The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (14 page)

In each of these ballad verses the first and third lines have four stresses (eight syllables) and the second and fourth lines have three (six syllables):

It might have struck you that all three extracts could have come from the same poem, despite their each being separated by roughly a hundred years. We will hold that thought until we come to look at the ballad later. You will remember, I hope, that the Earl of Oxford’s duff heptameters and Kipling’s rather better managed ones seemed to beg to be split into a similar arrangement:

My life through lingering long is lodged,

In lair of loathsome ways,

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms

That guard you while you sleep

Tetrameters, even if they follow ballad form and alternate with trimeters, don’t
need
to have the swing and narrative drive of a ballad: they can be used in more lyrical and contemplative poetry too, as we have already seen with Wordsworth’s use of them for his daffodils. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is perhaps the poet who most completely mastered the reflective aspect of the four-beat/three-beat measure. Almost none of her poetry is in lines of longer than four feet, yet its atmosphere of depth, privacy and (often sad) thoughtfulness is a world away from lusty narrative ballads.

712
²²

Because I could not stop for death

He kindly stopped for me

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

1612

The Auctioneer of Parting

His ‘Going, going, gone’

Shouts even from the Crucifix,

And brings his Hammer down–

He only sells the Wilderness,

The prices of Despair

Range from a single human Heart

To Two–not any more–

Lord Byron shows that pure four-beat tetrameters can be blissfully lyrical: note the initial trochaic substitution in the last line.

She walks in beauty like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meets in her aspect and her eyes.

While Humbert Wolfe demonstrates here their appropriateness for comic satire:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

Thank God, the British journalist.

But seeing what the man will do

Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

The above examples are of course in
iambic
four-beats.

Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke’s metrical version of Psalm 71 is written in
trochaic
tetrameters:

Lord
, on
thee
my
trust
is
ground
ed:

Leave
me
not
with
shame
con
found
ed

As is Longfellow’s
Song of Hiawatha
:

Oft
en
stopped
and
gazed
im
plor
ing

At
the
trembl
ing
Star
of
Eve
ning,

At
the
tend
er
Star
of
Wom
an;

And
they
heard
him
murm
ur
soft
ly

Now look at the following two four-stress lines, which reiterate the point I made earlier about question and answer: the obvious but crucial difference in the way each foot as it were distributes its weight.

Tro
chees
end
their
lines
in
weak
ness

I
am
bic
lines
re
solve
with
strength

But as we know, iambic lines don’t
have
to end with a stressed syllable: you can add an extra weak syllable (
hypermetric
addition). Similarly, trochaic lines can have their weak ending dropped (
catalectic
subtraction). In both cases you’re either adding or subtracting a
weak
syllable: the number of
stresses
stays the same.

Ty
ger,
ty
ger
bu
rning
bright

In
the
for
ests
of
the
night

Blake’s famous opening lines drop the natural weak ending of the fourth trochees, giving a seven syllable count and a strong resolution.

Dum
-di,
dum
-di,
dum
-di
dum

or

Tro
chee,
tro
chee,
tro
chee
troke

The full trochaic line ‘Tiger, tiger burning brightly’ would be rather fatuous, don’t we feel? The conclusiveness of a strong ending frames the image so much more pleasingly. Here is the opening to Keats’s poem ‘Fancy’:

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home:

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Both lines of the first couplet (a
couplet
is a pair of rhyming lines) have their final weak endings docked. The second couplet is of four full trochees. Why?

Well, at the risk of taking us back to English classes, it is worth considering this, for the sake, if not of appreciation, then at least of one’s own poetry. The strong endings of the opening give a sense of the epigrammatic and purposeful: they offer a firm opening statement:

Ever let the Fancy
roam
,

Pleasure never is at
home
:

The weak endings of ‘melteth’ and ‘pelteth’ (after all, in his time Keats could perfectly well have said ‘melts’ and ‘pelts’)
echo the meaning of the image
by melting and popping to their end rather than banging to a solid conclusion. Sweet Pleasure’s evanescence is evoked by the evanescence of the metre.

At a touch sweet Pleasure
melt
eth,

Like to bubbles when rain
pelt
eth;

Did he
consciously
set out to do this and for that reason? Well, I think someone with a sensitive ear for the rhythms and cadences of verse wouldn’t need to be taught something like that. To anybody with the slightest instinct such use in metre would come as naturally as finding the right musical phrase for the right emotion comes to a composer. It is true, however, that Keats from an early age completely soaked himself in poetry and (despite being labelled a ‘Cockney poet’ by literary snobs of the time) experimented all his life with poetic form and constantly wrote about prosody and chewed over its nuances passionately with his friends and fellow poets. A mixture of absorption in poetry, obsession with technique and, of course, natural talent culminates in what you might call ‘poetic taste’–a feel for precisely which techniques to reach for.

Incidentally, for some reason Keats’s ‘Fancy’ was one of my favourite poems when I was a mooncalf teenager. Don’t ask me why: it is after all a slight work compared to ‘Endymion’, ‘Lamia’ and the great Odes.

