The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
Page 12
titty-titty
or isn’t it
Dispondee
tum-tum-tum-tum
MRSA, long time no see, fee-fie-fo-fum
Diamb
ti-tum-ti-tum
the Queen of Hearts, alas a lack
Ditrochee
tum-ti-tum-ti
Hurdy-gurdy, silly billy, Humpty Dumpty
Ionic minor
titty-tum-tum
he’s a good man, in a mad world
Ionic major
tum-tum-titty
bad policy, John Kennedy
Antispast
ti-tum-tum-ti
the big breakfast, Nicole Kidman
Choriamb
tum-titty-tum
top of the world, Richard the Third, over to you
First Paeon
tum-ti-titty
temporary, practically, emissary
Second Paeon
ti-tum-titty
ridiculous, preposterous, adorable, pentameter
Third Paeon
titty-tum-ti
Jackanory, altogether,
Fourth Paeon
titty-ti-tum
is it a boy, give it to me
First epitrite
ti-tum-tum-tum
the thin red line, the BBC
Second epitrite
tum-ti-tum-tum
mix a stiff drink, have a nice day
Third epitrite
tum-tum-ti-tum
give peace a chance, hip hip hurray
Fourth epitrite
tum-tum-tum-ti
horse hair sofa, dead man walking
Now about the metrics: the terminology you use – of amphibrachs, pyrrhics etc. – is obsolete in English. We now speak of these feet only in analyzing choruses from Greek plays – because Greek verse is quantitative [ . . . ] we have simplified our metrics to five kinds of feet [ . . . ] trochee, iambus, anapest, dactyl, spondee. We do not need any more.
Edmund Wilson in a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 1 September 1942
1 Pitch matters, of course it does. It matters in speech and in poetry, but for the moment we will concentrate on stress.
2 Unless otherwise stated, I use ‘English’ here and throughout the book to refer to the English language, not the country.
3 ‘Convenient and innocuous nomenclatorial handles,’ as Vladimir Nabokov calls them in his Notes on Prosody.
4 He sat up without another word and split the rope in two with his axe.
5 From An Essay on Criticism.
6 Caesuras have a more ordered and specific role to play in French verse, dramatic or otherwise. French poems, like their geometrically planned gardens, were laid out with much greater formality than ours. They are more like regular rests in musical bars. We need not worry about this formal use.
7 Hence too, possibly, caesarean section, though some argue that this is named after Julius Caesar who was delivered that way. Others claim that this was why Julius was called Caesar in the first place, because he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. We needn’t worry about that, either. Incidentally, in America they are spelled ‘cesura’.
8 Wordsworth, sonnet:‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.’
9 There are metrists who would argue that there are more caesuras than that: there may be ‘weak’ breaks in some of the other lines, but my reading stands, so there.
10 A scholiast is an inkhorn or pedantic grammarian and a poetaster a tediously bad poet – not, as you might think, someone who samples the work of Edgar Allan Poe . . .
11 is a schwa, that slack ‘e’ sound, the uh in bigger or written.
12 T. Steele. All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, Ohio University Press.
13 ‘Nature so spurs them on that people long to go on pilgrimages.’
14 Milton, like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as always to mark ‘heaven’ as the monosyllable ‘heav’n’ whenever it ended a line. Finding two hendecasyllables in a row in Paradise Lost is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican.
15 Ditto: Pope took great pride in the decasyllabic nature of his rhyming couplets. This is one of only two feminine endings in the whole (over 1,500 line) poem, the other being a rhyme of ‘silly’ with ‘Sir Billy’: it seems it was acceptable to Pope so long as the rhyming words were proper names. Maybe here he hears Cowards as Cards and Howards as Hards . . .
16 Wordsworth’s hero was, poetically and politically, Milton and W shows the same disdain for weak endings. I’m fairly convinced that for him ‘being’ is actually elided into the monosyllable ‘beeng’!
17 Many prosodists would argue, as I have said earlier, that there is no such thing as a spondee in English verse, partly because no two contiguous syllables can be pronounced with absolute equal stress and partly because a spondee is really a description not of accent, but of vowel length, an entirely different concept, and one essentially alien to English prosody.
18 If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I’m afraid I shall have to kill you.
19 When I wrote this, we had just lost the first Test against Australia and I was pessimistic . . .
20 Named from a twelfth-century French poem,Le Roman d’Alexandre.
21 After all, in French (as opposed to Spanish, say), a diacritical mark (a written accent) is not about syllabic emphasis: école is evenly stressed, the accent is just there to modify the vowel sound, not impart extra stress to it.
22 Dickinson’s works remain untitled: the numbers refer to their order in the 1955 Harvard variorum edition.
23 At first attempt I mistyped that as ‘A Robin Red breast in a Café’, ‘Makes Heaven go all daffy’, I suppose . . .
24 A common but metrically meaningless convention.
25 Including Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s definitive 1957 edition.
26 It was T. S. Eliot.
27 ‘But that’s just plain silly’ is amphibrachic: these feet can get into your system.
28 A quintain or cinquain being a five-line verse.
29 But not Oxford Street, which would be more of a dactyl, this is an oddity of English utterance.
30 ‘The repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected’ is how the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, with trademark elegance and concision.
31 Pronounced scissor-gee:‘a pair of connected or corresponding things’.
32 From the C text: shorn of its yoghs and thorns, thanks to Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall’s invaluable edition, published by Edward Arnold for York Medieval Texts.
33 A work-shy monk, not attached to any monastic order. Like Chaucer, Langland was very down on the species.
34 My edition of Gawain was edited by Tolkien, who did much to popularise Middle English verse, through his scholarship as much as through his Middle Earth fantasies.
35 Derived from the theology of Duns Scots, whom Hopkins revered.
36 From the French vers libre, coined in Paris in an 1886 edition of La Vogue, which included excerpts of Whitman among the Laforgue and Rimbaud.
37 A reading of those poets will of course reveal much in the way of metrics, form and rhyming, but the generality of their work escaped into free verse.
38 A Filipino language.
39 Technically a mora-timed language: morae being phonological units of duration.
40 The longest syllabic verse poem in the language, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia. I tried – for your sake, dear reader, I tried – but gave up after line 23.
41 Also sometimes known as a proceleusmatic foot.
CHAPTER TWO
Rhyme
It is the one chord we have added to
the Greek lyre.
OSCAR WILDE: ‘The Critic as Artist’
I
‘Do you rhyme?’
This is often the first question a poet is asked. Despite the absence of rhyme in Greece and Rome (hence Wilde’s aphorism above), despite the glories of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and all the blank-verse masterpieces of English literature from the Dark Ages to the present day, despite a hundred years of Modernism, rhyming remains for many an almost defining feature of poetry. It ain’t worth a dime if it don’t got that rhyme is how some poets and poetry lovers would sum it up. For others rhyming is formulaic, commonplace and conventional: a feeble badge of predictability, symmetry and bourgeois obedience.
There are very few poets I can call to mind who only used rhyme in their work, but I cannot think of a single one, no matter how free form and experimental, who never rhymed. Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams,T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, e e cummings, Crane, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Hughes – not an exception do I know.
There are some stanzaic forms, as we shall find in the next chapter, which seem limp and unfinished without the comfort and assurance that rhyme can bring, especially ballads and other forms that derive from, or tend towards, song. In other modes the verse can seem cheapened by rhyme. It is hard to imagine a rhyming version of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ or Eliot’s Four Quartets, for example. This may of course be a failure of imagination: once a thing is made and done it is hard to picture it made and done in any other way.
The question ‘to rhyme or not to rhyme’ is not one I can answer for you, except to say that it would almost certainly be wrong to answer it with ‘always’ or ‘never’.
Rhyme, like alliteration (which is sometimes called head rhyme) is thought to have originated in pre-literate times as a way of allowing the words of sung odes, lyrics, epics and sagas more easily to be memorised. Whatever its origin, the expectations it sets up in the mind seem deeply embedded in us. Much of poetry is about ‘consonance’ in the sense of correspondence: the likeness or congruity of one apparently disparate thing to another. Poetry is concerned with the connections between things, seeing the world in a grain of sand as Blake did in ‘Auguries of Innocence’, or sensing loss of faith in the ebbing of the tide as Arnold did in ‘Dover Beach’. You might say poets are always looking for the wider rhymes in nature and experience. The Sea ‘rhymes’ with Time in its relentless flow, its eroding power, its unknowable depth. Hope ‘rhymes’ with Spring, Death ‘rhymes’ with Winter. At the level of physical observation, Blood ‘rhymes’ with Wine, Eyes with Sapphires, Lips with Roses, War with Storms and so on. Those are all stock correspondences which were considered clichés even by Shakespeare’s day of course, but the point is this: as pattern-seeking, connection-hungry beings we are always looking for ways in which one thing chimes with another. Metonym, metaphor and simile do this in one way, rhyme, the apparently arbitrary chiming of word sounds, does it in another. Rhyme, as children quickly realise, provides a special kind of satisfaction. It can make us feel, for the space of a poem, that the world is less contingent, less random, more connected, link by link. When used well rhyme can reify meaning, it can embody in sound and sight the connections that poets try to make with their wider images and ideas. The Scottish poet and musician Don Paterson puts it this way:
Rhyme always unifies sense [ . . . ] it can trick a logic from
the shadows where one would not otherwise have existed.
An understanding of rhyme comes to us early in life. One sure way to make young children laugh is to deny them the natural satisfaction of expected end-rhymes, as in this limerick by W. S. Gilbert:
There was an old man of St Bees
Who was horribly stung by a wasp
When they said: ‘Does it hurt?’
He replied: ‘No it doesn’t –
It’s a good job it wasn’t a hornet.’
We all know of people who are tone-deaf, colour-blind, dyslexic or have no sense of rhythm, smell or taste, but I have never heard of anyone who cannot distinguish and understand rhyme. There may be those who genuinely think that ‘bounce’ rhymes with ‘freak’, but I doubt it. I think we can safely say rhyme is understood by all who have language. All except those who were born without hearing of course, for rhyming is principally a question of sound.
The Basic Categories of Rhyme
End-rhymes – internal rhymes
While it is possible that before you opened this book you were not too sure about metre, I have no doubt that you have known since childhood exactly what rhyme is. The first poems we meet in life are nursery rhymes.
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
That famous and deeply tragic four-line verse (or quatrain) consists of two rhyming couplets. Here is an example of a ballady kind of quatrain where only the three-stress (second and fourth) lines bear the rhyme words:
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
In both examples, the rhyme words come at the end of the line: fall/wall, men/again, snow/go. This is called END RHYMING.
Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them.
Leave them alone and they’ll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Little Bo Peep fell fast asleep
And dreamt she heard them bleating
But when she awoke she found it a joke
For they were still afleeting.
Here we have end-rhymes as before but INTERNAL RHYMES too, in the four-beat lines: Peep/sheep, alone/home, Peep/asleep and awoke/joke. Coleridge used this kind of internal rhyming a great deal in his ‘Ancient Mariner’:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
As did Lewis Caroll in ‘The Jabberwocky’:
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
A rarer form of internal rhyming is the leonine which derives from medieval Latin verse.1 This is found in poems of longer measure where the stressed syllable preceding a caesura rhymes with the last stressed syllable of the line. Tennyson experimented with leonine rhymes in his juvenilia as well as using it in his later poem ‘The Revenge’:
And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace.
I suppose the internal rhyming in ‘The Raven’ might be considered leonine too, though corvine would be more appropriate . . .
But the raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered;
Till I scarcely more than muttered, ‘Other friends have flown before;
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.’
Then the bird said, ‘Nevermore.’
Throughout the poem Poe runs a third internal rhyme (here uttered/fluttered) into the next line (muttered).
Hopkins employed internal rhyme a great deal, but not in such predictable patterns. He used it to yoke together the stresses in such phrases as dapple-dawn-drawn, stirred for a bird, he cursed at first, fall gall, in a flash at a trumpet-crash, glean-stream and so on.
Partial Rhymes
Partial rhymes: assonance and consonance – eye-rhyme and wrenched rhyme
On closer inspection that last internal rhyme from Hopkins is not quite right, is it? Glean and stream do not share the same final consonant. In the third line of ‘L
ittle Bo Beep’ the alone/home rhyme is imperfect in the same way: this is PARTIAL RHYME, sometimes called SLANT-rhyme or PARA-RHYME.2 In slant-rhyme of the alone/home, glean/stream kind, where the vowels match but the consonants do not, the effect is called ASSONANCE: as in cup/rub, beat/feed, sob/top, craft/mast and so on. Hopkins uses plough/down, rose/moles, breath/bread, martyr/master and many others in internal rhymes, but never as end-rhyme. Assonance in end-rhymes is most commonly found in folk ballads, nursery rhymes and other song lyrics, although it was frowned upon (as were all partial rhymes) in Tin Pan Alley and musical theatre. On Broadway it is still considered bad style for a lyricist not to rhyme perfectly. Not so in the world of pop: do you remember the Kim Carnes song ‘Bette Davis Eyes’? How’s this for assonance?
She’s ferocious
And she knows just
What it takes to make a pro blush
Yowser! In the sixties the Liverpool School of poets, who were culturally (and indeed personally, through ties of friendship) connected to the Liverpool Sound, were notably fond of assonantal rhyme. Adrian Mitchell, for example, rhymes size with five in his poem ‘Fifteen Million Plastic Bags’. The poets you are most likely to find using assonantal slant-rhymes today work in hip-hop and reggae traditions: Here’s ‘Talking Turkey’ by Benjamin Zephaniah. Have fun reading it out à la B.Z. –
Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas
Cos’ turkeys just wanna hav fun
Turkeys are cool, turkeys are wicked
An every turkey has a Mum.
Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas,
Don’t eat it, keep it alive,
It could be yu mate, an not on your plate
Say,‘Yo! Turkey I’m on your side.’