The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  Your turn now. You have forty minutes for your two verses.

  V

  Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

  Accentual verse – alliteration and the two-beat hemistich

  English verse sprang, like the English language, from two principal sources, Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon. From the Greeks and Romans we took ordered syllabic measures, from the Old English we took accent. We put them together to make the native accentual-syllabic verse that we have been looking at thus far. It is the classical stream that had the most obvious influence on our poetry and certainly on the technical language we use to describe it, but the Anglo-Saxon tributary has carved its way through our literary landscape too. For hundreds of years it lay isolated, like an old oxbow lake, cut off from the flow, but over the last century or more it has snaked its way back into the mainstream. It is worth dipping our toes in to see if we find it congenial. I suspect that after the syllable counting and footwatching of the foregoing pages, you will find its comparative freedom a great delight.

  ANGLO-SAXON and OLD ENGLISH are (more or less) interchangeable terms used for verse written in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. MIDDLE ENGLISH or MEDIEVAL applies to a later, post-Norman revival of the Old English style. These are loose ascriptions but will do for our purposes.

  With Old English poetry there is NO SYLLABIC COUNT and there is NO RHYME. Is it free verse, then, unbounded by rules? By no means. Old English verse is distinctly patterned. Until now we have been looking at metre composed according to rules of syllabic accentuation: Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed according to rules of accent only: it is a form of accentual verse. Accentual-alliterative to be precise. Oo-er, sounds a bit scary. It really isn’t, I promise you.

  Alliteration is the trick of beginning a succession of words with the same consonant.30 W. S. Gilbert’s ‘life-long lock’, ‘short sharp shock’ and ‘big black block’ are examples of alliterative phrases that we have already met. Alliteration is still rife in English – advertisers and magazine sub-editors seem obsessed with it. Next time you find yourself out and about with your notebook, write down examples from advertising hoardings and newspaper headlines. It is an English disease: you won’t find it to anything like the same degree in Spanish, French or Italian. It lives on in phrases like ‘wit and wisdom’, ‘parent power’, ‘feast or famine’, ‘sweet sixteen’, ‘dirty dozen’, ‘buy British’, ‘prim and proper’, ‘tiger in your tank’, ‘you can be sure of Shell’ and so on. As we have seen, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream mocked its overuse when Bottom and his friends attempt dramatic verse. Here is another part of their dreadful ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:

  Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,

  He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;

  That is cast in standard Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Old English verse made no such regular, organised use of iambs or any other kind of foot; instead, their verse was based on a much simpler kind of accentuation. The poetic line is divided in two. Two parts, each containing two stressed elements, two beats. The Greek for half a line is hemistich (pronounced hemmy-stick) and so, Greek being the language even of native English prosody, hemistich is the word commonly used to describe the Anglo-Saxon half-line.

  Each hemistich must contain two stressed syllables. It doesn’t matter where they come or how many unstressed syllables surround them. For now, we will call the stressed syllables one, two, three and four. One and two are placed in the first hemistich, three and four in the second. I have left a deliberately wide gap to denote the vital caesura that marks the division into hemistichs.

  One comes along with two and three is there with four

  Let old one take two’s hand while young three has a word with four

  Here come one and two three is there with four

  Although ‘comes’, ‘along’, ‘there’, ‘hand’, ‘young’ and ‘word’ might seem to be words which ought properly to receive some stress, it is only the numbers here that take the primary accent. Try reading the three lines aloud, deliberately hitting the numbers hard.

  You get the idea. Of course there will always be minor, secondary stresses on the other words, but it is those four stressed elements that matter. You could say, if you love odd words as much as most poets do, that a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is in reality a syzygy of dipodic hemistichs. A pair of yoked two-foot half-lines, in other words. But I prefer syzygy. It really is a word, I promise you.31

  Now for the alliterative principle, christened by Michael Alexander, Anglo-Saxon scholar and translator of Beowulf, the BANG, BANG, BANG – CRASH! rule.

  ONE, TWO AND THREE ARE ALLITERATED,

  FOUR ISN’T

  It is as simple as that. No rhyming, so syllable counting. In fact, why bother with the word hemistich at all? The line is divided into two: the first half has bang and bang, and the second half has bang and crash. That’s all you really need to know. Let us scan this kind of metre with bold for the first three beats and bold-underline for the fourth, to mark its unalliterated difference.

  It embarks with a bang

  sucking breath from the lungs

  And rolls on directly

  as rapid as lightning.

  The speed and the splendour

  come spilling like wine

  Compellingly perfect and

  appealingly clear

  The most venerable invention

  conveniently simple.

  Important to note that it is the stressed syllables that matter: ‘compelling’ and ‘appealing’ are perfectly legitimate alliteration words, as are ‘invention’ and ‘convenient’, ‘rolls’ and ‘directly’. So long as the stress falls heavily enough on the syllable belonging to the alliterating consonant, everything’s hotsy-totsy and right as a trivet. And I say again, because it might seem unusual after all the syllabic counting of the previous section of the book, IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY SYLLABLES THERE ARE, ONLY HOW MANY BEATS. Occasionally, in defiance of the b-b-b-crash rule you may see the fourth beat alliterate with the others, but usually it does not.

