The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (20 page)

Well, hours of lively debate down the pub over that one. We will tiptoe away and leave them to it.

You may have guessed that if a double iamb or ionic
minor
goes titty-
tum-tum
, then an ionic
major
might well do the opposite:
tum-tum
-titty,
tum-tum
-titty:
: ‘
make much
of it’, that sort of rhythm:

Lee Harv
ey the
lone gun
man, did
cold heart
edly

Shoot fa
tally
John Kenn
edy:
poor Jacq
ueline.

You’d be right to think it
ought
to be called a double trochee too, but so far as I am aware this term isn’t used for such a foot, just ionic major.

For the record, you’ll find the other quaternary feet in the table at the end of this chapter: they include the antispast, the choriamb and the epitrite and paeon families. Again, good for name-dropping at parties, but like the other measures of four, vestiges of Greek poetry that really don’t have a useful place in the garden of English verse. Rupert Brooke experimented with accentual versions of choriambs, which go
tum
-titty-
tum
:
Bill
y the
Kid
. True classical choriambic verse lines should start with a spondee followed by choriambs and a pyrrhic:

Brooke came up with lines like:

Light
-f
oot dance
in the
woods, whis
per of
life, woo
me to
way
faring

To make the last two syllables a pyrrhic foot you have to read the word as ‘wafering’, which is not quite what Brooke means. He, of course, was classically educated to a degree unimaginable today and would from his early teens have written Greek and Latin poems scanned according to quantitative vowel length, not stress. The vast bulk of successful English verse is, as we know, accentual-syllabic. Nonetheless, he shows that all the metres lie in readiness, waiting for someone to experiment with them. The problem comes when a form is so specific as to cause you to cast about for what fits the metre rather than what fits the true sense of what you want to say. How far the meaning and feeling drives you and how far, as a poet, you allow form and metre to guide you where you never expected to go is for a later section of the book.

There is another kind of native metre, however, the
accentual
, at which we will take a look when you have completed one more drill.

Poetry Exercise 6

• Write some anapaestic hexameters describing how to get to your house.
  

Just as
far
as the
mo
torway
takes
you then
straight
past the

Lake
nheath
bend
.

Take a
left
on the
Na
rborough
Road
then a
right
when you

come
to the
end
.

It’s the
house
with the
shut
ters all
closed
and a
gar
den that’s

frank
ly a
slum
.

When you’re
there
, why not
park
round the
back
or just

hoot
on your
horn
till I
come
?

• And some dactylic pentameter on the subject of cows. For fun these should be in the classical manner: four dactyls and a spondee: try to make the spondee as spondaic as the English tongue will allow–two solid bovine stressed syllables.
  

Stand
ing in
rand
omly
cur
ious
hudd
les in
long grass

Pat
ient as
stat
ues, but
twitch
ing and
steam
ing like
stopped

trains

Pens
ively
wait
ing for
someth
ing to
happ
en that
just won’t

Prob
ably
think
ing we’re
nerv
ous and
skitt
ish as
new calves
.

Your turn now. You have forty minutes for your two verses.

V

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Accentual verse–alliteration and the two-beat hemistich

English verse sprang, like the English language, from two principal sources, Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon. From the Greeks and Romans we took ordered syllabic measures, from the Old English we took
accent
. We put them together to make the native
accentual-syllabic
verse that we have been looking at thus far. It is the classical stream that had the most obvious influence on our poetry and certainly on the technical language we use to describe it, but the Anglo-Saxon tributary has carved its way through our literary landscape too. For hundreds of years it lay isolated, like an old oxbow lake, cut off from the flow, but over the last century or more it has snaked its way back into the mainstream. It is worth dipping our toes in to see if we find it congenial. I suspect that after the syllable counting and footwatching of the foregoing pages, you will find its comparative freedom a great delight.

A
NGLO
-S
AXON
and O
LD
E
NGLISH
are (more or less) interchangeable terms used for verse written in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. M
IDDLE
E
NGLISH
or M
EDIEVAL
applies to a later, post-Norman revival of the Old English style. These are loose ascriptions but will do for our purposes.

With Old English poetry there is
NO SYLLABIC COUNT
and there is
NO RHYME
. Is it
free verse
, then, unbounded by rules? By no means. Old English verse is distinctly patterned. Until now we have been looking at metre composed according to rules of
syllabic accentuation
: Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed according to rules of
accent only
: it is a form of
accentual
verse. Accentual-
alliterative
to be precise. Oo-er, sounds a bit scary. It really isn’t, I promise you.

Alliteration is the trick of beginning a succession of words with the same consonant.
³⁰
W. S. Gilbert’s ‘life-long lock’, ‘short sharp shock’ and ‘big black block’ are examples of alliterative phrases that we have already met. Alliteration is still rife in English–advertisers and magazine sub-editors seem obsessed with it. Next time you find yourself out and about with your notebook, write down examples from advertising hoardings and newspaper headlines. It is an English disease: you won’t find it to anything like the same degree in Spanish, French or Italian. It lives on in phrases like ‘wit and wisdom’, ‘parent power’, ‘feast or famine’, ‘sweet sixteen’, ‘dirty dozen’, ‘buy British’, ‘prim and proper’, ‘tiger in your tank’, ‘you can be sure of Shell’ and so on. As we have seen, Shakespeare in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
mocked its overuse when Bottom and his friends attempt dramatic verse. Here is another part of their dreadful ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:

Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,

He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;

That is cast in standard Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Old English verse made no such regular, organised use of iambs or any other kind of foot; instead, their verse was based on a much simpler kind of accentuation. The poetic line is
divided in two
. Two parts, each containing two stressed elements, two beats. The Greek for half a line is
hemistich
(pronounced hemmy-stick) and so, Greek being the language even of native English prosody, hemistich is the word commonly used to describe the Anglo-Saxon half-line.

Each hemistich must contain two
stressed
syllables. It doesn’t matter where they come or how many unstressed syllables surround them. For now, we will call the stressed syllables
one, two, three
and
four
. One and two are placed in the first hemistich,
three
and
four
in the second. I have left a deliberately wide gap to denote the vital caesura that marks the division into hemistichs.

Although ‘comes’, ‘along’, ‘there’, ‘hand’, ‘young’ and ‘word’ might seem to be words which ought properly to receive some stress, it is only the
numbers
here that take the primary accent. Try reading the three lines aloud, deliberately hitting the numbers hard.

You get the idea. Of course there will always be minor, secondary stresses on the other words, but it is those four stressed elements that matter. You could say, if you love odd words as much as most poets do, that a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is in reality a syzygy of dipodic hemistichs. A pair of yoked two-foot half-lines, in other words. But I prefer syzygy. It really is a word, I promise you.
³¹