The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
Page 11
The manner was designed to create an outward, poetic form (‘instress’) that mirrored what he saw as the ‘inscape’ of the world. He said in a letter to Patmore that stress is ‘the making of a thing more, or making it markedly, what it already is; it is the bringing out its nature’. His sense of instress and inscape is not unlike the medieval idea of haecceity or ‘thisness’35 and the later, modernist obsession with quiddity (‘whatness’). If such exquisite words are leaving you all of a doo-dah, it is worth remembering that for those of us with a high doctrine of poetry, the art is precisely concerned with precision, exactly about the exact, fundamentally found in the fundamental, concretely concrete, radically rooted in the thisness and whatness of everything. Poets, like painters, look hard for the exact nature of things and feelings, what they really, really are. Just as painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to move their form on, tried to find new ways to represent the ‘concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’ that T. E. Hulme saw as reality, so Hopkins attempted to create a prosodic scheme that went beyond the calm, regular certainties of iambs and anapaests (‘running rhythm’ as he called traditional metrics) in order to find a system that mirrored the (for him) overwhelming complexity, density and richness of nature. How they mocked Cézanne and Matisse for their pretension and oddity, yet how truthful to us their representations of nature now seem. The idiosyncrasy of Hopkins is likewise apparent, yet who can argue with such a concrete realisation of the skies? ‘Cloud puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows . . .’ The density and relentless energy of his stresses and word-yokings are his way of relaying to us the density and relentless energy of experience. There is nothing ‘primitivist’, ‘folksy’ or ‘naïve’ in Hopkins’s appropriation of indigenous, pre-Renaissance poetics, his verse strikes our ear as powerfully modern, complex and tense.‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness,’ he wrote to Bridges in 1879.‘It is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’
One more excerpt, this time from ‘The Caged Skylark’, which, as you will see, refers to us more than to the bird:
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.
How different from Blake’s Robin Red breast in its cage . . .
Five of those twenty-four syllables are slack and squeezed into the lightest of scudding trips (in order: a, -ed, a, -it, his), while the in of both lines takes fractionally more push. The others, with varying degrees of weight that you might like to decide upon, are stressed: I have emboldened the words that seem to me to take the primary stress, but I could well be wrong. Incidentally,‘bone-house’ to mean ‘body’ is an example of a kenning: it doesn’t take too much to see that the adjectival ‘dare-gale’ could easily cross over into another kenning too.
All of which demonstrates, I hope, the way in which Hopkins backwards-leapfrogged the Romantics, the Augustans (Pope, Dryden et al.), Shakespeare, Milton and even Chaucer, to forge a distinct poetics of stress metre from the ancient verse of the Welsh, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon traditions. In turn, many British twentieth-century poets looked back the shorter distance to Hopkins, over the shoulders of Eliot, Pound and Yeats. I find it hard to read much of Ted Hughes, for example, without hearing Hopkins’s distinct music. Here are two fragments from ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’ for you to recite to yourself.
They clatter
Over worthless moraines, tossing
Their Ancient Briton draggle-tassel sheepskins
Or pose, in the rain-smoke, like warriors –
...
This lightning-broken huddle of summits
This god-of-what-nobody-wants
Or this, from ‘Eagle’:
The huddle-shawled lightning-faced warrior
Stamps his shaggy-trousered dance
On an altar of blood.
Certainly the sensibility is different: Hopkins is all wonderment, worship, dazzle and delight, where Hughes is often (but certainly not always) in a big mood: filled with disgust, doubt and granite contempt. Nonetheless, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the generally four-stressed split line and use of alliteration and other ‘echoic’ devices (we’ll come to them in a later chapter) reveal much common ground. Many modern British poets show the influence of ancient forms filtered through Hopkins. We’ve already met this perfect Langlandian line from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:
On a bleak background of bald stone.
From the same poem comes this:
the leaves’
Intricate filigree falls, and who shall renew
Its brisk pattern?
We feel a faint echo of Hopkins there, I think, for all that it is more controlled and syntactically conventional. I am not denying the individuality of Hughes or Thomas: the point is that Hopkins cleared a pathway that had long been overgrown, a pathway that in the twentieth century became something of a well-trodden thoroughfare, almost a thronging concourse. Hopkins himself said in a letter to Bridges in 1888 after he had just completed the ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, inspired as it was by the distillation ‘of a great deal of early philosophical thought’:
. . . the liquor of the distillation did not taste very Greek, did it? The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.
