The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (21 page)

Now for the
alliterative
principle, christened by Michael Alexander, Anglo-Saxon scholar and translator of
Beowulf
, the
BANG, BANG, BANG–CRASH
! rule.

ONE, TWO AND THREE ARE ALLITERATED, FOUR ISN’T

It is as simple as that. No rhyming, so syllable counting. In fact, why bother with the word hemistich at all? The line is divided into two: the first half has
bang
and
bang
, and the second half has
bang
and
crash
. That’s all you really need to know. Let us scan this kind of metre with bold for the first three beats and bold-underline for the fourth, to mark its unalliterated difference.

Important to note that it is the stressed
syllables
that matter: ‘com
pell
ing’ and ‘ap
peal
ing’ are perfectly legitimate alliteration words, as are ‘in
vent
ion’ and ‘con
ven
ient’, ‘
rolls
’ and ‘di
rect
ly’. So long as the stress falls heavily enough on the syllable belonging to the alliterating consonant, everything’s hotsy-totsy and right as a trivet. And I say again, because it might seem unusual after all the syllabic counting of the previous section of the book,
IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY SYLLABLES THERE ARE, ONLY HOW MANY BEATS
. Occasionally, in defiance of the b-b-b-crash rule you may see the fourth beat alliterate with the others, but usually it does not.

Although I said that it does not matter where in each half of the line the stressed elements go, it is close enough to a rule to say that the
fourth
stress (the
CRASH
) is very likely to be in the last word of the line, which may (like ‘lightning’ and ‘simple’ above) have a feminine ending.

I could give you some examples of Anglo-Saxon verse, but they involve special letters (
yoghs, eths
and
thorns
) and the language is distant enough from our own to be virtually incomprehensible to all but the initiated.

Medieval verse is not so tricky to decipher. Round about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English poets began to write once more in the Anglo-Saxon style: this flowering, known as the Alliterative Revival, gave rise to some magnificent works. Here is the opening to William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’.
³²

In a
som
er se
soun
, whan
softe
was the
sonne

I
shope
me into
shroudes
, as I a
shep
were
,

In
hab
ite as an
her
emite, un
holy
of
werkes
,

Wente
forth in the
world wond
res to
here
,

And
saw
many
selles
and
sell
couthe
thynges
.

You hardly need to know what every word means, but a rough translation would be:

One summer, when the sun was gentle

I dressed myself in rough clothes like a shepherd

In the habit of a lazy hermit
³³

Went forth into the world to hear wonders

And saw many marvels and strange things.

You will notice that Langland does open with bang, bang, bang–
bang
. Perhaps it is his way of beginning his poem with special hoopla.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, an anonymous work from the same period (late fourteenth century: contemporary with Chaucer) opens thus:

Sithen the
sege
and the as
saut
watz
ses
ed at
Troye

The
borgh britt
ene
d
and
brent
to
brond
ez and
ask
ez

The
tulk
that the
trammes
of
tre
soun ther
wroght

Watz
tried
for his
tricherie
, the
trewest
on
erthe
;

My spellcheck has just resigned, but no matter. Here is a basic translation:

Since the siege and the assault ceased at Troy

The town destroyed and burned to brands and ashes

The man that the wiles of treason there wrought

Was tried for his treachery, the veriest on earth;

The Gawain Poet (as he is known in the sexy world of medieval studies–he is considered by some to be the author of three other alliterative works–
Pearl, Patience
and
Purity
) occasionally breaks the ‘rule’ and includes an extra alliterating word, and therefore, one must assume, an extra beat, as he does here in the second line.

Modern poets (by which I mean any from the last hundred years) have tried their hands at this kind of verse with varying degrees of accomplishment. This is a perfect Langlandian four-stress alliterated line in two hemistichs and comes from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

On a bleak background of bald stone.

Ezra Pound’s ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo-Saxon’ contains lines like ‘Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth’ and ‘Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight’ but for the most part it does not follow the hemistich b-b-b-c pattern with such exactness. Among the more successful in this manner was that great prosodic experimenter, W.H. Auden. These extracts are from his verse drama
The Age of Anxiety
.

Deep in my dark the dream shines

Yes, of you, you dear always;

My cause to cry, cold but my

Story still, still my music.

Mild rose the moon, moving through our

Naked nights: tonight it rains;

Black umbrellas blossom out;

Gone the gold, my golden ball.

