The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  Which made their hearts for to quail,

  And many of the passengers with fear did say –

  ‘I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay’

  So the train sped on with all its might,

  And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,

  And the passengers’ hearts felt light,

  Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,

  With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,

  And wish them all a happy New Year.

  . . .

  I must now conclude my lay

  By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,

  That your central girders would not have given way,

  At least many sensible men do say,

  Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,

  At least many sensible men confesses,

  For the stronger we our houses do build,

  The less chance we have of being killed.

  Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse. His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it. It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.

  I will not linger long on why it fails so spectacularly: it must surely be apparent to you. The metre of course is all over the place. Even if this were accentually written like a music hall turn, folk ballad or other non-syllabic rhythmic verse, there is no discernible pattern of three-stress, four-stress or five-stress rhythm at work. The poem is arbitrarily laid out in stanzas of five, six, six, five, six, eight, nine and thirteen lines which create no expectations to fulfil or withhold. This in part contributes to its overall narrative slackness.

  We have lots of Tay rhymes: say, midway, dismay, lay, bray. There are night, might, sight and moonlight; known/blown, down/frown, gale/quail and build/killed.

  There is, however, excruciating para-rhyme laid on for our pleasure. Edinburgh/felt no sorrow forces a rather American Edin-borrow pronunciation, or else surrer for sorrow. Buttresses/confesses will never be a happy pair, nor is the repeated seventy-nine/time assonance at all successful. If you are going to assonate, much better to do it within the verse, not on the last line of a stanza, as we saw with the Zephaniah poem.

  The archaic expletives (metrical fillers) and inversions: ‘did say’ and ‘do build’ for ‘said’ and ‘build’ and ‘their hearts for to quail’ are not pleasant; ‘the wind it blew’ is a common enough formulation in ballads trying to get round the problem of the lack of a weak syllable between ‘wind’ and ‘blew’ (‘the rain it raineth every day’ and so on), but cannot be considered a satisfactory phrase in a serious poem. Nor do such archaisms as ‘hove’ (for ‘came’) and ‘lay’ (for ‘song’) please the reader. It is, of course, the sheer banality that lives longest in the mind and most contributes to our sense of this being such a tour de farce. This banality mostly derives from McGonagall’s word choice (what is known as poetic diction) and word choice is shown here to be most pitifully at the mercy of rhyme. It is not only the rhyming words themselves that are at fault, but the phrases and syntax used in order to reach those rhyme words. Not to mention the accidental and gruesome internal rhyme Sabbath day in line 4 of stanza 1. With his rhyming alone McGonagall has already sabotaged his poem. A perfectly fine piece might in other hands have been worked up from the full rhyme pairs he found, night/might et cetera, and from the perfectly laudable sentiments he expresses, but a committee comprising Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Frost, Auden and Larkin could do little with those unfortunate para-rhymes.

  As it happens Gerard Manley Hopkins had already composed another ‘disaster poem’, his ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ exactly four years earlier: it was written to commemorate the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who lost their lives at sea in 1875.

  Into the snows she sweeps,

  Hurling the haven behind,

  The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,

  For the infinite air is unkind,

  And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow

  Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

  Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow

  Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

  That splendid last line has spawned the popular kenning ‘widowmaker’ to describe the sea, and latterly by extension vessels of the deep, as in the Hollywood movie K-19:The Widowmaker. Wiry and whitefiery works well as internal rhyme, together with all the usual head rhymes, assonances and consonances we expect from Hopkins. Otherwise he uses the fairly neutral and simple sweeps/keeps/deeps, blow/snow and behind/kind. He nestles the eye-rhyme wind into the quarter wiry white alliteration and it doesn’t stand out as too ugly. Mind you, there is some less than comfortable rhyming elsewhere in the poem. Stanza 15 contains this unfortunate internal rhyme:

  And frightful the nightfall folded rueful a day

  Frightful indeed – to our ears at least: but perhaps ‘frightful’ was not such a trivial word in 1875. Some three and a half decades later the loss of the Titanic inspired Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’:

  VIII

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  IX

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later destiny,

  X

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  XI

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Says ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  While I yield to none in my admiration of Hardy, I do not believe this to be his finest work. The characteristic obsession with ‘the Spinner of the Years’ (‘The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything’ he calls it in an earlier alexandrine in the same poem, or ‘the President of the Immortals’ in his deathless phrase from Tess of the D’Urbervilles) gives the whole an appropriate sense of imminent, inexorable doom, which is of course its very subject as we know from the title. But ‘they were bent/By paths coincident’ is not very happy, nor is ‘being anon twin halves of one august event’. ‘August’ seems an almost comically inappropriate word for such a tragedy and ‘anon’ smells very dated in a poem written just two years before T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and indeed in the very same year that Ezra Pound and others were founding the Imagist movement. All in all it is a surprisingly flawed poem from so fine a poet and it is partly the rhyming that makes it so. In stanza VIII the word hue is manifestly used only to go with grew. The image of the iceberg ‘growing’ was so important to the central idea of the poem that Hardy could not resist the rhyme. But what was so special about the hue of the Titanic? Its red funnel? You could argue I suppose that in such a monochrome world as the North Atlantic anything man-made would seem colourful, but really it is clear that the word is a dud, chosen primarily for its rhyme. Also unattractively primitive is the internal rhyme in the alexandrine ‘In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too’. In the following stanza the slight wrenching of ‘destiny’ can hardly be counted a wonderful success either. Infelicitous rhyming triplets in stanzas omitted here include meant/opulent/indifferent and sea/vanity/she. Nonetheless it is clearly a whole continent better as verse than poor old McGonagall’s effort. There is effortless metrical consistency, there is a scheme: three-line stanzas (rhyming triplets) the last of which is an alexandrine. The two shorter trimetric lines atop each hexameter look a little like a
ship on a wide sea with the roman numeral stanza numbers forming the funnel. That may sound fanciful, but if you squint through half-closed eyes at that last stanza I’m sure you will see what I mean. For all its less than technically superior rhyming (and therefore word choices or diction) it is at least memorable, grave and thoroughly thought through.

  Now for the second disaster poem that you, the Victorian poet, must write: the year is 1854 and you are Britain’s Poet Laureate. Alfred, Lord Tennyson has just unexpectedly resigned the post so it is now your patriotic duty to write a poem about a disastrous British cavalry charge that has just taken place on the peninsula that lies between the Ukraine and the Black Sea. Due to some monstrous error, an officer, Captain Nolan, had galloped down from the Causeway Heights above the Balaclava plain pointing with his sabre at the Russian battery in the valley below, yelling ‘There are your guns, charge them!’ or words to that effect, according at least to the report by W. H. Russell in The Times that you, along with the rest of the nation have just read with avid horror. Those were not in fact the guns that Lord Cardigan, his commanding officer, had meant at all, the whole thing has been a catastrophic cock-up from start to finish. A cock-up but a gallant one: Disraeli has just told a packed and stunned House of Commons that it was ‘a feat of chivalry, fiery with consummate courage, and bright with flashing courage’. Of the 673 mounted officers and men of the 13th Light Dragoons, 17th Lancers and 11th Hussars – a cavalry troop collectively known as the Light Brigade – 157 have lost their lives. Nothing was achieved. A military disaster as traumatic and tragic for the nation as the collapse of the Tay Bridge was to be in twenty-five years’ time.

  Your mission, then, is to write up the debacle into a poem that will tell the story, sum up the public mood and stand as a worthy memorial to the brave dead.

  What do you do? What sort of preparatory scribbles do you make in your poet’s notebook?

  As for metre, short lines, you decide. Falling rhythms of dactyls and trochees would be a good choice, echoing the fierceness and rush of the action and suggesting the cadences of a bugle sounding the charge: Tum-da-da, tum-da-da, tum-da-da dum-da! Tum-dada, tum-da-da, tum-da-da dum! That sort of effect. But as for rhymes . . .

  Hussar is a bummer, only para-rhymes seem to fit: bizarre, beaux arts, faux pas, disbar, ajar, papa and hurrah might do at a pinch, but they hardly promise suitably solemn material; besides, the plural Hussars excludes at least half of them. Lancers is OK: dancers, prancers, answers – some suggestive possibilities there. Dragoons is if anything worse than Hussars: lagoons seems to be the only proper rhyme, the slant-rhyme racoon is unlikely to come in handy, nor are jejune, cartoon and baboon, one feels. Brigade is better, much better. Made, invade, fade, raid, dismayed, laid, all words that might offer some connection with the subject matter. Russian? There’s Prussian which is of no relevance, otherwise there are only bad para-rhymes available, hushin’, cushion, pushin’. Horses gives the rather obvious forces and courses, while steeds offers deeds . . .

  Off on their galloping steeds

  Praise for their marvellous deeds . . .

  Hmmm . . . bit lame. Rhymes for guns might come in handy. Buns, runs, sons, Huns (shame the enemy are Ruskies), stuns, shuns? Hm, come back to that later. Six hundred and seventy three is simply too long: a whole three-beat line used up.

  Six hundred and seventy-three

  Charging to victory!

  Only it isn’t a victory – it is a terrible defeat.

  Six hundred and seventy-three

  Charging for Queen and Country!

  Oh what a wonder to see,

  Marvellous gallantry

  Six hundred and seventy-three!

  This is dreadful. Six hundred and seventy-three sounds too perky and too literal at the same time. Should we round it up or down? Six hundred or seven hundred? Hundred doesn’t rhyme with much though – oh, hang on, there are some good slant-rhymes here: thundered, sundered, blundered, wondered, onward.

  Onward, Light Brigade, Onward

  Onward you splendid six-hundred.

  ‘There are the guns to raid,

  Charge them,’ brave Nolan said.

  On rode the Light Brigade,

  Not knowing that Nolan had blundered!

  It is getting there. The accidental consonance/assonance of knowing/Nolan is inelegant. But a bit of a polish and who knows?

  Your turn now. See if you can come up with some phrases with that metre and those rhyme words, or ones close to them.

  Well, as you probably know, Tennyson did not retire from his laureateship and this is what he came up with to mark the calamity.

  Half a league, half a league,

  Half a league onward,

  All in the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

  ‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

  Was there a man dismay’d?

  Not tho’ the soldier knew

  Someone had blunder’d:

  Their’s not to make reply,

  Their’s not to reason why,

  Their’s but to do and die:

  Into the valley of Death

  Rode the six hundred.

  Cannon to right of them,

  Cannon to left of them,

  Cannon in front of them

  Volley’d and thunder’d;

  Storm’d at with shot and shell,

  Boldly they rode and well,

  Into the jaws of Death,

  Into the mouth of Hell

  Rode the six hundred.

  . . .

  When can their glory fade?

  O the wild charge they made!

  All the world wondered.

  Honour the charge they made,

  Honour the Light Brigade,

  Noble six hundred.

  Naturally, I cannot tell how Tennyson embarked upon the preparation and composition of his poem. Quite possibly he charged (as it were) straight in. Maybe the rhythm and some of the phrasing came to him in the bath or while walking. It is possible that he made notes not unlike those we’ve just made or that the work emerged whole in one immediate and perfect Mozartian stream. We shall never know. What we can agree upon I hope, is that the rhyming is perfect. Shell/hell, brigade/made/dismayed and the wondered/blundered, thundered/sundered, hundred/onward group work together superbly. A small nucleus of rhyming words like this throughout one poem can set up a pattern of expectation in the listener’s or reader’s ear. ‘Thundered’ is close to onomatopoeic, it seems somehow more than just descriptive of thunder, it actually seems to mimic it – and those thunderous qualities are in turn passed on to its rhyme-partners, lending a power and force to wondered and hundred that they would not otherwise possess. The rhyming, quite as much as the rhythm, helps generate all the pity, pride and excitement for which the poem is renowned.

  We do know that in writing this Tennyson created a rod for the back of all subsequent British Poets Laureate who have struggled in vain to come up with anything that so perfectly captures an important moment in the nation’s history. It was perhaps the last great Public Poem written in England, the verse equivalent of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

  It is a hoary old warhorse to our ears now I suppose, as much as a result of social change as literary. Most modern readers, academic, poetic or amateur, would probably feel that Hopkins and Hardy engage our sensibilities more directly than Tennyson, in the same way that – for all their technical mastery – we are less moved by the painters of the mid-Victorian period than by the later impressionists and post-impressionists. Nonetheless, there is always much to be learned from virtuosity and I disbelieve any poet who does not confess that he would give even unto half his wealth to have come up with ‘Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die’. We should recognise that Tennyson’s is a poem written for the nation whil
e the Hopkins and Hardy are essentially inward looking. Indeed, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is much more an autobiographical contemplation of the poet’s religious development than a commemoration of a shipwreck.

  Whatever our feelings we can surely acknowledge that Tennyson’s versifying is magnificent. It is pleasingly typical, at all events, that this, the best-known poem we have on a military theme, memorialises failure. There are no stirring odes celebrating Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar or the Battle of Britain in our popular anthologies. No English verse equivalent of the 1812 Overture for us to cheer at and weep over. Earlier on the morning of that same October day in 1854, on the same Crimean battlefield, the Heavy Brigade had fought a supremely successful battle during which more men died than in the later disaster, they were just as gallant but their heroism goes unremembered.11 Misfortune, failure and incompetence remain our great themes. It is probable that without the poem the Light Brigade’s futile charge would have vanished into history. Among the many books on the subject there are works whose titles and subtitles include: ‘Honour the Charge they Made’, ‘Noble Six Hundred’, ‘Do or Die’, ‘Into the Valley of Death’,‘The Reason Why’,‘The Real Reason Why’ and ‘Someone Had Blundered’. Not many poems that I can think of can have so completely caught the public attention or for ever defined our understanding of an historical event. Anyway, I hope I have convinced you that in great part, it is the rhyming that has contributed to this immortality. Tennyson’s discovery of the hundred/blundered wondered/thundered group is the heart of the poem, its engine.

  It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail. I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming. Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words. It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting ‘ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace . . .’ when surely a proper poet should be thinking high, pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus. Well, yes. But a rhyme is a rhyme and won’t come unless searched for. Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme. To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas. It is one of the things we do.