The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (17 page)

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

He
could
have written the anapaest ‘And he breathed…’ but I think his instinct to use the clipped ‘And breathed’ instead is exactly right for the conceit. It is a very subtle difference. What do you think? Try saying each alternative aloud. I think the clipping causes us to linger a tiny bit longer on the word ‘breathed’ than we would in strict anapaestic rhythm and this brings the image to life. Now, back to those standard anapaests beating:

Titty-
tum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum

Titty-
tum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum

Imagine that, instead of doing what Browning and Byron did and clipping off the head like so:

Da-
dum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum

Da-
dum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum
, titty-
tum

you started with anapaests and ended with a
spondee
which, as I mentioned earlier, is a double-stressed foot:
Hard cheese
.
Humdrum

Ana
paest
, ana
paest
, ana
paest, spon-dee
!

Ana
paest
, ana
paest
, ana
paest, spon-dee
!

That might remind you of the gallop from Rossini’s overture to
William Tell
, famously used for the TV series
The Lone Ranger
and the three-way orgy in Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
.

The spondee (inasmuch as it truly exists in English) makes a great
full stop
, either serious like a tolling bell or comic, as in the famous knocking rhythm that Americans express as:

Shave
and a
hair cut, two bits
!

Tum
-titty
tum tum
.
Tum tum
!

If you wanted to scan that line, you would say ‘haircut’ and ‘two bits’ were both spondaic. But what is ‘shave-and-a’? When you think about it, it is an anapaest in reverse. Instead of titty-
tum
(
), it is
tum
-titty. (
). A new ternary foot for us to meet and its name is
dactyl
.

T
HE
D
ACTYL

As a matter of fact the earliest and greatest epics in our culture, Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
were written in dactylic hexameters. Remember, though, classical poetry was written in quantitative measure, where those feet were better described as ‘long short short’,—––‘wait for it’, ‘cool, not hot’, ‘smooth black pig’ rather than our sprightly
tum
-titty. The word dactyl comes from the Greek for ‘finger’: fingers have one long joint and two short ones. In reality, Greek metrical units are closer to musical notes in that they tell you their duration: a long syllable takes exactly twice as long to utter as a short one, hence you could say a dactyl for Greek-style quantitative verse should be written thus:

Homer’s verse didn’t swing along in a bouncy rhythmic way, it pulsed in gentle lo-o-o-ng short-short, lo-o-o-ng short-short waves, each line usually ending with a spondee. As I hope I have made pretty clear by now, that sort of metrical arrangement isn’t suited to the English tongue. We go, not by duration, but by syllabic accentuation.

Tennyson’s dialect poem ‘Northern Farmer’ shows that, as with Browning’s anapaests, a dactyl in English verse, using
stressed
-weak-weak syllables instead of lo-o-o-ng-short-short, has its place, also here imitating the trot of a horse’s hooves as it sounds out the word ‘property’. (I have stripped it of Tennyson’s attempts at phonetic northern brogue–‘paäins’, for example.)

Proputty, proputty, proputty–that’s what I ’ears ’em say

Proputty, proputty, proputty–Sam, thou’s an ass for thy pains

The poem ends with the line:

Five dactyls and a single full stop stress on the ‘way’ of ‘away’. As with anapaests, lines of pure dactyls are rather predictable and uninteresting:

Tum
-titty,
tum
-titty,
tum
-titty,
tum
-titty

Just as the anapaest in its rising rhythm, its move from weak to strong, is a ternary version of the iamb, so the dactyl, in its
falling
rhythm, its move from strong to weak, is a ternary version of the trochee. Furthermore, just as it is rewarding to clip the first weak syllable of an anapaestic line, as we saw Browning do (in other words substitute the first foot with an iamb) so dactylic verse can be highly compelling when you dock the
last
weak syllable (in other words substitute the final foot with a trochee).

Tum
-titty,
tum
-titty,
tum
-titty,
tum
-ti

Or you could use a single beat as Tennyson does above (a docked trochee, if you like):

Tum
-titty,
tum
-titty,
tum
-titty,
tum
.

Browning uses this kind of dactylic metre to great effect in ‘The Lost Leader’, his savage attack on Wordsworth. Browning regarded him as a sell-out for accepting the post of Poet Laureate:

Just for a handful of silver he left us

Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

This creates verse with great rhythmic dash and drive. Some poets, however, in their admiration for Homer, attempted to construct quantitative English dactylic hexameters, ending them, as is common in classical verse, with spondees. Edgar Allan Poe had this to say about Longfellow’s stab at translating the Swedish dactyls of a poet called Tegner: