The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
Page 14
If I were used to writing verse,
And had a muse not so perverse,
But prompt at Fancy’s call to spring
And carol like a bird in Spring;
Or like a Bee, in summer time,
That hums about a bed of thyme,
And gathers honey and delights
From every blossom where it ’lights;
If I, alas! had such a muse,
To touch the Reader or amuse,
And breathe the true poetic vein,
This page should not be fill’d in vain!
But ah! the pow’r was never mine
To dig for gems in Fancy’s mine:
Or wander over land and main
To seek the Fairies’ old domain –
To watch Apollo while he climbs
His throne in oriental climes;
Or mark the ‘gradual dusky veil’
Drawn over Tempe’s tuneful vale,
In classic lays remember’d long –
Such flights to bolder wings belong;
To Bards who on that glorious height,
Of sun and song, Parnassus hight,8
Partake the divine fire that burns,
In Milton, Pope, and Scottish Burns,
Who sang his native braes and burns.
For me a novice strange and new,
Who ne’er such inspiration knew,
To weave a verse with travail sore,
Ordain’d to creep and not to soar,
A few poor lines alone I write,
Fulfilling thus a lonely rite,
Not meant to meet the Critic’s eye,
For oh! to hope from such as I,
For anything that’s fit to read,
Were trusting to a broken reed.
II
Rhyming Arrangements
The convention used when describing rhyme-schemes is literally as simple as abc. The first rhyme of a poem is a, the second b, the third c, and so on:
At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
a
Your trumpets, angels; and arise, arise
b
From death, your numberless infinities
b
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
a
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
a
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
b
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes
b
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
a
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
c
For if, above all these, my sins abound,
d
’Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
c
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
d
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
e
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood.
e
JOHN DONNE: Sonnet:‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’
This particular abba abba cdcd ee9 arrangement is a hybrid of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets’ rhyme-schemes, of which more in Chapter Three.
As to the descriptions of these layouts, well, that is simple enough. There are four very common forms. There is the COUPLET. . .
So long as men can breathe and eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
. . . and the TRIPLET:
In the poetry of the Augustan period (Dryden, Johnson, Swift, Pope etc.) you will often find triplets braced in one of these long curly brackets, as in the example above from the Prologue to Dryden’s tragedy, All For Love. Such braced triplets will usually hold a single thought and conclude with a full stop.
Next is CROSS-RHYMING, which rhymes alternating lines, abab etc:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Finally there is ENVELOPE RHYME, where a couplet is ‘enveloped’ by an outer rhyming pair: abba, as in the first eight lines of the Donne poem, or this stanza from Tennyson’s In Memoriam.
The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
You might have noticed that in the cross-rhyme and envelope-rhyme examples above, Wordsworth and Tennyson indent rhyming pairs, as it were pressing the tab key to shift them to the right: this is by no means obligatory. Larkin does indent with ‘Toads’, perhaps gently to nudge our attention to the subtle consonance rhyming:
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –
They seem to like it.
While in his ‘truly rhymed’ poem ‘The Trees’ he presents the envelope-rhymed stanzas without indentation:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said.
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Naturally, there are variations on these schemes: Wordsworth ends each cross-rhymed stanza of ‘Daffodils’ with a couplet, for example (abbacc). The world of formal rhyme-schemes awaits our excited inspection in the next chapter, but without delving into neurolinguistics and the deeper waters of academic prosody I really do not believe there is much more we need to know about rhyming in the technical sense. We have met all the types we are likely to meet and seen ways in which they may be arranged. The questions that concern us next are how and why?
I have already addressed the idea of rhyme as a connective, unifying force in poems, but it is worth considering the obvious point that rhyme uses language. Or is, I should say, exclusive to language. Paint can evoke landscape, sculpture the textures of physical form, but neither of these modes of expression has rhyme available to them (save in some metaphorical sense); music, like verse, can do rhythm but it is only poetry that can yoke words together in rhyme (sometimes, of course, and aboriginally, at the service of music). Rhyme may not be a defining condition of poetry, but poetry is pretty much a defining condition of rhyme. If poets shun rhyme, they are closing themselves off from one of the few separate and special techniques available to them and that, in my estimation, is foolishly prodigal.
