The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  A haiku which does not include a kigo word and is more about human than physical nature is called a SENRYU which, confusingly, means ‘river willow’.

  Those who have studied the form properly and write them in English are now very unlikely to stick to the 5–7–5 framework. The Japanese on (sound unit) is very different from our syllable and most original examples contain far fewer words than their English equivalents. For some the whole enterprise is a doomed and fatuous mismatch, as misguided as eating the Sunday roast with chopsticks and calling it sushi. Nonetheless non-Japanese speakers of some renown have tried them. They seemed to have been especially appealing to the American beat poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Kerouac, as well as to Spanish-language poets like Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. Here are a couple of Borges examples (it is possible that haikus in Spanish, which like Japanese is syllabically timed, work better than in English) – my literal translations do not obey the syllabic imperatives.

  La vasta noche

  no es ahora otra cosa

  que una fragancia.

  (The enormous night

  is now nothing more

  than a fragrance.)

  Callan las cuerdas.

  La música sabía

  lo que yo siento.

  (The strings are silent.

  The music knew

  What I was feeling.)

  Borges also experimented with another waka-descended Japanese form, the TANKA (also known as yamato uta). I shall refrain from entering into the nuances of the form, which appear to be complex and unsettled – certainly as far as their use in English goes. The general view appears to be that they are five-line poems with a syllable count of 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. In Spanish, in the hands of Borges, they look like this:

  La ajena copa,

  La espada que fue espada

  En otra mano,

  La luna de la calle,

  Dime, ¿acaso no bastan?

  (Another’s cup,

  The sword which was a sword

  In another’s hand,

  The moon in the street,

  Say to me, ‘Perhaps they are not enough.’)

  The form has recently grown in popularity, thanks in large part to the publication American Tanka and a proliferation of tanka sites on the Internet.

  GHAZAL

  The lines in GHAZAL always need to run, IN PAIRS.

  They come, like mother-daughter, father-son, IN PAIRS

  I’ll change the subject, as this ancient form requires

  It offers hours of simple, harmless fun, IN PAIRS.

  Apparently a Persian form, from far-off days

  It needs composing just as I have done, IN PAIRS

  And when I think the poem’s finished and complete

  I STEPHEN FRY, pronounce my work is un-IMPAIRED.

  My version is rather a bastardly abortion I fear, but the key principles are mostly adhered to. The lines of a GHAZAL (pronounced a bit like guzzle, but the ‘g’ should hiccup slightly, Arab-stylie) come in metrical couplets. The rhymes are unusual in that the last phrase of the opening two lines (and second lines of each subsequent couplet) is a refrain (rhadif), it is the word before the refrain that is rhymed, in the manner shown above. I have cheated with the last rhyme-refrain pairing as you can see. Each couplet should be a discrete (but not necessarily discreet) entity unto itself, no enjambment being permitted or overall theme being necessary. It is usual, but not obligatory, for the poet to ‘sign his name’ in the last line as I have done.

  The growth in the form’s popularity in English is largely due to its rediscovery by a generation of Pakistani and Indian poets keen to reclaim an ancient form with which they feel a natural kinship. As with the haiku, it may seem to some impertinent and inappropriate to try to wrench the form out of its natural context: like taking a Lancashire hotpot out of a tandoori oven and serving it as Asian food. I see nothing intrinsically wrong with such attempts at cultural cross-breeding, but I am no authority.

  LUC BAT

  LUC BAT is rather cute

  It keeps the mind astute and pert

  It doesn’t really hurt

  To keep the mind alertly keen

  You’ll know just what I mean

  When you have gone and been and done

  Your own completed one

  It’s really rather fun to do

  Full of subtlety too,

  I hope that yours earn you repute.

  This is a Vietnamese form much easier to do than to describe. LUC BAT is based on a syllable count that alternates 6, 8, 6, 8, 6, 8 and so on until the poet comes to his final pair of 6, 8 lines (the overall length is not fixed). The sixth syllables rhyme in couplets like my cute/astute but the eight-syllable lines have a second rhyme (pert in my example), which rhymes with the sixth syllable of the next line, hurt. When you come to the final eight-syllable line, its eighth syllable rhymes with the first line of the poem (repute back to cute). I don’t expect you to understand it from that garbled explanation. Here is a scheme: maybe that will be easier to follow.

  cute

  astute and pert

  hurt

  alertly keen

  mean

  been and done

  one

  fun to do

  too

  you repute

  Luc bat is the Vietnamese for ‘six eight’. The form is commonly found as a medium for two-line riddles, rhyming as above.

  Completely round and white

  After baths they’re tight together.

