The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  Much easier to grasp in action than in code. I have boxed and shaded the refrains here in Derek Mahon’s villanelle ‘Antarctica’. (I have also numbered the line and stanzas, which of course Mahon did not do):

  I hope you can see from this layout that the form is actually not as convoluted as it sounds. Describing how a villanelle works is a great deal more linguistically challenging than writing one. Mahon, by the way, as is permissible, has slightly altered the refrain line, in his case turning the direct speech of the first refrain. There are no rules as to metre or length of measure, but the rhyming is important. Slant-rhyme versions exist but for my money the shape, the revolving gavotte of the refrains and their final coupling, is compromised by partial rhyming. The form is thought to have evolved from Sicilian round songs, of the ‘London Bridge is falling down’ variety. In the anthologies you will find villanelles culled from the era of their invention, the sixteenth century, especially translations of the work of the man who really got the form going, the French poet Jean Passerat: after these examples there seems to be a notable lacuna until the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde wrote ‘Theocritus’, a rather mannered neo-classical venture – ‘O singer of Persephone!/Dost thou remember Sicily?’ (I think it best to refer to villanelles by their refrain lines), while Ernest Dowson, Wilde’s friend and fellow Yellow Book contributor, came up with the ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ which is a much bouncier attempt, very Tudor in flavour: ‘I took her dainty eyes as well/And so I made a Villanelle.’

  But it is, perhaps surprisingly, during the twentieth century that the villanelle grows in popularity; besides those we have seen by Mahon and Dylan Thomas, there are memorable examples you may like to try to get hold of by Roethke, Auden, Empson, Heaney, Donald Justice, Wendy Cope and a delightful comic one candidly wrestling with the fiendish nature of the form itself entitled ‘Villanelle of Ye Young Poet’s First Villanelle to his Ladye and Ye Difficulties Thereof’ by the playwright Eugene O’Neill: ‘To sing the charms of Rosabelle,/I tried to write this villanelle.’ But for a reason I cannot quite fathom it is female poets who seem to have made the most of the form in the last fifty years or so. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ is especially poignant, given what we know about the poet’s unhappy end: ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead./(I think I made you up inside my head)’. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ is as fine a modern villanelle as I know and Marilyn Hacker has also written two superbly ambiguous love villanelles. Carolyn Beard Whitlow’s ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’ shows how a medieval Mediterranean pastoral form can adapt to the twentieth-century African American experience. I like the Porgy and Bess-style rhythms:

  Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line,

  Night wind blowin’ against sweet, yellow thighs,

  Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

  Man smell of honey, dark like coffee grind;

  Countin’ on his fingers since last July.

  Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.

  Mister Jacobs say he be colorblind,

  But got to tighten belts and loosen ties.

  Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

  Winter becoming angry, rent behind.

  Strapping spring sun needed to make mud pies.

  Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.

  Looked in the mirror, Bessie’s face I find.

  I be so down low, my man be so high.

  Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

  Policeman’s found him; damn near lost my mind.

  Can’t afford no flowers; can’t even cry.

  Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.

  Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

  A form that seemed so dead in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought back to rude and glistening health in the twentieth and twenty-first. Why? The villanelle has been called ‘an acoustic chamber for words’ and a structure that lends itself to ‘duality, dichotomy, and debate’, this last assertion from ‘Modern Versions of the Villanelle’ by Philip Jason, who goes on to suggest:

  there is even the potential for the two repeating lines to form a paradigm for schizophrenia . . . the mind may not fully know itself or its subject, may not be in full control, and yet it still tries, still festers and broods in a closed room towards a resolution that is at least pretended by the final couplet linking of the refrain lines.

  Hm. It is a form that certainly seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves such. Among the poets we have looked at as authors of villanelles we find an African American lesbian, a Jewish lesbian, a lesbian whose father died when she was four and whose mother was committed into a mental institution four years later, two gay men, two alcoholics who drank themselves to death and a deeply unstable and unhappy neurotic who committed suicide. Perhaps this is coincidence, perhaps not. Once again I am forced to wonder if it is ironic interplay that might make the most convincing explanation. As I suggested earlier, sometimes the rules of form can be as powerfully modern a response to chaos, moral uncertainty and relativism as open freedom can be. The more marginalised, chaotic, alienated and psychically damaged a life, the greater the impulse to find structure and certainty, surely? The playful artifice of a villanelle, preposterous as it may appear at first glance, can embody defiant gestures and attitudes of vengeful endurance. It suits a rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or of fatalism. We mustn’t exaggerate that characteristic of the form, however: Heaney’s ‘Anniversary Villanelle’ and some very funny examples by Wendy Cope demonstrate that it need not be always down in the dumps.

  Technically the trick of it seems to be to find a refrain pair that is capable of run-ons, ambiguity and ironic reversal. I think you should try one yourself.

  Poetry Exercise 14

  Any subject, naturally. The skill is to find refrain lines that are open ended enough to create opportunities for enjambment between both lines and stanzas. This is not essential, of course, your refrain line can be closed and contained if you prefer, but you will gain variety, contrast and surprise if run-ons are possible.

