The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  There is also a seventeen-line variant. These are called CAUDATE SONNETS (from the Latin for ‘tail’, same root as ‘coda’) which feature a three-line envoi or cauda. The convention here is for the first line of the cauda to be trimetric and to rhyme with the last line of the main body of the sonnet, and for the next two lines to be in the form of a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. Milton’s sonnet ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’ is an example: here are its final couplet and cauda, with line numbers, just so that you are clear:

  May with their wholesome and preventative shears

  13

  Clip your phylacteries,18 though baulk your ears,

  14

  And succor our just fears,

  15

  When they shall read this clearly in your charge:

  16

  New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.

  17

  Those last two words, of course, writ large, have entered the language.

  In the nineteenth century the poet and novelist George Meredith developed a form of sixteen line sonnet with four sets of envelope rhymes abba cddc effe ghhg.

  There are traditions in the writing of SONNET SEQUENCES, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese and Meredith’s sequence ‘Modern Love’ (in his own Meredithian sixteen-line form). Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata, being a sequence of fourteen sonnets, is known as a SONNET OF SONNETS. More complex sequences exist, such as one of indeterminate length in which each new sonnet opens with the last line of the previous until you reach the final sonnet which terminates with the opening line of the first. This is called a CORONA SEQUENCE. John Donne wrote such a sequence in seven sonnets, called ‘La Corona’. More complex variations on that include the SONNET REDOUBLÉ, a corona sequence of fourteen sonnets terminating with a fifteenth which is wholly composed of each linking line of the corona in sequence. If there is no good reason for such complexity it will look like showing off, I feel. Donne’s corona had a purposeful religious structure, to make a crown of poetry to match Christ’s crown of thorns.

  There are two very well-known examples of SONNET COMPETITIONS which reveal, among other things, the form’s special place in poetry. The ability to write them fluently was, and to some extent still is, considered the true mark of the poet.

  On the evening of 30 December 1816, John Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’. Legend has it that they each took just fifteen minutes to write the following. I shall not tell you straight away who wrote which. All I ask is that you decide which you prefer:

  1

  Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,

  Catching your heart up at the feel of June,

  Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,

  When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;

  And you, warm little housekeeper, who class

  With those who think the candles come too soon,

  Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune

  Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;

  Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong

  One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

  Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong

  At your clear hearts; and both were sent on earth

  To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:

  Indoors and out, summer and winter, – Mirth.

  2

  The poetry of earth is never dead:

  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

  From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

  That is the Grasshopper’s – he takes the lead

  In summer luxury, – he has never done

  With his delights; for when tired out with fun

  He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

  The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

  On a lone winter evening, when the frost

  Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

  The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,

  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

  The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

  Our second two sonnets share the subject of an inscription on the great statue of Rameses II (Greek name Ozymandias): one is by Percy Byssche Shelley and the other by his friend Horace Smith. Shelley’s is more than a little well known, but which ‘Ozymandias’ do you like best?

  1

  I met a traveller from an antique land,

  Who said – ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert . . . near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

  Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

  2

  In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,

  Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

  The only shadow that the Desert knows: –

  ‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,

  ‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

  The wonders of my hand.’ – The City’s gone, –

  Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose

  The site of this forgotten Babylon.

  We wonder, – and some Hunter may express

  Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness

  Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,

  He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess

  What powerful but unrecorded race

  Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

  Of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’ pair, the first is by Leigh Hunt and the second by Keats. In a recent Internet poll (for what it is worth) seventy-five per cent preferred the Leigh Hunt and only a quarter went for the Keats. As a matter of fact Keats would have agreed with them; he thought Leigh Hunt’s clearly the superior poem. One the other hand, ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’ is one of the finest opening lines imaginable. If you have read Keats before, ‘one in drowsiness half lost’ would be a dead giveaway as to authorship. Leigh Hunt’s sonnet scores, we feel, as a whole poem; even if it doesn’t contain such moments of perfect music, the progression of ideas (which is so much of what a sonnet is there to exhibit) seems clearer and more satisfactory. They are both Petrarchan, and both have clear voltas at the beginning of their ninth lines. The Leigh Hunt sestet rhymes cdcdcd, while Keats sticks to the more traditional cdecde.

  Of the next pair, Shelley’s is the first, Smith’s second, as I’m sure you guessed even if you didn’t already know. They were both published in The Examiner in 1818 and are both entitled ‘Ozymandias’. They each, as you can see, tell the same story – the opening descriptions being, in their basic outlines, identical. There all similarity ends. There is something dreadfully comic about ‘In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,/Stands a gigantic Leg . . .’. If Shelley’s sonnet outlasts even the ancient monument it commemorates, Smith’s will be fortunate to endure as a curiosity. His is not a terrible poem, but immensely ordinary by comparison. Perhaps you disagree? Shelley and Smith, as you may have noticed if you have been a good and attentive girl or a boy, have both dreamt up their own rhyme schemes.

  Whether you choose to write Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets in blank, full or slant-rhyme, or adapt or reinvent as many poets have, the form is there for you to explore.
I find it hard to imagine anyone calling themselves a poet who has not at least experimented with the sonnet and, like Wordsworth, found –

  In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

  Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

  Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

  Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

  Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

  So now it is your turn.

  Poetry Exercise 19

  Write a Petrarchan Sonnet on Electoral Apathy. Use the octave to complain about how lazy and uninterested voters are and then, at the volta, decide that apathy is probably the best response.

  Now write a Shakespearean Sonnet on exactly the same subject. Use the first four lines for a description of apathy, the second four for a complaint against it, the third for an admission of your own apathy and then, in the final couplet express the concluding thought that, what the hell, it makes no difference anyway.

  If you don’t like this subject, do write your own sonnet anyway. I think it would be a big mistake to leave this chapter without having tried to write at least one of each major form.

  XI

  Shaped Verse

  Pattern poems – concrete poetry: a few words concerning Imagism – gamesome forms – rictameter, rhopalics, lipograms – silly syllabic forms – tetractys and nonet – acrostics and more

  PATTERN POEMS

  the

  QUEEN

  can do

  almost

  what

  ever

  she

  wishes

  up down

  side to side

  the world is hers

  but

  a

  small

  PAWN

  gets

  the

  chance

  to be a king

  The idea of shaping your poem on the page to make a picture, symbol or pattern is a very old one. The best-known example in English verse is George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ which, rotated ninety degrees, takes on the shape of two angels’ wings:

  Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store

  Though foolishly he lost the same,

  Decaying more and more

  Till he became

  Most poore:

  With Thee

  O let me rise

  As larks, harmoniously,

  And sing this day thy victories:

  Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

  My tender age in sorrow did beginne;

  And still with wickedness and shame

  Thou didst so punish sinne,

  That I became

  Most thin.

  With Thee

  Let me combine

  And feel this day thy victorie;

  For, if I imp my wing on thine,

  Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

  Another of Herbert’s pattern poems, ‘The Altar’, reveals the shape of its title, an altar table.

  When I was small I remember endlessly looking through my parents’ copy of the collected poems of e e cummings and being fascinated and appalled by the things he did with punctuation, his blithe disregard for majuscules and spaces and the general appearance of childish illiteracy his work presented. My teachers, I felt, would never allow me to get away with such liberties and yet there he was, sharing shelf-space with Robert Browning and John Keats. The collection included this poem; I found the slippage of the ‘l’ from ‘loneliness’ unbearably sad.

  1(a

  le

  af

  fa

  ll

  s)

  one

  l

  iness

  It is, incidentally, the only poem I know of whose title contains all the words of the poem: 1(a . . . (a leaf falls on loneliness), yet of course the poem is not the words, it is the sum of the words and their layout, a truth in all poetry but one most obviously declared in this kind of patterned or shaped verse. cummings was a Cubist painter as well as a poet:‘The symbol of all art is the Prism,’ he wrote.‘The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains.’ I am not sure how one would categorise such a work as the famous ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’:

  r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

  who

  a)s w(e loo)k

  upnowgath

  PPEGORHRASS

  eringint(o-

  aThe):l

  eA

  !p:

  S a

  (r

  rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)

  to

  rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

  ,grasshopper;

  Unscrambled, the words reveal ‘the grasshopper, who, as we look now upgathering into [himself], leaps, arriving to become, rearrangingly, a grasshopper’. Those may be the words, but the poem attempts to embody the movement, complexity, camouflage, windup and release, the whole whatness of a grasshopper’s leap. It is not meant visually to imitate the appearance of a grasshopper on the page, rather to force the reader to slow down and look and feel and think and unpick all the dynamics of a grasshopper’s launch and spring. A conventional poem can use words and all their qualities descriptively and sonorously, a painting can freeze a moment in time, a sculpture can imitate texture, density and mass, music can reproduce sound and shape, but what cummings has done is to create a mechanism whose moving parts are operated by the reader in the act of reading. A verbal sculpture, if you like, containing a potential energy which releases its kinetic force only at the moment of the reader’s engagement. Some of you may find this either a pretentious game or a stultifying dead end. I am sorry if this is so. I would agree, however, that as with much modern conceptual art the very specificity of the work’s originality allows little opportunity for development by others. cummings has had that idea, it is now ticked off in the box of high concepts and anything else in that line would look like cheap imitation. This is what separates such works from forms. The sonnet and the villanelle are certainly not played out, such poetic self-release mechanisms probably are.

  I suppose ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’ qualifies as CONCRETE poetry, a term that came out of a movement in São Paolo in the 1950s. Its manifesto states that

  the old formal syllogistic-discursive foundation, strongly shaken at the beginning of the century, has served again as a prop for the ruins of a compromised poetic, an anachronistic hybrid with an atomic heart and a medieval cuirass.19

  So there. Ezra Pound and the Imagists were concrete poets avant la lettre: Pound was influenced by the writings of T. E. Hulme and by Ernest Fenollosa’s pioneering work, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Pound (Fenollosa’s literary executor) found himself inspired by the idea that the Chinese ideogram, rather than displaying its meaning syntagmatically (rolling it out phonetically and phonemically in sequence as this sentence does) actually contained meaning, held it in one visual unit. This tallied with Hulme’s idea of reality being process.‘There are no nouns in the universe,’ he had declared, ‘only verbs.’The upshot of this – and academics will forgive my blithe generalities – was to attempt poems that were kinds of ideogram. The best-known example is ‘In a Station of the Metro’ written in 1911:

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

  Petals on a wet, black bough .

  Pound went into some detail concerning the composition of this poem in an influential article called ‘Vorticism’. He had been overwhelmingly moved by the sight of a succession of beautiful women and children on the Paris Metro, ‘and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion,’ he wrote, until

  . . . that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that – a ‘pattern’, or hardly a pattern, if by
‘pattern’ you mean something with a ‘repeat’ in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. . .. I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

  The new poetics suggested by Pound’s thoughts on colour, image, quiddity and ideogram engendered a new kind of ‘iconographic’ poetry which culminated in his cantos, most especially The Pisan Cantos, notable for their use of hieroglyphs and ideograms and, so far as most of us are concerned, their almost total unreadability. There is huge gusto and bravado in their best moments, but much to make the reader feel foolish and unlettered.

  I am not here to attempt a history lesson, nor am I qualified to do so, but I mention all of this as a background to the concepts that have propelled much modern poetry, most of these ideas being osmotically absorbed by succeeding generations of course, not acquired intellectually: but that holds true of our grasp of, for example, gravity, evolution, the subconscious mind and genetics. Our understanding of much in the world is more poetic than noetic. We let others do the work and take their half-understood ideas for a ride, all unaware of the cognitive principles that gave birth to them. That those principles and their corollaries would have shocked and perplexed us had we lived in other times is interesting but irrelevant for our purposes. You do not have to understand Faraday’s and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories of light to operate a light switch, or even to become a professional lighting designer.

  The upshot of Imagism, Vorticism, Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, Constructivism, Acmeism, Futurism, Dadaism and all the other -isms that flooded art in the twentieth century was to allow a new kind of poetry, of which concrete poetry is one, the work of cummings another. Such practices now inform the works of thousands of poets around the globe. Since, unlike traditional metrical poetry, they descend from conscious ideas rather than techniques evolved (by way of music and dance) out of the collective unconscious of three millennia, their genesis did seem worth a small excursion.