Not all my poetry is in rhyme, but sometimes (and I cannot always be certain at the time why this should be) rhyming seems right and natural for a poem. It is more than likely that this will hold true in your work too.
One of the great faults we ‘amateur’ poets are prey to is lazy and pointless rhyming. If a poem is not to rhyme then it seems to me very silly indeed arbitrarily to introduce rhymes from time to time with no apparent thought but apparently because a natural rhyme has come up at that moment. So let us look now at good and bad rhyming, or convincing and unconvincing rhyming if you prefer.‘Deferred success rhyming’ as those nervous of the word failure would have us say.
III
Good and Bad Rhyme?
There are two issues to consider when rhyming: firstly and most clearly there is the need to avoid hackneyed rhyme pairs. For the past seven hundred years poets have been rhyming love with dove, moon with June, girl with curl and boy with joy. Certain rhymes are so convenient and appropriate that their use had already become stale by the mid 1700s. Alexander Pope was fierce on the subject of bad rhymers in his An Essay on Criticism:
While they ring round the same unvary’d chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes.
Where-e’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze’,
In the next line, it ‘whispers thro’ the trees’;
If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep’,
The reader’s threaten’d (not in va
in) with ‘sleep’.
Night/light/sight, death/breath and cherish/perish might be included in that list. The poor old word love, a natural subject for poetry if ever there was one, offers very few rhyme choices in English. Frances Cornford in ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train’ did her best:
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
Only the unlikely shoves could have been added. When it is a singular love, the word above becomes available and for the Cockney rhymesters among us, there is, I suppose, guv. Of is a popular assonance, especially in songs. In written verse you would be forced either to run the word on with an enjambment which is likely to make it overstressed and clumsy or to resort to this kind of stale formulation:
You’re the one I love,
The one I’m dreaming of.
Hate is so much easier . . .
If there is a rule to rhyming, I suppose it is that (save in comic verse or for some other desired effect) it should usually be – if not invisible – natural, transparent, seamless, discreet and unforced. The reader should not feel that a word has been chosen simply because it rhymes. Very often, let us not pretend otherwise, words are chosen for precisely that reason, but ars est celare artem – the art lies in the concealment of art. So, two blindingly obvious points:
AVOID THE OBVIOUS PAIRS
STRIVE NOT TO DRAW ATTENTION TO A RHYME
Trying to mint fresh rhymes and being transparent and uncontrived in one’s rhyming may seem like contradictory aims. Therein lies the art, of course; but if one guideline has to be sacrificed then for my preference it should certainly be the first. Better to go for a traditional rhyme pair than draw unnecessary attention to an unusual one.
Both ‘rules’, like any, can of course be broken so long as you know what you are doing and why. If you want an ugly rhyme, it is no less legitimate than a dissonance and discord might be in music: horrific in the wrong hands of course, but by no means unconscionable. Talk of the wrong hands leads us to pathology.
It is a deep and important truth that human kind’s knowledge advances further when we look not at success but at failure: disease reveals more than health ever can. We would never have understood, for example, how the brain or the liver worked were it not for them going wrong from time to time: they are not, after all, machines whose function is revealed by an intelligent inspection of their mechanisms, they are composed of unrevealing organic spongy matter whose function would be impossible to determine by dissection and examination alone. But when there is injury, disease or congenital defect, you can derive some clue as to their purpose by noticing what goes wrong with the parts of the body they control. A trauma or tumour in an area of the brain that causes the patient to fall over, for example, might suggest to a neurologist that this is the area that controls balance and mobility. In the same way rhyming can be shown to control the balance and mobility of a poem, doing much more than simply providing us with a linked concord of sounds: there is no better way to demonstrate this than by taking a look at some diseased rhyming.
Thus far almost all the excerpts we have scrutinised have been more or less healthy specimens of poetry. We did take a look at a couplet from Keats’s ‘Lamia’:
Till she saw him, as once she pass’d him by,
Where gainst a column he leant thoughtfully.
There was not much doubt in our minds, I think, that this was a triumph neither of rhyme nor metre: in such a long poem we decided (or at least I maintained) this was not a terminal problem. We questioned, too, William Blake’s prosodic skill in lines like:
A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all heaven in a Rage.
We forgave him also. It is time now to go further down this path and compare two poems from approximately the same era treating approximately the same themes. One is a healthy specimen, the other very sick indeed.