  Milk inside, not a yak

  Hairy too, this snack is fleshy

  Plates and coconuts, in case you hadn’t cracked them.16 Proper poems in Vietnamese use a stress system divided into the two pleasingly named elements bang and trac, which I cannot begin to explain, since I cannot begin to understand them. Once more the Internet seems to have been responsible for raising this form, obscure outside its country of origin, to something like cult status. It has variations. SONG THAT LUC BAT (which literally means two sevens, six-eight, although it begs in English to have the word ‘sang’ after it, as in ‘The Song That Luc Bat Sang’) consists of a seven-syllable rhyming couplet, followed by sixes and eights that rhyme according to another scheme that I won’t bother you with. I am sure you can search Vietnamese literature (or van chuong bac hoc) resources if you wish to know more.

  TANAGA

  The TANAGA owes its genes

  To forms from the Philippines.

  To count all your words like beans

  You may need adding machines.

  The TANAGA is a short non-metric Filipino form, consisting of four seven-syllable lines rhyming aaaa, although modern English language tanagas allow abab, aabb and abba.17 I am not aware of any masterpieces having yet been composed in our language. But there it is for your pleasure.

  Poetry Exercise 18

  Four haikus in the usual mongrel English form: one for each season, so do not forget your kigo word.

  X

  The Sonnet

  PETRARCHAN AND SHAKESPEAREAN

  I wrote a bad PETRARCHAN SONNET once,

  In two laborious weeks. A throttled stream

  Of words – sure following the proper scheme

  Of Abba Abba – oh, but what a dunce

  I was to think those yells and tortured grunts

  Could help me find an apt poetic theme.

  The more we try to think, the more we dream,

  The more we whet our wit, the more it blunts.

  But give that dreaming part of you release,

  Allow your thrashing conscious brain a break,

  Let howling tom become a purring kitten

  And civil war dissolves to inward peace;

  A thousand possibilities awake,

  And suddenly your precious sonnet’s written.

  The sonnet’s fourteen lines have called to poets for almost a thousand years. It is the Goldilocks form: when others seem too long, too short, too intricate, too shapeless, too heavy, too ligh
t, too simple or too demanding the sonnet is always just right. It has the compactness to contain a single thought and feeling, but space enough for narrative, development and change.

  The sonnet was, they say, invented in the thirteenth century by Giacomo da Lentini in the Sicilian court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Dante and d’Arezzo and others experimented with it, but it was Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch, who shaped it into the form which was to have so tremendous an impact on European and English poetry. In the papal court of Avignon he composed his cycle of sonnets to Laura, a girl he always claimed was flesh and blood, but whom many believed to be a conjured ideal. His sonnets made their way over to god-fearing medieval England and lay there like gleaming alien technology: dazzling in their sophistication, knowledge, mastery and promise, frightening in their freedom, daring and originality.

  Chaucer knew of them and admired them but their humanism, their promotion of personal feeling and open enquiry, the vigour and self-assertion of their individual voice would have made any attempt on his part to write such works, if indeed he had that desire, a kind of heresy or treason. We had to wait two hundred years for the warm winds of the Renaissance truly to cross the channel and thaw us out of our monkish and feudal inertia. In the hundred and twenty or so years between the Reformation and the Restoration the sonnet had, like some exotic plant, been grafted, grown, hothoused and hybridised into a flourishing new native stock, crossbred to suit the particular winds and weather of our emotional and intellectual climate. This breeding began under Wyatt and Surrey, great pioneers in many areas of English verse, and was carried on by Sidney, Shakespeare, Drummond, Drayton, Donne, Herbert and Milton. The next century saw an equally rapid decline: it is hard to think of a single sonnet being written between the death of Milton in the 1670s and the publication of Wordsworth’s first sonnets a hundred and thirty years later. Just as Wren and the Great Fire between them redesigned half-timbered, higgledy-piggledy Tudor London into a metropolis of elegant neoclassical squares and streets, so Dryden, Johnson and Pope preferred to address the world from a Palladian balcony, the dignified, harmonious grandeur of the heroic couplet replacing what they saw as the vulgar egoism of the lowly sonnet and its unedifying emotional wrestling matches. Those very personal qualities of the sonnet were precisely what attracted Wordsworth and the romantic poets of course, and from their day to ours it has remained a popular verse forum for a poet’s debate with himself.

  The structure of the PETRARCHAN SONNET, preferred and adapted by Donne, Milton and many others, is easily expressed. The first eight lines abba-abba are called the OCTAVE, the following six lines cdecde (or cddccd or cdccdc) the SESTET.

  The ninth line, the beginning of the sestet, marks what is called the VOLTA, the turn. This is the moment when a contrary point of view, a doubt or a denial, is often expressed. It is the sonnet’s pivot or fulcrum. In mine at the top of this section the ninth line begins with ‘But’, a rather obvious way of marking that moment (although you may recall Donne uses the same word in his ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ cited in Chapter Two). In Wordsworth’s ‘The world is too much with us’ below, the volta comes in the middle of the ninth line, at the ‘en dash’: it is precisely here, after ‘It moves us not’ that, overlooking the sea, having pondered the rush of the modern Christian world in its commerce and crassness and its blindness to nature, Wordsworth as it were draws breath and makes his point: he would rather be a pagan for whom at least nature had life and energy and meaning. A volta can be called a crisis, in its literal Greek sense of ‘turning point’ as well as sometimes bearing all the connotations we now place upon the word.

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

  The winds that will be howling at all hours,

  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

  It moves us not. – Great God! I’d rather be

  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

  Within the Petrarchan form’s basic octave–sestet structure there are other sub-divisions possible. Two groups of four and two of three are natural, two quatrains and two tercets if you prefer.

  Here now is Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth Sonnet.

  When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself and curse my fate,

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

  Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least;

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

  Like to the lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

  For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,

  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

  This contains one of the strongest voltas imaginable: it arrives in the breath between Haply and I think of thee in line 10, pivoting from the very first word of the sonnet, When. The whole first part of the poem is a vast conditional clause awaiting the critical turn. But the difference in rhyme-scheme and lack of octave and sestet structure will already have shown you that, volta or no volta, this is far from a Petrarchan sonnet.

  For the Tudor poets one of the disadvantages of the Petrarchan form was that abba abba requires two sets of four rhyming words. While this is a breeze in Italian where every other word seems to end -ino or -ella, it can be the very deuce in English. Drayton, Daniel and Sidney radically reshaped the rhyme-scheme, using a new structure of abab cdcd efef gg. This arrangement reached unimaginable heights in the hands of Shakespeare, after whom it is named. His great sonnets stand with Beethoven’s piano sonatas as supreme expressions of the individual human voice using and fighting the benign tyranny of form, employing form itself as a metaphor for fate and the external world. Sonata and sonnet share the same etymology, as it happens – ‘little sound’. Little sounds that make a great noise.

  The SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET offers, aside from less troublesome rhyming searches, twelve lines in its main body, three quatrains or two sestets and a couplet and other permutations thereof – twelve is a very factorable number. The cross-rhyming removes the characteristic nested sequence of envelope rhyming found in the Petrarchan form (bb inside aa and the following aa inside bb) but the reward is a new freedom and the creation of a more natural debating chamber.

  For this is primarily what the Shakespearean sonnet suits so well, interior debate. I have mentioned before the three-part structure that seems so primal a part of human thinking. From the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of the earliest logicians, the propositions, suppositions and proofs of Euclid and the strophe, antistrophe and epode of Greek performance and poetic ode to our own parliaments and senate chambers, boardrooms, courtrooms and committee rooms, this structure of proposal, counterproposal and vote, prosecution, defence and verdict is deep within us. It is how we seem best to frame the contrary flows of thought and feeling that would otherwise freeze us into inaction or propel us into civil war or schizophrenic uncertainty. The sonnet shares with the musical sonata a rhetorical fitness for presentation, exploration and return. While the Petrarchan sonnet’s two divisions separated by a strong volta suit a proposition and a conclusion, the nature of the Shakespearean form allows of three quatrains with a final judgem
ental summing up in the trademark final couplet. Do bear in mind when I talk of a ‘dialectical structure’ that the sonnet is, of course, a poetic form, not a philosophical – I oversimplify to draw attention to the internal movement it offers. Clearly a closing couplet can often seem glib and trite. The romantics preferred the Petrarchan sonnet’s more unified scheme, finding the Shakespearean structure of seven rhyme pairs harsh and infelicitously fractured compared to the Petrarchan’s three.

  In modern times the sonnet has undergone a remarkable second English-language renaissance. After its notable health under Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese) and Hopkins (‘The Windhover’, ‘All Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’), Daryush wrote some syllabic sonnets (‘I saw the daughter of the sun’ is very fine) and the form was ‘rediscovered’ by Auden, Berryman, Cummings, Edna St Vincent Millais, Elizabeth Bishop, Carol Ann Duffy and many others, including Seamus Heaney whose superb sonnets in The Haw Lantern are well worth exploring. In this century it is more popular than ever: you will find one written every minute on the profusion of websites devoted to it.

  SONNET VARIATIONS AND ROMANTIC DUELS

  There are as many arguments about what constitutes a sonnet as there are arguments about any field of human activity. There are those who will claim that well-known examples like Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ are anamorphic, not true sonnets but types of quatorzain, which is just another way of saying ‘fourteen-line poem’. This is an argument we need not enter. There are those who recognise poems of less than fourteen lines as being CURTAL SONNETS (Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ reproduced in full in Chapter One being an example and perhaps Yeats’s ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ is another).