The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  THE CLERIHEW

  ELIZABETH BARRETT

  Was kept in a garret.

  Her father resented it bitterly

  When Robert Browning took her to Italy.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  Preferred Victoria Sponge to venison.

  His motto was ‘Regina semper floreat’

  And that’s how he became Poet Laureate.

  OSCAR WILDE

  Had his reputation defiled.

  When he was led from the dock in tears

  He said ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking

  at two years.’

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  Held flies in abhorrence.

  He once wrote a verse graffito

  Deploring the humble mosquito.

  TED HUGHES

  Had a very short fuse.

  What prompted his wrath

  Was being asked about Sylvia Plath.

  The CLERIHEW is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, father of Nicolas, that peerless illustrator who always signed his work ‘Nicolas Bentley Drew the pictures’. The rules state that clerihews be non-metrically written in two couplets, the first of which is to be a proper name and nothing else. The best-known originals include:

  Christopher Wren

  Said ‘I am going to dine with some men,

  ‘If anyone calls

  Say I am designing St Paul’s.’

  Sir Humphrey Davy

  Abominated gravy.

  He lived in the odium

  Of having discovered sodium.

  John Stuart Mill,

  By a mighty effort of will,

  Overcame his natural bonhomie

  And wrote ‘Principles of Economy’.

  Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum; indeed, it is considered extremely bad form for a clerihew to scan. Properly done, they should tell some biographical truth, obvious or otherwise, about their subject, rather than be sheer nonsense. Sir Humphrey’s dislike of gravy, for example, may well be whimsical tosh, but he did discover sodium: I have tried to cleave to this requirement in my clerihews on the poets. Clerihews have therefore some utility as biographical mnemonics.

  THE LIMERICK

  There was a middle-aged writer called Fry

  Whose book on verse was a lie.

  For The Ode Less Travelled

  Soon unravelled

  To reveal some serious errors in its scansion and rhy . . .

  Unlike clerihews, LIMERICKS, as we discovered when considering their true metrical nature (we decided they were anapaestic, if you recall), do and must scan. I am sure you need to be told little else about them. The name is said to come from a boozy tavern chorus ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’. Although they are popularly associated with Edward Lear, anonymous verses in the ‘There was an old woman of . . .’ formulation pre-dated him by many years:

  A merry old man of Oporto,

  Had long had the gout in his fore-toe;

  And oft when he spoke

  To relate a good joke,

  A terrible twinge cut it short-O.

  Said a very proud Farmer at Reigate,

  When the Squire rode up to his high gate

  ‘With your horse and your hound,

  You had better go round,

  For, I say, you shan’t jump over my gate.’

  That pair was accompanied by Cruikshank illustrations in a children’s ‘chap-book’ of around 1820 when Lear was just eight or nine years old. Oddly, these examples accord more closely to the modern sense of what a limerick should be than Lear’s own effusions, in which the last line often lamely repeats the first.

  There was an Old Man of the West,

  Who wore a pale plum-coloured vest;

  When they said, ‘Does it fit?’

  He replied, ‘Not a bit!’

  That uneasy Old Man of the West.

  Rather flat to the modern ear, I find. We prefer a punchline:

  Girls who frequent picture palaces

  Set no store by psychoanalysis.

  And although Sigmund Freud

  Would be greatly annoyed,

  They cling to their long-standing fallacies.

  Or phalluses, ho-ho-ho. It was W. S. Baring-Gould’s collection The Lure of the Limerick that really understood the base (in both senses) nature of the form. I remember owning a Panther Books edition (an imprint known for publishing risqué but classy works, Genet and the like) and finding their scabrous and cloacal nature hilarious, as any unhealthy ten-year-old would. This anonymous (so far as I can tell) limerick puts it well:

  The limerick packs laughs anatomical

  Into space that is quite economical.

  But the good ones I’ve seen

  So seldom are clean

  And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

  When I began collecting the works of Norman Douglas I was delighted to find a copy of his 1928 anthology, Some Limericks, which remains deeply shocking to this day. Most of them are simply disgusting. Hard to believe that an antiquarian belle-lettriste like Douglas (you may remember his ‘Wagtail’ anacreontics) would dare risk attaching his name to them at a time when Ulysses was being impounded by customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic. Please do not read these four examples of Douglas’s literary excavations. Skip to the next paragraph instead.

  There was an old fellow of Brest,

  Who sucked off his wife with a zest.

  Despite her great yowls

  He sucked out her bowels

  And spat them all over her chest.

  There was a young man of Nantucket

  Whose prick was so long he could suck it

  He said, with a grin

  As he wiped off his chin:

  ‘If my ear were a cunt, I could fuck it.’

  There was an old man of Corfu,

  Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew.

  When he couldn’t get this,

  He fed upon piss –

  And a bloody good substitute too.

  There was an old man of Brienz,

  The length of whose cock was immense.

  With one swerve he could plug

  A boy’s bottom in Zug

  And a kitchen-maid’s cunt in Koblenz.

  Reflections on Comic and Impolite Verse

  Comic forms such as the limerick and the clerihew are the pocket cartoons of poetry. Often they fail dismally to provoke the slightest smile – although those collected by Norman Douglas can certainly provoke cries of outrage and s(t)imulated disgust. It seems to me that the City of Poesy, with its associations of delicacy, refined emotion and exquisite literacy is all the richer for having these moral slums within its walls. No metropolis worth visiting is without its red-light district, its cruising areas and a bohemian village where absinthe flows, reefers glow and love is free. W. H. Auden wrote obscene comic verse which you will not find anthologised by Faber and Faber, 14 and even the retiring Robert Frost had the occasional reluctant (and unconvincing) stab at being saucy. Obscenity is a fit manner for comic verse; without it the twin horrors of whimsy and cuteness threaten. There is surely no word in the language that causes the heart to sink like a stone so much as ‘humorous’. Wit is one thing, bawdy another, but humorousness . . . Humorousness is to wit what a suburban lawn is to either Sissinghurst or a rubbish-heap, what an executive saloon is to an Aston Martin or a cheerful old banger. Wit is either a steel rapier or a lead cosh, rarely a cutely fashioned paper dart. Wit is not nice, wit is not affirmative or consoling. Jonathan Swift describing how ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Goes to Bed’ is unafraid of being disgusting in his disgust:

  CORINNA, Pride of Drury-Lane,

  . . .

  Returning at the Midnight Hour;

  Four Stories climbing to her Bow’r;

  Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,

  Takes off her artificial Hair:

  Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,

  She wipes it clean, and lays it by.

  Her Eye-Brows
from a Mouse’s Hide,

  Stuck on with Art on either Side,

  Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,

  Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.

  Now dexterously her Plumpers draws,

  That serve to fill her hollow Jaws.

  Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums

  A Set of Teeth completely comes.

  Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to prop

  Her flabby Dugs and down they drop.

  Proceeding on, the lovely Goddess

  Unlaces next her Steel-Rib’d Bodice;

  Which by the Operator’s Skill,

  Press down the Lumps, the Hollows fill,

  Up hoes her Hand, and off she slips

  The Bolsters that supply her Hips.

  With gentlest Touch, she next explores

  Her Shankers, Issues, running Sores,

  Effects of many a sad Disaster;

  And then to each applies a Plaster.

  But must, before she goes to Bed,

  Rub off the Daubs of White and Red;

  And smooth the Furrows in her Front,

  With greasy Paper stuck upon’t.

  She takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps;

  And then between two Blankets creeps.

  . . .

  CORINNA wakes. A dreadful Sight!

  Behold the Ruins of the Night!

  A wicked Rat her Plaster stole,

  Half eat, and dragged it to his Hole.

  The Crystal Eye, alas, was miss’d;

  And Puss had on her Plumpers piss’d.