What Auden manages, which other workers in this field often do not, is to imbue the verse with a sense of the modern and the living. He uses enjambment (something very rarely done by Old English and medieval poets) to help create a sense of flow. A grim failing when writing in alliterative four-stress lines is to overdo the Saxon and produce verse that is the poetic equivalent of morris dancing or Hobbit-speak.
³⁴
When reading such verse out loud you feel the urge to put a finger to your ear and chant nasally like a bad folk singer. This unpleasantness can be aggravated by an over-reliance on a trope known as a
kenning
. Kennings are found in great profusion in Anglo-Saxon, Old German and especially Norse poetry. They are a kind of compound
metonym
(a metaphoric trope, see the glossary) used to represent a single object, person or concept: thus a ship becomes an
oar steed
, the sea is the
whale road
or the
gannet’s bath
(
hron-rade
or
ganotes-bae?
,) and
din of spears
would stand for ‘battle’. My favourite is
brow-stars
for eyes. Eddic and Icelandic bards were very fond of these devices: I suppose modern equivalents would be
iron horse
for train,
chalk face
for the classroom,
fleapit
for cinema,
bunfight
for party,
devil’s dandruff
for cocaine and
Hershey highway
for…well, ask your mother.

Modern prosodists and teachers (perhaps in a tragic and doomed attempt to get young people interested) have described alliterative-accentual verse of this kind as a sort of Old English forerunner of hip-hop. There is no doubt that hip-hop will often favour the four-beat line, as the Blazin’ Squad remind us…

M
e and the
boys
, we’ll be
blazin’
it
up

And certainly MC Hammer’s ‘Let’s Get It Started’ can be said to be formed in perfect hemistichs, two beats to each.

Nobody knows
how a
rapper
really
feels

A
mind
full of
rhymes
, and a
tongue
of
steel

Just
put
on the
Hammer
, and
you
will be
rewarded

My
beat
is ever
boomin
, and you
know
I get it
started

To scan such lyrics in the classical manner would clearly be even more absurd than comparing them to Anglo-Saxon hemistichs, but somewhere between sociology, anthropology, prosody and neuro-linguistics there could be found an answer as to why a four-beat line divided in two has continued to have such resonance for well over a millennium. For our purposes, it can do no harm to be familiar with the feel of the Anglo-Saxon split line. To that end, we come to…

Poetry Exercise 7

Write a piece of verse following the rules above: each half-line to contain two beats, all four following the bang, bang, bang–crash rule (in other words alliteration on the first three beats).

To make it easier, I would suggest finding something very specific to write about. Poetry comes much more easily when concrete thoughts and images are brought to mind. For the sake of this exercise, since it is getting on for lunchtime and I am hungry, I suggest eighteen or twenty lines on the subject of what you would like, and wouldn’t like, to eat right this minute.

Once again, I have scribbled down some drivel to show you that quality is not the point here, just the flexing of your new accentual-alliterative muscles. I have not been able to resist rhyming the last two lines, something entirely unnecessary and, frankly, unacceptable. You will do much better, I know.

Figs are too fussy and fish too dull

I’m quite fond of quince, but I question its point.

Most sushi is salty and somehow too raw

I can’t abide bagels and beans make me fart

There’s something so sad about salmon and dill

And goose eggs and gherkins are ghastlier still.

But cheese smeared with chutney is cheerful enough

So I’ll settle for sandwiches, sliced very thick

The brownest of bread, buttered with love.

A plate of ploughman’s will pleasure me well,

I’ll lunch like a lord, then labour till four

When teacakes and toast will tempt me once more.

Sprung Rhythm

Stress is the life of it.

GMH–letter to Robert Bridges

One single name rises above all others when considering the influence of Anglo-Saxon modalities on modern poetry. Well–three single names, come to think of it…

G
ERARD
M
ANLEY
H
OPKINS

It is possible that you came across this mysterious Jesuit priest’s verse at school and that someone had the dreadful task of trying to explain to you how
sprung rhythm
worked. Relax: it is like Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Only three people in the world understand it, one is dead, the other has gone mad and the third is me, and I have forgotten.

Hopkins was a nineteenth-century English–Welsh poet who developed his own metrics. Calling the system ‘sprung rhythm’, he marked his verse with accents, loops and foot divisions to demonstrate how his stresses should fall. Among his prosodic inventions were such devices as ‘outriders’, ‘roving over’ and ‘hanging stress’: these have their counterparts or at least rough equivalents in the
sain
and
lusg
that make up
cynghanedd
, the sound system of ancient Welsh poetry, which Hopkins had studied deeply. I am not going to go into them here for two simple reasons: firstly, they make my head ache and secondly, I think they would only be usefully covered in a much more detailed book than this aspires to be. If you really want to get to grips with what he was up to, I recommend a library. H is collected letters are available in academic bookshops and university collections; in these he explains to fellow poets like Robert Bridges and Coventry Patmore what he felt he was doing. Personally I find reading his poems a supreme pleasure
unless
I am trying to figure out their underlying metrical schemes.