  Although I said that it does not matter where in each half of the line the stressed elements go, it is close enough to a rule to say that the fourth stress (the CRASH) is very likely to be in the last word of the line, which may (like ‘lightning’ and ‘simple’ above) have a feminine ending.

  I could give you some examples of Anglo-Saxon verse, but they involve special letters (yoghs, eths and thorns) and the language is distant enough from our own to be virtually incomprehensible to all but the initiated.

  Medieval verse is not so tricky to decipher. Round about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English poets began to write once more in the Anglo-Saxon style: this flowering, known as the Alliterative Revival, gave rise to some magnificent works. Here is the opening to William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’.32

  In a somer sesoun, whan softe was the sonne

  I shope me into shroudes, as I a shep were,

  In habite as an heremite, unholy of werkes,

  Wente forth in the world wondres to here,

  And saw many selles and sellcouthe thynges.

  You hardly need to know what every word means, but a rough translation would be:

  One summer, when the sun was gentle

  I dressed myself in rough clothes like a shepherd

  In the habit of a lazy hermit33

  Went forth into the world to hear wonders

  And saw many marvels and strange things.

  You will notice that Langland does open with bang, bang, bang – bang. Perhaps it is his way of beginning his poem with special hoopla. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous work from the same period (late fourteenth century: contemporary with Chaucer) opens thus:

  Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at Troye

  The borgh brittened and brent to brondez and askez

  The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght

  Watz tried for his tricherie, the trewest on
erthe;

  My spellcheck has just resigned, but no matter. Here is a basic translation:

  Since the siege and the assault ceased at Troy

  The town destroyed and burned to brands and ashes

  The man that the wiles of treason there wrought

  Was tried for his treachery, the veriest on earth;

  The Gawain Poet (as he is known in the sexy world of medieval studies – he is considered by some to be the author of three other alliterative works – Pearl, Patience and Purity) occasionally breaks the ‘rule’ and includes an extra alliterating word, and therefore, one must assume, an extra beat, as he does here in the second line.

  Modern poets (by which I mean any from the last hundred years) have tried their hands at this kind of verse with varying degrees of accomplishment. This is a perfect Langlandian four-stress alliterated line in two hemistichs and comes from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

  On a bleak background of bald stone.

  Ezra Pound’s ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo-Saxon’ contains lines like ‘Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth’ and ‘Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight’ but for the most part it does not follow the hemistich b-b-b-c pattern with such exactness. Among the more successful in this manner was that great prosodic experimenter,W. H. Auden. These extracts are from his verse drama The Age of Anxiety.

  Deep in my dark the dream shines

  Yes, of you, you dear always;

  My cause to cry, cold but my

  Story still, still my music.

  Mild rose the moon, moving through our

  Naked nights: tonight it rains;

  Black umbrellas blossom out;

  Gone the gold, my golden ball.

  What Auden manages, which other workers in this field often do not, is to imbue the verse with a sense of the modern and the living. He uses enjambment (something very rarely done by Old English and medieval poets) to help create a sense of flow. A grim failing when writing in alliterative four-stress lines is to overdo the Saxon and produce verse that is the poetic equivalent of morris dancing or Hobbit-speak.34 When reading such verse out loud you feel the urge to put a finger to your ear and chant nasally like a bad folk singer. This unpleasantness can be aggravated by an over-reliance on a trope known as a kenning. Kennings are found in great profusion in Anglo-Saxon, Old German and especially Norse poetry. They are a kind of compound metonym (a metaphoric trope, see the glossary) used to represent a single object, person or concept: thus a ship becomes an oar steed, the sea is the whale road or the gannet’s bath (hron-rade or ganotes-bæ∂) and din of spears would stand for ‘battle’. My favourite is brow-stars for eyes. Eddic and Icelandic bards were very fond of these devices: I suppose modern equivalents would be iron horse for train, chalk face for the classroom, fleapit for cinema, bunfight for party, devil’s dandruff for cocaine and Hershey highway for . . . well, ask your mother.

  Modern prosodists and teachers (perhaps in a tragic and doomed attempt to get young people interested) have described alliterative-accentual verse of this kind as a sort of Old English forerunner of hip-hop. There is no doubt that hip-hop will often favour the four-beat line, as the Blazin’ Squad remind us . . .

  Me and the boys, we’ll be blazin’ it up

  And certainly MC Hammer’s ‘Let’s Get It Started’ can be said to be formed in perfect hemistichs, two beats to each.

  Nobody knows how a rapper really feels

  A mind full of rhymes, and a tongue of steel

  Just put on the Hammer, and you will be rewarded

  My beat is ever boomin, and you know I get it started

  To scan such lyrics in the classical manner would clearly be even more absurd than comparing them to Anglo-Saxon hemistichs, but somewhere between sociology, anthropology, prosody and neurolinguistics there could be found an answer as to why a four-beat line divided in two has continued to have such resonance for well over a millennium. For our purposes, it can do no harm to be familiar with the feel of the Anglo-Saxon split line. To that end, we come to . . .

  Poetry Exercise 7

  Write a piece of verse following the rules above: each half-line to contain two beats, all four following the bang, bang, bang – crash rule (in other words alliteration on the first three beats).

  To make it easier, I would suggest finding something very specific to write about. Poetry comes much more easily when concrete thoughts and images are brought to mind. For the sake of this exercise, since it is getting on for lunchtime and I am hungry, I suggest eighteen or twenty lines on the subject of what you would like, and wouldn’t like, to eat right this minute.

  Once again, I have scribbled down some drivel to show you that quality is not the point here, just the flexing of your new accentual-alliterative muscles. I have not been able to resist rhyming the last two lines, something entirely unnecessary and, frankly, unacceptable. You will do much better, I know.

  Figs are too fussy and fish too dull

  I’m quite fond of quince, but I question its point.

  Most sushi is salty and somehow too raw

  I can’t abide bagels and beans make me fart

  There’s something so sad about salmon and dill

  And goose eggs and gherkins are ghastlier still.

  But cheese smeared with chutney is cheerful enough

  So I’ll settle for sandwiches, sliced very thick

  The brownest of bread, buttered with love.

  A plate of ploughman’s will pleasure me well,

  I’ll lunch like a lord, then labour till four

  When teacakes and toast will tempt me once more.

  Sprung Rhythm

  Stress is the life of it.

  GMH – letter to Robert Bridges

  One single name rises above all others when considering the influence of Anglo-Saxon modalities on modern poetry. Well – three single names, come to think of it . . .

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  It is possible that you came across this mysterious Jesuit priest’s verse at school and that someone had the dreadful task of trying to explain to you how sprung rhythm worked. Relax: it is like Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Only three people in the world understand it, one is dead, the other has gone mad and the third is me, and I have forgotten.

  Hopkins was a nineteenth-century English–Welsh poet who developed his own metrics. Calling the system ‘sprung rhythm’, he marked his verse with accents, loops and foot divisions to demonstrate how his stresses should fall. Among his prosodic inventions were such devices as ‘outriders’, ‘roving over’ and ‘hanging stress’: these have their counterparts or at least rough equivalents in the sain and lusg that make up cynghanedd, the sound system of ancient Welsh poetry, which Hopkins had studied deeply. I am not going to go into them here for two simple reasons: firstly, they make my head ache and secondly, I think they would only be usefully covered in a much more detailed book than this aspires to be. If you really want to get to grips with what he was up to, I recommend a library. His collected letters are available in academic bookshops and university collections; in these he explains to fellow poets like Robert Bridges and Coventry Patmore what he felt he was doing. Personally I find reading his poems a supreme pleasure unless I am trying to figure out their underlying metrical schemes.

  Here is one of his best-known works ‘Pied Beauty’. YOU ARE STILL READING OUT LOUD AREN’T YOU? GOOD.

  GLORY be to God for dappled things –

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

  Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

  And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

  All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

  He fathers-forth whose beaut
y is past change:

  Praise him.

  ‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ as he himself wrote of the windhover. I am sure you have seen that most of the words are Anglo-Saxon in origin, very few Latinate words there at all (counter, original, colour and trout are the only ones I am sure of), the alliteration is fierce throughout, though not in the strict bang, bang, bang – crash! form we saw in Langland. You probably don’t need to count syllables to be able to tell that there is no standard metric regularity here. His own accents on ‘áll trádes’ reveal the importance he places on stress and the unusual nature of its disposition.

  Now read out the opening of ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’. The endearing title refers to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who believed that impermanence, the perpetual flux of all nature, is central to our understanding of existence and that clouds, air, earth and fire constantly transmute one into the other. The language again is almost entirely Anglo-Saxon in derivation. Hopkins uses virgules to mark the long lines for us into hemistichs.

  CLOUD PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth,

  then chevy on an air-

  Built thoroughfare: heaven roisterers, in gay-gangs | they

  throng; they glitter in marches,

  Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an

  elm arches,

  Shivelights and shadowtackle in long | lashes lace, lance, and

  pair.

  Essentially his technique was all about compression: sprung rhythm squeezes out weak or ‘slack’ syllables and condenses the strong stresses, one to each foot. ‘Sprung rhythm makes verse stressy,’ he wrote to his brother Everard, ‘it purges it to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm, as poetry in general is brighter than common speech.’

  Writing to Bridges of his poem ‘The Eurydice’ he said this: ‘you must not slovenly read it with the eyes but with your ears as if the paper were declaiming it at you. For instance the line “she had come from a cruise training seamen” read without stress is mere Lloyds Shipping Intelligence; properly read it is quite a different story. Stress is the life of it.’ My italics, my stress.