I have taken a little time over the style, purpose and influence of Hopkins because his oppo, as you might say,Walt Whitman – very different man, but so alike too – was busy in America tearing up the prosodic manuals round about the time Hopkins was experimenting with his sprung rhythms.
Whitman is considered by many to be the father of English language free verse36: verse without traditional patterning, stanza form, rhyme, metre, syllabic count or regular accentuation. Since such verse is beyond the reach and aim of this book, much of the pleasures of Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, the American ‘Open Field’ School and Whitman37 himself (and very real pleasures they are) will not be looked at here. As I have already said, I do not look down on free verse at all: I admire the poet who can master it.
There are two kingdoms of life: Flora and Fauna. In the natural history of poetry there are likewise two kingdoms: there is the kingdom of Accentual-Syllabic Verse and there is the kingdom of Accentual Verse.
Hang on a mo . . .
There are actually three kingdoms in the natural world – we have forgotten the kingdom of Fungi. And likewise there is a third kingdom of Poetry: the Kingdom of Syllabic verse.
VI
Syllabic Verse
These three then:
A
accentual-syllabic verse — the number of syllables and stresses in a line is fixed.
B
accentual verse — the number of stresses in a line is fixed, but the number of syllables varies (includes alliterative-accentual verse).
C
syllabic verse — the number of syllables in a line is fixed, but the number of stresses varies.
A
Meters and feet — iambs, pentameters, trochees, tetrameters and so on.
B
Anglo-Saxon four-stress verse — Hopkins and much song, ballad, folk, hip-hop and nursery rhyme forms.
C
??
We have spent a fair amount of time looking at categories A and B but C remains unexplored.
Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point?
Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it. Much syllabic verse is from other linguistic cultures than our own. Perhaps the best known is the Japanese haiku which, as you may already know, is a three-line verse of five, seven and five syllables. In Japanese this syllable count is imperative and the form contains other rules which we can examine (as well as seeing whether it is feasible
to write haikus in the strict Japanese manner in English) in the chapter on Verse Forms. The Tagalog tanaga is another such syllabic measured verse-form. Japanese and Tagalog38 are syllable-timed languages39 as are Spanish and many others European and worldwide. English, however, is stress-timed. What this means is beyond the scope of this book (or my poor grasp of phono-linguistics) but the upshot is that while verse ordered by syllabic count is popular in many other cultures, and indeed is often the norm, it is a rarity in English, since the lack of equal spacing between syllables in our stress-timed utterance renders such elaborate schemes very different from the foreign mode. They will never carry the music that native speakers of syllable-timed languages find in their syllabic verse, the English type involves a mostly visual engagement with the reader, sometimes resulting in a kind of concrete or shaped poetry. The moment a poet writing in this manner tries to arrange the stress – voilà! – we arrive back where we started at accentual-syllabic verse and our good friend the metric foot.
Nonetheless English-language poets have tried to write syllabic verse. The history of it may be stated briefly: with the exception of a few Elizabethan examples the mode did not come into prominence until Hopkins’s friend Robert Bridges wrote extensively on the subject and in the manner – including his unreadable ‘The Testament of Beauty’, five thousand lines of twelve-syllable tedium.40 His daughter Elizabeth Daryush (1887– 1977) took up the standard and wrote many syllabic poems, usually in lines of equal syllabic count, managing artfully to avoid iambic or any other regular stress patterns, as in the decasyllabic ‘Still Life’, a poem published in 1936:
Through the open French window the warm sun
lights up the polished breakfast table, laid
round a bowl of crimson roses, for one –
a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed
near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot
rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,
butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,
and, heaped, on a salver, the morning’s post.
Note that ‘porcelain’ in true upper-class British would have to be pronounced ‘porslin’ to make the count work. Some kind of form is offered by the rhyming – one feels otherwise that the heavily run-on lines would be in danger of dissolving the work into prose. It was Daryush’s exact contemporary the American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1969) who fully developed the manner. Her style of scrupulous, visually arresting syllabic verse has been highly influential. Here is an extract from her poem ‘The Fish’ with its syllable count of 1,3,9,6,8 per stanza.