M
IXED
F
EET

Let us consider the whole issue of
mixing feet
within a poem. The end of writing poetry is not to write ‘perfect’ metre with every line going da-
dum
or
dum
-da into the distance, it is to use the metre you’ve chosen to reflect the meaning, mood and emotional colour of your words and images. We’ve already seen how subtle variations such as pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions stand as perfectly acceptable ways of bringing iambic pentameter to life. What about mixing up whole lines of iambic and trochaic metre in the same verse?

He
bangs
the
drums
and
makes
a
noise

Scar
ing
girls
and
wak
ing
boys

Nothing necessarily wrong with that either. Don’t get hung up on writing perfectly symmetrical parades of consistent rhythm.
Utterance
, sung or spoken, underlies poetry. Human utterance, like its heartbeat and its breathing, quickens, pauses and breaks its patterns according to states of relaxation, excitement, passion, fear and all manner of moods and feelings: this is precisely why I took so long over caesura and enjambment earlier. No one could say that the above two lines are
wrong
, it is surprisingly rare, however, to find two metres mixed in this fashion (in ‘literary’ verse, as opposed to popular ballad and song lyrics, at least) and you would want to alternate trochaic and iambic lines for a good reason: the ‘ear’ of the reader would note (however subconsciously) the variation and expect something from it. Perhaps in the above example the alternating trochaic lines could form a kind of chorus or explanatory aside:

He bangs the drums and makes a noise

(Scaring girls and waking boys)

He makes a row till dawn unfurls

(Waking boys and scaring girls)

I never knew a greater pest

(Even squirrels need a rest)

He drives his wretched family wild

(Spare the rod and spoil the child)

So long as you are
in control
of the metre, using its swing and balance to fit the mood, motion or story of your poem there is no reason not to use a variety of beats within the same piece. I would only repeat this observation: well-made poems do not mix up their metric scheme
carelessly
. Have you ever seen a parish magazine or some other flyer, newsletter, brochure or poster where the designer has got too excited about the number of fonts available on his computer and created a great crashing mess of different typefaces and sizes? Musical pieces often go into double time or modulate up or down for effect, but generally speaking such techniques are crass and ugly unless there is a good
purpose
behind it all. Most of the paintings we admire use a surprisingly small palette of colours. A profusion of herbs in a dish can cancel out each flavour or drown the main ingredients. You get the idea.

Having said all that, let’s look at the
whole
first stanza of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.

Ty
ger,
ty
ger,
bu
rning
bright

In
the
for
ests
of
the
night

What
im
mor
tal
hand
or
eye

Could
frame
thy
fear
ful
sym
me
try
?

As we observed earlier, these are trochaic four-stress lines (docked of their last weak syllable). That holds true of the first three lines, but what’s afoot with the last one? It is a regular
iambic
four-stress line. Here’s the third stanza:

And
what
shoul
der
and
what
art

Could
twist
the
sin
ews
of
thy
heart
?

And,
when
thy
heart
be
gan
to
beat
,

What
dread
hand
and
what
dread
feet
?

Trochaic
first and last lines ‘enveloping’ two central
iambic
lines; and the poem’s penultimate stanza runs:

When
the
stars
threw
down
their
spears
,

And
wat
er’d
heav
en
with
their
tears
,

Did
He
smile
His
work
to
see
?

Did
He
who
made
the
lamb
make
thee
?

In this case we alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters. The rest of the poem is trochaic. With a little casuistry one could, I suppose, make the argument that Blake’s shift between metres ‘stripes’ the verse as a tiger is striped. I think that is more than a little tenuous: there is no
plan
to the changes between metre, no apparent design at work: certainly, poets in the past and present have employed metre, rhyme and even the shape of the words on a page further to conjoin form with subject matter, but I do not believe this applies here.

Nonetheless, the variations can hardly be said to spoil the poem: the docking of the final trochaic foot matches the standard male endings of the iambic. After all,
one could look at it this way
: are the odd lines out really iambic, or are they trochees with an extra weak syllable at the
beginning
? Trochees are the opposite of iambs: if you can pop a weak syllable at the end of an iambic line, why not shove one on to the beginning of a trochaic one? If you read those stanzas above, missing out the unstressed syllables at the start of each iambic line you will see what I mean. It is finally a matter of nomenclature and one’s own ear. For many modern metrists there’s no such thing as the iamb or the trochee at all, there are only lines with a set number of beats or stresses to them. Where the
weak
syllables come is, for them, irrelevant. They would have us believe that English verse should be treated as if it is accentual, but not accentual-syllabic. I can’t go that far, myself: there is an obvious and to my ear
absolute
difference between the whole nature of
Hiawatha
and that of, say, ‘She walks in beauty’. There certainly was to Longfellow and Byron.

Here is a well-known couplet from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage
²³

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

That is metrically identical to my made-up hybrid line:

He
bangs
the
drums
and
makes
a
noise

Scar
ing
girls
and
wak
ing
boys

Heartless to quibble with Blake’s sentiment, but to most ears, trained or otherwise, it is a bit of a dud, isn’t it? This is a naïvety one expects, forgives and indeed celebrates with Blake (‘look at his paintings: couldn’t draw, couldn’t colour in’ as Professor Mackenny of Edinburgh University once excellently remarked) and from any poetic sensibility but his one might wrinkle one’s nose at such childlike versifying. If the poem went on alternating in regular fashion as I suggested with the drum-banging boy one could understand. In fact the next lines are: