The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  Rhyming Practice

  Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things.

  GERTRUDE STEIN

  On that head. Should you use a rhyming dictionary? I must confess that I do, but only as a last resort. They can be frustrating and cumbersome, they can break concentration, they offer no help with assonance or consonance rhymes and are too crammed with irrelevant words like multicollinearity and cordwainer and eutectic (something to do with melting points apparently) or types of Malayan cheese and Albanian nose-flutes which are never going to be of the least use to one’s poetry. I prefer first simply to chant the sound to myself in the rhythm the word needs to fit. If that doesn’t bear fruit I will write all the letters of the alphabet at the top of a page and then go through the permutations one by one. It is easy enough to find monosyllabic masculine rhymes, they get harder to pop into your mind when you try to think of their compound versions, the various syllables that can precede the word. For boy, words like joy, toy, soy, cloy, coy, ploy slip into the mind quite quickly. Employ, deploy, alloy, annoy, destroy and enjoy might take a little longer. Decoy and convoy have just occurred to me (although they would need careful use as there is a little more stress on their first syllables) and now I am going to turn to the dictionary. Hm. I’ve missed buoy, but that’s a silly rich-rhyme (besides, it doesn’t rhyme for Americans, who pronounce it boo-ey). McCoy is there (as in ‘the real’ I suppose), Hanoi, savoy and bok choi (strange to find two different types of cabbage). Envoy, carboy, borzoi and viceroy are there, though I would argue that they are usually stressed on their first syllable. There are compounds of words we have already found: redeploy and overjoy. I’m very cross that I failed to find corduroy for myself and I would like to think that given enough time saveloy, hobbledehoy and hoi polloi might have come to me unaided. The assonance rhymes void, Lloyd, Freud, hoik, foil and so on are naturally not shown. By all means invest in a good rhyming dictionary, there are several available from the usual publishing houses and they are all much the same so far as I can tell. If it is musical lyrics you are thinking of then I would recommend Sammy Cahn’s The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary; the lyricist who gave us ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’ is full of excellent and affable advice. There is no index, however, so it will take a bit of getting used to. There are also software rhyming dictionaries available either as stand-alone applications or as online resources. Personally I feel that a poet’s words are better mumbled out or scribbled on paper. Words have colour, feel, texture, density, shape, weight and personality, they are – I have said this before – all we have. Deeply dippy about most things digital I may be, but when it comes to poetry I want the words to have been uttered with my breath and shaped by my hand12. I am writing this now on my computer, but even the most frivolous sample lines of verse I have composed for you have been sketched on paper first. You may feel differently and no doubt some reader yet unborn who chances upon this book in an antiquarian bookshop of the future will marvel at such distinctions. I send you greetings from the grave: I do trust the sun hasn’t exploded yet and that The Archers is still running.

  Poetry Exercise 10

  Your task now is to discover as many rhymes as you can for the word girl (my rhyming dictionary offers twenty-four, many of which are absurd dialect words). As many syllables as you like, but obviously it is a masculine rhyme so the ‘url’ sound will terminate each word you find. When you’ve done that, you have to do the same for the feminine-rhyming martyr (the dictionary offers twenty-eight, many of which are again farcically weird). This is not Scrabble: proper nouns, place names, foreign words and informal language of any description all count. Ten for each would be an excellent score, but don’t worry if you can’t manage it. Facility and speed in the hunting down of rhyme-words is hardly a sign of poetic genius.

  When you have finished, try this as the second part of your rhyming exercise. Take your notebook and wander about the house and garden, if you have one. If you are not reading this at home, then wander around your office, hospital ward, factory floor or prison cell. If you are outside or on a train, plane or bus, in a café, brothel or hotel lobby you can still do this. Simply note down as many things as you can see, hear or smell. They need not be nouns, you can jot down processes, actions, deeds. So, if you are in a café, you might write down: smoking, steam, raincoat, lover’s tiff, cappuccino machine, sipping, flapjacks, cinnamon, jazz music, spilt tea and so on – whatever strikes the eye, ear or nose. Write a list of at least twenty words. When you’ve done that, settle down and once more see how many rhymes you can come up with for each word. You may find that this simple exercise gets your poetic saliva glands so juiced up that the temptation to turn the words into poetry becomes irresistible. Yield to it. A random, accidental and arbitrary consonance of word sounds can bring inspiration where no amount of pacing, pencil chewing and looking out of the window can help.

  Rhyme Categories

  1. Masculine rhyme – box/frocks, spite/tonight, weird/beard, amaze/delays

  2. Feminine rhyme – breathing/seething, relation/nation, waiter/equator

  3. Triple rhyme – merrily/verily, merited/inherited, drastically/fantastically

  4. Slant-rhyme:

  a. Assonance – pit/kiss, mean/dream, stub/rug, slack/shag, hop/dot

  b. Partial consonance – coils/gulls, wild/fold, mask/tusk, stump/ramp

  c. Full consonance – coils/cools, wild/weld, mask/musk, stump/stamp

  5. Eye-rhyme – fool/wool, want/pant, heard/beard, mould/could, rove/love

  6. Rich-rhyme – red rose/he rose, single file/nail file, nose/knows, eye/I

  RHYMING COUPLETS

  Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

  The proper study of mankind is Man.

  ALEXANDER POPE: An Essay on Man

  RHYMING TRIPLETS

  What Flocks of Critiques hover here today,

  As vultures wait on Armies for their Prey,

  All gaping for the carcass of a Play!

  JOHN DRYDEN: Prologue to All for Love

  CROSS-RHYME

  The boy stood on the burning deck

  Whence all but he had fled;

  The flame that lit the battle’s wreck

  Shone round him o’er the dead.

  FELICIA HEMANS: ‘Casabianca’

  ENVELOPE RHYME

  Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold

  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

  Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

  JOHN KEATS: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

  1 Named after Leo, the twelfth-century Canon of Saint Victor’s in Paris.

  2 Near rhyme and off rhyme are terms used too.

  3 Presumably this is what a poetaster does: give poe-a-try . . .

  4 Aphaeresis means the dropping of a first letter or letters of a word: in poetry it refers to ’neath, ’twas, ’mongst – that kind of thing. It’s also something to do with separating plasma from blood cells, but that needn’t worry us.

  5 Or ‘bachelor’ with ‘naturaler’ as Ogden Nash manages to do . . .

  6 From the Italian word meaning ‘slippery down-slope’ and used for a kind of glib Italian dactylic rhyme. There is a Sdrucciolo dei Pitti in Florence, a sloping lane leading down to the Pitti Palace. I once ate a bun there.

  7 From the French rime riche.

  8 Hight is an archaic word for ‘called’, as in ‘named’: ‘a poet hight Thomas Hood’.

  9 Anthony Burgess wrote a novel Abba Abba which imagines a meeting between Keats and the Italian sonneteer Belli: the title is a pun on the Petrarchan rhyme-scheme and the Hebrew for ‘father’. Not sure where the Swedish popsters got their name.

  10 Sir William ‘Topaz’ McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma, a title conferred by King Thibaw of Burma and the Andaman Islands in 1894 (Burma’s last monarch). Sadly, many believe this was one of many cruel hoaxes perpetrated o
n the unfortunate poet.

  11 Despite Tennyson writing a poem about their charge too:‘The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!’ Don’t milk it Alfie, love . . .

  12 Having said which I have invented a poetic method that utilises the provokingly silly incompetence of Voice Recognition Software, allowing its mistakes to furnish interesting poetic ideas. It gave me ‘power monkey’ for ‘poet manqué’ recently. Such aleatory assistance can be suggestive.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Form

  I

  The Stanza

  So we can write metrically, in iambs and anapaests, trochees and dactyls. We can choose the length of our measure: hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter. We can write accentually, in three-stress and four-stress lines. We can alliterate and we can rhyme, but thus far our verse has merely been stichic, presented in a sequence of lines. Where those lines terminate is determined, as we know, by the measure or, in the case of syllabic verse, by the syllable count. Prose, such as you are reading now, is laid out (or lineated) differently – as I write this I have no reason to start a new line (to ‘press the return key’) until it is time for a new paragraph or a quotation and you certainly won’t

  find me doing this

  or this, for that

  matter; it would be

  highly

  odd,

  not to mention confusing:

  in poetry such a procedure

  would not be considered

  strange at all, although as

  we shall see, how we

  manage the lineation of our poems is not a question of random line

  breaks, or it had better not be . . .

  Our first clue that the written words on a page might qualify as poetry may indeed be offered by lineation, but an even more obvious indicator is the existence of stanzas. The word derives from the Italian for ‘stand’, which in turn developed into the word for ‘room’ (stanza di pranzo is ‘dining room’, for example). In everyday speech, in songwriting, hymn singing and many other popular genres a stanza will often be referred to as a verse (meaning ‘turn’, as in ‘reverse’, ‘subvert’, ‘diversion’ and so on). I will be keeping to the word stanza, allowing me to use verse in its looser sense of poetic material generally. Also, I like the image of a poem being a house divided into rooms. Some traditional verse forms have no stanzaic layout, for others it is almost their defining feature. But first we need to go deeper into this whole question of form . . .

  What is Form and Why Bother with It?

  Stephen gets all cross

  By form, just so that we are clear, we mean the defining structure of a genre or type. When we say formal, the word should not be thought of as bearing any connotations of stiffness, starchiness, coldness or distance – formal for our purposes simply means ‘of form’, morphological if you like.

  In music, some examples of form would be sonata, concerto, symphony, fugue and overture. In television, common forms include sit-com, soap, documentary, mini-series, chat show and single drama. Over the years docu-dramas, drama-docs, mockumentaries and a host of other variations and sub-categories have emerged: form can be undermined, hybridised and stretched almost to breaking point.

  Poetic forms too can be cross-bred, subverted, made sport of, mutilated, sabotaged and rebelled against, but HERE IS THE POINT. If there is no suggestion of an overall scheme at work in the first place, then there is nothing to subvert or undermine: a whole world of possibility is closed off to you. Yes, you can institute your own structures, you can devise new forms or create a wholly original poetic manner and approach, but there are at least three major disadvantages to this. First, it is all too often a question of reinventing the wheel (all the trial-and-error discoveries and setbacks that poetic wheelwrights have undergone over two millennia to be caught up with in one short lifetime); second, and this flows from the first point, it is fantastically difficult and lonely; third, it requires the reader to know what you are up to. Since human beings first sang, recited and wrote they have been developing ways of structuring and presenting their verse. Most readers of poetry, whether they are aware of it or not, are instinctively familiar with the elemental forms – for a practising poet to be ignorant of them is foolish at best, perverse and bloody-minded at worst. We can all surely admit without sacrificing any cherished sense of our bold modernity and iconoclastic originality that a painter is in a better position to ignore the ‘rules’ of composition or perspective if he knows exactly what those rules are. Just because poems are made of our common currency, words, it does not mean that poets should be denied a like grounding and knowledge. Besides, as I have emphasised before, initiation into the technique of poetry is all part of becoming a poet and it is pleasurable: one is in the company of one’s forebears, one is not alone.

  Ezra Pound, generally regarded as the principal founder of modernism, wrote of the need to refresh poetics: ‘No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.’ He went further, asserting that extant poetical language and modes were in fact defunct, he declared war on all existing formal structures, metre, rhyme and genre. We should observe that he was a researcher in Romance languages, devoted to medieval troubadour verse, Chinese, Japanese, Sicilian, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian forms and much besides. His call to free verse was not a manifesto for ignorant, self-indulgent maundering and uneducated anarchy. His poems are syntactically and semantically difficult, laden with allusion and steeped in his profound knowledge of classical and oriental forms and culture: they are often laid out in structures that recall or exactly follow ancient forms, cantos, odes and even, as we shall discover later, that most strict and venerable of forms, the sestina. Pound was also a Nazi-sympathising, anti-Semitic,1 antagonistic son of a bitch as it happens: he wasn’t trying to open poetry for all, to democratise verse for the kids and create a friendly free-form world in which everyone is equal. But if the old fascist was right in determining that his generation needed to get away from the heavy manner and glutinous clichés of Victorian verse, its archaic words and reflex tricks of poetical language, and all out-dated modes of expression and thought in order to free itself for a new century, is it not equally true that we need to escape from the dreary, self-indulgent, randomly lineated drivel that today passes for poetry for precisely the same reasons? After a hundred years of free verse and Open Field poetry the condition of English-language poetics is every bit as tattered and tired as that which Pound and his coevals inherited. ‘People find ideas a bore,’ Pound wrote, ‘because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.’ Unfortunately the tide has turned, and now it is some of Pound’s once new ideas that have been stuffed and shelved and become a bore. He wrote in 1910: ‘The art of letters will come to an end before AD 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.’ It might be tempting to agree that ‘the art of letters’ has indeed come to an end, and to wonder whether a doctrinaire abandonment of healthy, living forms for the sake of a dogma of stillborn originality might not have to shoulder some of the responsibility for such a state of affairs.

  Add a feeble-minded kind of political correctness to the mix (something Pound would certainly never have countenanced) and it is a wonder that any considerable poetry at all has been written over the last fifty years. It is as if we have been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism and that to acquire knowledge is to drive a jackboot into the face of those poor souls who are too incurious, dull-witted or idle to find out what poetry can be. Surely better to use another word for such free-form meanderings: ‘prosetherapy’ about covers it, ‘emotional masturbation’, perhaps; autoomphaloscopy might be an acceptable coinage – gazing at one’s own navel. Let us reserve the word ‘poetry’ for something worth fighting for, an ideal we can strive to live up to.

  What, then, is the solution? Greeting-card verse? Pastiche? Fo
r some the answer lies in the street poetry of rap, hip-hop, reggae and other musically derived discourses: unfortunately this does not suit my upbringing, temperament and talents; I find these modes, admirable as they no doubt are, as alien to my cultural heritage and linguistic tastes as their practitioners no doubt find Browning and Betjeman, Pope, Cope and Heaney. I will try to address this problem at the end of the book, but for now I would urge you to believe that a familiarity with form will not transform you into a reactionary bourgeois, stifle your poetic voice, imprison your emotions, cramp your style, or inhibit your language – on the contrary, it will liberate you from all of these discomforts. Nor need one discourse be adopted at the expense of another, eclecticism is as possible in poetry as in any other art or mode of cultural expression.

  There are, to my mind, two aesthetics available when faced by the howling, formless, uncertain, relative and morally contingent winds that buffet us today. One is to provide verse of like formlessness and uncertainty, another is (perhaps with conscious irony) to erect a structured shelter of form. Form is not necessarily a denial of the world’s loss of faith and structure, it is by no means of necessity a nostalgic evasion. It can be, as we shall see, a defiant, playful and wholly modern response.