1 All
3 external
9 marks of abuse are present on this
6 defiant edifice
8 all the physical features of
1 ac-
3 cident – lack
9 of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
6 hatchet strokes, these things stand
8 out on it; the chasm-side is
1 dead . . .
As you can see, the count is important enough to sever words in something much fiercer than a usual enjambment. The apparent randomness is held in check by delicate rhyming: this/edifice, and/stand.
‘I repudiate syllabic verse’ Moore herself sniffed to her editor and went further in interview:
I do not know what syllabic verse is, can find no appropriate application for it. To be more precise, to raise to the status of science a mere counting of syllables seems to me frivolous.
As Dr Peter Wilson of London Metropolitan University has pointed out, ‘. . . since it is clear that many of her finest poems could not have been written in the form they were without the counting of syllables, this comment is somewhat disingenuous.’ Other poets who have used syllabics include Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn and Donald Justice, this from the latter’s ‘The Tourist from Syracuse’:
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.
Between the Daryush and the Moore I hope you can see that there are possibilities in this verse mode. There is form, there is shape. If you like the looser, almost prose-poem approach, then writing in syllabics allows you the best of both worlds: structure to help organise thoughts and feelings into verse, and freedom from what some poets regard as the jackboot march of metrical feet. The beauty of such structures is that they are self-imposed, they are not handed down by our poetic forebears. That is their beauty but also their terror. When writing syllabics you are on your own.
It must be time for another exercise.
Poetry Exercise 8
Two stanzas of alternating seven- and five-line syllabic verse: subject Rain.
Two stanzas of verse running 3, 6, 1, 4, 8, 4, 1, 6, 3: subject Hygiene.
Here are my attempts, vague rhymes in the first, some in the second: you don’t have to:
Rain
they say there’s a taste before
it comes; a tin tang
like tonguing a battery
or a cola can
I know that I can’t smell it
but the animals
glumly lowering their heads
can foretell its fall:
they can remember rains past
as I come closer
their eyewhites flash in fear of
another Noah
Hygiene
I’m filthy
On the outside I stink.
But,
There are people
So cleansed of dirt it makes you think
Unhygienic
Thoughts
Of them. I’d much rather
Stay filthy.
Their lather
Can’t reach where they reek,
Suds
Can’t soap inside.
All hosed, scrubbed and oilily sleek
They’re still deep dyed
They
Can stand all day and drench
They still stench.
We have come to the end of our chapter on metrical modes. It is by no means complete. If you were (heaven forbid) to go no further with my book, I believe you would already be a much stronger and more confident poet for having read thus far. But please don’t leave yet, there is much to discover in the next chapters on rhyming and on verse forms: that is where the fun really begins. Firstly, a final little exercise awaits.
Poetry Exercise 9
Coleridge wrote the following verse in 1806 to teach his son Derwent the most commonly used metrical feet. Note that he uses the classical ‘long’ ‘short’ appellation where we would now say ‘stressed’ ‘weak’. For your final exercise in this chapter, whip out your pencil and see how in the first stanza he has suited the metre to the description by scanning each line. By all means refer to the ‘Table of Metric Feet’ below. You are not expected to have learned anything off by heart. I have included the second stanza, which does not contain variations of metre, simply because it is so touching in its fatherly affection.
Lesson for a Boy
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl’s trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long; –
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride; –
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.
If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres to show it,
With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet,
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and
his Father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge . . .
Table of Metric Feet
BINARY
Iamb
da-dum
divine, alert, inept, confined
Trochee
dum-da
metre, rhythm, never, touching
Spondee
dum-dum
full stop, no way, get stuffed
Pyrrhic
da-da:
in the, of a
TERNARY
Anapaest
titty-tum
understand, in a spin, minaret, Japanese
Dactyl
tum-titty
agitate, lavender, fantasy solemnly, signature
Amphibrach
ti-tum-ti
immoral, whatever, imperfect, desiring
Amphimacer
tum-ti-tum
mating game, hand to mouth, up to you
Bacchius
ti tum tum
a top dog, your main man
Antibacchius
tum-tum-ti
good morning, Dick Turpin
Molossus
dum-dum-dum
John Paul Jones, short sharp shock
Tribrach
ti-ti-ti
and in the, or as a
QUATERNARY
Tetrabrach41