A Thought Experiment
Your task is to imagine yourself as a Victorian poet, whiskered and wise. You have two poems to write: each will commemorate a disaster.
At approximately seven fifteen on the stormy night of Sunday 28 December 1879, with a howling wind blowing down from the Arctic, the high central navigation girders of the Tay Railway Bridge collapsed into the Firth of Tay at Dundee, taking with them a locomotive, six carriages and seventy-five souls (original estimates projected a death toll of ninety) on their way from Edinburgh to Dundee for Hogmanay. It was a disaster of the first magnitude, the Titanic of its day. The bridge had been open for less than twenty months and been pronounced perfectly sound by the Board of Trade, whose subsequent inquiry determined that a lack of buttressing was at fault. As with all such calamities, this one threatened a concomitant collapse in national self-confidence. To this day the event stands as the worst structural failure in British engineering history.
In this poem you, a Victorian poet, are going to tell the story in rhyming verse: the idea is not a contemplative or personal take on the vanity of human enterprise, fate, mankind’s littleness when pitted against the might of nature or any other such private rumination, this is to be the verse equivalent of a public memorial. As a public poem it should not be too long, but of appropriate length for recitation. How do you embark upon the creation of such a work?
You get out your notebook and consider some of the words that are likely to be needed. Rhyme words are of great importance since – by definition – they form the last words of each line, the repetition of their sounds will be crucial to the impact of your poem. They need therefore to be words central to the story and its meaning. Let us look at our options.
Well, the River Tay is clearly a chief player in the drama. Tay, say, day, clay, away, dismay and dozens of others available; no real problems there. Bridge? Hm, not so easy. Ridge is possible, but doesn’t seem relevant. Plenty of midges in Scotland, but again hardly suitable for our purposes. Fridges have not yet been invented. The word carriage, marvellously useful as it might be, would have to be wrenched into carriage so that is a non-starter too. Girders offers murders, but that seems a bit unjust. Sir Thomas Bouch, the bridge’s chief engineer, may have been incompetent, but he was scarcely homicidal. Dundee? See, three, be, thee, wee, flee, key, divorcee, employee, goatee, catastrophe. The last, while excellently apposite, might lose some of its power with the slight extra push needed on the last syllable for a proper rhyme, catastrophee. Ditto calamitee. Pity. Eighteen seventy-nine? Well, there are rhymes aplenty there: fine, brine, wine, mine, thine – railway line even, now that does suggest possibilities. Other useful rhymes might be river/quiver/shiver, train/strain/rain, drown/down/town, perhaps/collapse/snaps and so on.
I hope this gives an idea of the kind of thought processes involved. Of course, I am not suggesting that in praxis any poet will approach a poem quite in this manner: much of these thoughts will come during the trial and error of the poem’s development.
I am not going to ask you to write the whole poem, though you might like to do so for your own satisfaction: the idea is to consider the elements that will go into the construction of such a work, paying special attention to the rhyming. We should now try penning a few lines and phrases, as a kind of preliminary sketch:
The bridge that spans the River Tay
For bridges are iron, but man is clay
Icy gale
Would not prevail
The steaming train
The teeming rain
Stress and strain
The girders sigh, the cables quiver
The troubled waters of the river
Locked for ever in the deeps
The mighty broken engine sleeps
The arctic wind’
s remorseless breath
From laughing life to frozen death
So frail the life of mortal man
How fragile seems the human span
How narrow then, how weak its girth –
The bridge between our death and birth
The cable snaps
All hopes collapse
Nothing very original or startling there:‘human clay’ is a very tired old cliché, as is ‘stress and strain’;‘girth’ and ‘birth’ don’t seem to be going anywhere, but with some tweaking and whittling a poem could perhaps emerge from beneath our toiling fingers. See now if you can come up with four or five couplets, rhyming snatches or phrases of a similar nature: do not try and write in modern English – you are a Victorian, remember. When you have done that we can proceed.
How did you do? Well enough to be driven on to complete a few verses? As it happens and as perhaps you already knew from the moment I mentioned the River Tay, a poem was written on this very catastrophe by William McGonagall.10 It remains the work for which he is best known: his masterpiece, if you will. I am too kind to you and to his memory to reproduce the entire poem:
The Tay Bridge Disaster
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
’Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say –
‘I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.’
When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,