skirt the parlor, and shun the zoo –

  Women and elephants never forget.

  VII

  More Closed Forms

  The rondeau – rondeau redoublé – the rondel – the roundel – the rondelet – the roundelay – the triolet and the kyrielle

  Yeah, right. You really want to know about all these French Rs. Your life won’t be complete without them. Well, don’t be too put off by the confusing nomenclatorial similarities and Frenchy sound they seem to share. You are probably familiar with the concept of a musically sung ROUND (‘Frère Jacques’, ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, ‘London Bridge’ etc.) All these forms are based on the principle of a poetic round, a (mercifully) short poem as a rule, characterised by the nature of its refrain (rentrement). The avatar of these genres is the RONDEAU, pronounced like the musical rondo, but with typical French equal stress.

  RONDEAU

  OF MY RONDEAU this much is true:

  Its virtues lie in open view,

  Unravelled is its tangled skein,

  Untapped the blood from every vein,

  Unthreaded every nut and screw.

  I strip it thus to show to you

  The way I rhyme it, what I do

  To mould its form, yet still retain

  The proper shape and inward grain

  OF MY RONDEAU.

  As rhyming words in lines accrue

  A pleasing sense of déjà-vu

  Will infiltrate your teeming brain.

  Now . . . here it comes the old refrain,

  The beating drum and proud tattoo

  OF MY RONDEAU.

  Most scholars of the genre seem to agree that in its most common form, as I have tried to demonstrate, the rondeau should be a poem of between thirteen and fifteen lines, patterned by two rhymes and a refrain R, formed by the first half of the opening line. The scheme is repre
sented by R-aabba aabR aabbaR. A notable example is the Canadian poet John McCrae’s rondeau,‘In Flanders Fields’:

  IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row,

  That mark our place, and in the sky,

  The larks, still bravely singing, fly,

  Scarce heard amid the guns below.

  We are the dead; short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie

  In Flanders fields.

  Take up our quarrel with the foe!

  To you from failing hands we throw

  The torch; be yours to hold it high!

  If ye break faith with us who die

  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

  In Flanders fields.

  This very earnest poem subverts the usual characteristic of the form in French verse, where the rondeau is a light, graceful and merry thing that refuses to take life very seriously. Although the two examples you have seen are, so far as my very unscholarly researches can determine, the ‘correct’ form, the appellation rondeau has been used through the ages by English-language poets from Grimald to the present day to apply to a number of variations. Leigh Hunt’s ‘Rondeau: Jenny Kissed Me’ adheres to the principle of a refrain culled from the first hemistich of the opening line, but adds a rhyme for it in line 6. The Jenny in question, by the way, is said to have been Thomas Carlyle’s wife.13

  JENNY KISSED ME when we met,

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

  Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in:

  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

  Say that health and wealth have missed me,

  Say I’m growing old, but add,

  JENNY KISSED ME.

  A variation exists (don’t they always) and here it is.

  RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ

  THE FIRST FOUR LINES OF RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ

  Are chosen with especial skill and care

  For each one has a vital role to play

  In turn they each a heavy burden share.