  A Pigeon pick’d her Issue-Peas;

  And Shock her Tresses fill’d with Fleas.

  The Nymph, tho’ in this mangled Plight,

  Must ev’ry Morn her Limbs unite.

  But how shall I describe her Arts

  To recollect the scatter’d Parts?

  Or show the Anguish, Toil, and Pain,

  Of gath’ring up herself again?

  The bashful Muse will never bear

  In such a Scene to interfere.

  Corinna in the Morning dizen’d,

  Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison’d.

  Heroic verse indeed. Even more scabrous, scatological and downright disgraceful was the seventeenth-century’s one-man Derek & Clive, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:

  She was so exquisite a whore

  That in the belly of her mother

  She turned her cunt so right before

  Her father fucked them both together.

  Mm, nice.

  Light Verse

  It is revealing that in polls to find the most popular poets, names like Shel Silverstein, Wendy Cope, Spike Milligan, Roald Dahl, Roger McGough, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Betjeman, Glyn Maxwell and Langston Hughes consistently appear high in the charts (not that all their work is comic, of course). Certainly Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda feature too (not that all their work is serious, of course). There seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for verse whose major rhetorical instrument is wit or lightness of touch. It is notable also that long poems seem a great deal less appealing to the public. Perhaps this is something to do with our culture of immediacy: fast food verse for fast food people. Whatever the reason, it seems to me self-evident that if you wish your poetry to make a noise outside the world of academia, poetry magazines and private Gesellschaften, your chances are greatly increased by their possession of an element of esprit. Perhaps the description that best fits the work of the more popular poets is not comic, but light. ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly,’ said Chesterton.

  LIGHT VERSE does not need to be comic in intent or witty in nature: it encourages readers to believe that they and the poet share the same discourse, intelligence and standing, inhabit the same universe of feeling and cultural reference, it does not howl in misunderstood loneliness, wallow in romantic agony or bombard the reader with learning and allusion from a Parnassian or abstrusely academic height. This kind of poetry, Auden argues in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, was mainstream until the arrival of the romantics. With the exception of sacred verse, Miltonic epics, drama and the more complex metaphysical poems of the seventeenth century, almost all poetry was, more or less, light. It was adult, it could be moving, angry, erotic and even religious, but it was digestible, it was not embarrassed by the idea of likeability and accessibility. A poem could be admired because it was prettily made and charming to read, Mozartian qualities if you like. Modernism appeared to drive lightness out of poetry for ever. These popularity polls, irksome as they be, seem to indicate that it is far from dead, however. In the knowledge that Gravity will destroy us in the end, perhaps Levity is not so trivial a response.

  Parody

  Neither are parody and pastiche an unfit manner for the poet. Chaucer began the trend in English with a scintillating parody of badly versified epical romance called Sir Thopas. Shakespeare parodied Marlowe, as did Donne (in praise of angling in the style of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’); Byron parodied and was parodied, Dryden, Johnson, and Swift parodied and were parodied and so it went on. Trends in the actual nuts and bolts of versification were ruthlessly guyed by Pope in the Dunciad: George Canning and John Hookham Frere (the former of Castlereagh, the latter of Whistlecraft fame and the pair of them high Tory ‘Anti-Jacobins’) made great sport of the democrat Southey’s experiments in dactylics:

  Wearisome Sonnetteer, feeble and querulous,

  Painfully dragging out thy democratic lays –

  Moon-stricken sonneteer, ‘ah! for thy heavenly chance!’

  Sorely thy Dactylics lag on uneven feet:

  Slow is the syllable which thou would’st urge to speed,

  Lame and o’erburden’d, and ‘screaming its wretchedness’.

  They had a go at his Sapphic verse too:

  Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?

  Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order –

  Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in ’t,

  So have your breeches.

  Byron was always savage at the expense of the ‘Lakers’. It is fair to observe that he, silver-spoon nobleman as was, remained a true radical all his life, while both Southey and Wordsworth accepted the King’s shilling and butt of malmsey as Poets Laureate, ending their lives as comfortable establishment grandees. Byron seemed to detect an air of fraudulence early on. Here is his parody of Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’.

  There’s something in a stupid ass:

  And something in a heavy dunce;

  But never since I went to school

  I saw or heard so damned a fool

  As William Wordsworth is for once.

  They say the modern literary world is full of squabbling hatred and simmering resentments, but it is as nothing to the past.

  The individuality and restless stressed energy of Hopkins makes him ripe for pastiche. Anthony Brode was inspired to write a perfect Hopkins parody after reading this on his cereal packet one morning: ‘Delicious heart-of-the-corn, fresh-from-the-oven flakes are sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can’t-be-resisted-flavour.’

  Parenthesis proud, bracket-bold, happiest with hyphens

  The writers stagger intoxicated by terms, adjective-unsteadied –

  Describing in graceless phrases fizzling like soda siphons

  All things crisp, crunchy, malted, tangy, sugared and shredded.

  Parodies are rife in popular culture, a staple of television comedy, but literary and verse parodies seem to have fallen from fashion, Wendy Cope being one of the few practising poets who plays happily and fruitfully with the style of other poets. Now it’s your turn.

  Poetry Exercise 17

  I am sure you have a favourite poet. Write a parody of their style and prosodic manner. Try and make it comically inappropriate: if you like Ted Hughes, try writing a fearsome, physically tough description of a Barbie doll or something else very un-Hughesy. I know this is a bit
of a Spectator Competition sort of exercise, but it is a good way of noticing all the metrical, rhyming and formal mannerisms of a poet. If you are really feeling bold, try writing a cento. You will need the collected works of the poet you choose, otherwise a cento mixing different verses from an anthology might be worth trying. Surprise yourself.

  IX

  Exotic Forms15

  Haiku — senryu – tanka – ghazal – luc bat – tanaga

  HAIKU

  Five seven and five:

  Seventeen essential oils

  For warm winter nights.

  The HAIKU, as you may already know, is a three-line poem of Japanese origin whose lines are composed of five, seven and five syllables. There is much debate as to whether there is any purpose to be served in English-language versions of the form. Those who understand Japanese are strong in their insistence that haikus in our tongue are less than a pale shadow of the home-grown original. English, as a stress-timed language, cannot hope to reproduce the effects of syllable-timed Japanese. I define these terms (rather vaguely) in the section on Syllabic Verse in Chapter One.

  Just so that you are aware, there is a great deal more to the haiku than mere syllable count. For one thing, it is considered de rigueur to include the season of the year, if not as crassly as mine does, then at least by some other reference to weather or atmosphere, what is known as a kigo word. A reverence for life and the natural world is another apparent sine qua non of the form, the aim being to provide a kind of aural, imagistic snapshot (a shasei or ‘sketch of nature’). The senses should be engaged and verbs be kept to a minimum, if not expunged entirely. The general tenor and thrust of the form (believe me, I am no expert) seems to be for the poet (haijin) to await a ‘haiku moment’, an epiphany or imaginative inspiration of some kind. The haiku is a distillation of such a moment. In their native land haikus are written in one line, which renders the idea of a 5–7–5 syllable count all the more questionable. They also contain many puns (kakekotoba), this not being considered a groan-worthy practice in Japanese. A caesura, or kireji, should be felt at the end of either the first or second ‘line’.

  Haiku descends from haikai no renga, a (playful) linked verse development of a shorter form called waka. The haikai’s first stanza was called a hokku and when poets like Masaoka Shiki developed their new, stand-alone form in the nineteenth century, they yoked together the words haikai and hokku to make haiku. We now tend to backdate the term and call the short poems of seventeenthcentury masters such as Matsuo Basho haikus, although they ought really to be called hokkus. Clear?