  Don’t hurry the process of chewing over suitable refrains. Naturally the middle lines have to furnish six b rhymes, so words like ‘plinth’ and ‘orange’ are not going to be very useful . . . enjoy.

  The Sestina

  Let fair SESTINA start with this first LINE,

  So far from pretty, perfect or inSPIRED.

  Its six-fold unrhymed structure marks the FORM.

  The art is carefully to choose your WORDS

  Especially those you use at each line’s END,

  If not you’ll find your effort’s all in VAIN.

  Look up: that final hero word was ‘VAIN’

  And so it ends this stanza’s opening LINE.

  We use up all our heroes till the END

  And trust that somehow we will be inSPIRED

  To find a fitting place for all our WORDS

  And satisfy the dictates of the FORM.

  It’s simple, once you get the hang, to FORM

  Your verse in sections like a weather-VANE:

  The secret lies in finding six good WORDS

  That seem to suit the ending of a LINE.

  Your pattern of ideas should be inSPIRED

  By heroes who will see you to the END.

  Their cyclic repetition to that END

  Ensures your poem will at least conFORM

  To all the rules. From time to time inSPIRED

  Solutions will occur. Write in this VEIN,

  Just interweaving neatly line by LINE

  Until you’ve used your stock of six good WORDS.

  Composing in this form is knitting WORDS:

  You cast off, purl and knit and purl to END

  Each row, then cast off for another LINE

  Until a woolly poem starts to FORM.

  You may believe sestinas are a VAIN,

  In
dulgent, showy, frankly uninSPIRED

  Idea. Yet many modern poets have conSPIRED,

  To weave away and knit their scarf of WORDS.

  I’ll not feel my attempt has been in VAIN

  If by the time this chapter’s reached its END

  Just one of you has learned to love this FORM

  And taught your hero words to toe the LINE.

  Envoi

  INSPIRED by fair SESTINA now I END

  This run of WORDS. I hope that you will FORM –

  And not in VAIN – a poem in this LINE.

  This is a bitch to explain but a joy to make. There is no set metre to the modern English sestina, but traditionally it has been cast in iambics. The form comprises six sixains followed by a three line envoi, a kind of summation or coda. So, thirty-nine lines in all. We can best see how it works by concocting a new one together. Let’s begin:

  Stanza 1

  So take the prize. You’re Number ONE.

  1

  First place is yours, the glory TOO.

  2

  No charge for smugness, gloating’s FREE.

  3

  It’s all you’ve worked and striven FOR,

  4

  The losers wilt, the victors THRIVE,

  5

  So wear the wreath, I hope it STICKS.

  6

  A silly slab of verse, but never mind. It is just a lash-up, a cardboard prototype, but it has its uses. You will notice that I have capitalised and numbered my end-words. They are ONE, TOO, FREE, FOR, THRIVE and STICKS cunningly chosen to sound as much like the numbers 1–6 as I can contrive. These end-words are the heroes of a sestina. Instead of being rhymed, they are reused in a set pattern: this technique is known as lexical repetition. So let us compose Stanza 2. The method is to shuttle up and down the previous stanza starting at the bottom. The end word there is STICKS. I’ll write a line that ends with STICKS, then:

  But you should know that triumph STICKS

  Then we go up to the top: ONE.

  Like post-it notes and everyONE

  Now we go back to the bottom: we’ve used up STICKS, so the next free end-word is THRIVE:

  Will soon forget. The kind who THRIVE

  The next unused end-word at the top is TOO:

  Are those who show compassion TO

  Back down now and the next spare is FOR:

  The slow, who claim their victory FOR

  Only one unused end-word left, FREE:

  The weak. I’ll tell you this for FREE

  So we shuttled from bottom to top, bottom to top, bottom to top taking STICKS, ONE, THRIVE, TO, FOR and FREE. In real digits that would be 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3. This string of numbers is our formula. Stanza 2 now looks like this:

  But you should know that triumph STICKS

  Like post-it notes and everyONE

  Will soon forget. The kind who THRIVE

  Are those who show compassion TO

  The slow, who claim their victory FOR

  The weak. I’ll tell you this for FREE,

  Now Stanza 3 will take the sixth line from Stanza 2, then the first, then the fifth and so on, according to that formula, and build itself accordingly. The sixth line of Stanza 3 is now FREE:

  You think that winning sets you FREE?

  The topmost free end-line is STICKS:

  No, it’s a poison pill that STICKS

  Then FOR, WON, TO and THRIVE: The homophone WON is perfectly acceptable for ONE.

  In victory’s throat. Worth striving FOR?

  The golden plaudits you have WON

  Are valueless and hollow TOO

  The victor’s laurels never THRIVE,

  Now we do the same to Stanzas 4, 5 and 6, shuttling between lines 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, in formula order.

  The weeds of self-delusion THRIVE

  On pride: they flourish, thick and FREE,

  To choke your glory. Thickly TOO

  The burr of disappointment STICKS

  To tarnish all the gold you’ve WON.

  Is victory worth the fighting FOR

  When friendship’s hand is only FOR

  The weak, whose ventures never THRIVE?

  I’d so much rather be the ONE

  Who’s always second. I am FREE

  To lose. I know how much it STICKS

  Inside your craw to come in TWO

  But you should learn that Number TWO

  Can have no real meaning, FOR

  We all must cross the River STYX

  And go where victors never THRIVE,

  No winner’s rostrum there, so FREE

  Your mind from numbers: Death has WON.

  The sixth is the last, after that the whole pattern would repeat. All we have to do now is construct the envoi, which contains all the hero words12 in a strict order: the second and fifth word in the top line, the fourth and third in the middle line, the sixth and first in the bottom line.

  Envoi

  In order TO improve and THRIVE

  Stop yearning FOR success, be FREE

  If this rule STICKS then all have WON.

  It may have seemed a fiendishly complicated structure and it both is and isn’t. The key is to number the lines and follow the 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3 formula with (2–5, 4–3, 6–1 for the envoi). If you don’t like numbers you might prefer to letter the lines alphabetically and make a note of this scheme:

  ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA (BE/DC/FA)

  If you want to understand the sestina’s shape, you might like to think of it as a spiral. Go back and put the tip of your forefinger on STICKS in Stanza 1, without taking it off the page move it in an anticlockwise circle passing through 1, 5, 2, 4 and 3. Do it a couple of times so you get the idea. I have made a table which you might find useful. It contains the end-lines of the sestina we built together, as well as ABC equivalents.

  Sestina Table

  ONE A STICKS F FREE C STRIVE E FOUR D TOO B

  TOO B ONE A STICKS F FREE C STRIVE E FOUR D

  FREE C STRIVE E FOR D TOO B ONE A STICKS F

  FOR D TOO B ONE A STICKS F FREE C STRIVE E

  STRIVE E FOR D TOO B ONE A STICKS F FREE C

  STICKS F FREE C STRIVE E FOUR D TOO B ONE A

  Stanza 1

  Stanza 2

  Stanza 3

  Stanza 4

  Stanza 5

  Stanza 6

  I was rather fascinated by why a sestina works the way it does and whether it could be proved mathematically that you only need six stanzas for the pattern to repeat. Being a maths dunce, I approached my genius of a father who can find formulas for anything and he offered an elegant mathematical description of the sestina, showing its spirals and naming his algorithm in honour of Arnaud Daniel, the form’s inventor, who was something of a mathematician himself, so legend has it. This mathematical proof can be found in the Appendix. If like me, formulae with big Greek letters in them mean next to nothing, you will be as baffled by it as I am, but you might like, as I do, the idea that even something as ethereal, soulful and personal as a poem can be described by numbers . . .

  Sestinas are still being written by contemporary poets. After their invention by the twelfth-century mathematician and troubadour Arnaud Daniel, examples in English have been written by poets as varied in manner as Sir Philip Sidney, Rossetti, Swinburne, Kipling, Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Justice, Howard Nemerov and Kona Macphee (see if you can find her excellent sestina ‘IVF’). Swinburne’s ‘A Complaint to Lisa’ is a double sestina, twelve stanzas of twelve lines each, a terrifying feat first achieved by Sir Philip Sidney. I mean surely that’s just showing off . . . . I shall present two examples to show the possibilities of a form which my sample verse has made appear very false and stagy. The first is by Elizabeth Bishop, entitled simply ‘Sestina’, flowing between ten-, nine- and eight-syllable lines, ending with a final line of twelve:

  September rain falls on the house.

  In the failing light, the old grandmother

&
nbsp; sits in the kitchen with the child

  beside the Little Marvel Stove,

  reading the jokes from the almanac,

  laughing and talking to hide her tears.

  She thinks that her equinoctial tears

  and the rain that beats on the roof of the house

  were both foretold by the almanac,

  but only known to a grandmother.

  The iron kettle sings on the stove.

  She cuts some bread and says to the child,

  It’s time for tea now; but the child

  is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears

  dance like mad on the hot black stove,

  the way the rain must dance on the house.

  Tidying up, the old grandmother

  hangs up the clever almanac

  on its string. Birdlike, the almanac

  hovers half open above the child,

  hovers above the old grandmother

  and her teacup full of dark brown tears.

  She shivers and says she thinks the house

  feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

  It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

  I know what I know, says the almanac.

  With crayons the child draws a rigid house

  and a winding pathway. Then the child

  puts in a man with buttons like tears

  and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

  But secretly, while the grandmother

  busies herself about the stove,

  the little moons fall down like tears

  from between the pages of the almanac

  into the flower bed the child

  has carefully placed in the front of the house.

  Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

  The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

  and the child draws another inscrutable house.

  It is not considered de rigueur these days to enforce the end-word order of the envoi. This next (also called ‘Sestina’) is by the poet Ian Patterson – wonderful how his end-words slowly cycle their multiple meanings: