The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (22 page)

Here is one of his best-known works ‘Pied Beauty’. Y
OU ARE

STILL READING OUT LOUD AREN’ T YOU
? G
OOD.

G
LORY
be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ as he himself wrote of the windhover. I am sure you have seen that most of the words are Anglo-Saxon in origin, very few Latinate words there at all (
counter, original, colour
and
trout
are the only ones I am sure of ), the alliteration is fierce throughout, though not in the strict bang, bang, bang–crash! form we saw in Langland. You probably don’t need to count syllables to be able to tell that there is no standard metric regularity here. His own accents on ‘áll trádes’ reveal the importance he places on stress and the unusual nature of its disposition.

Now read out the opening of ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’. The endearing title refers to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who believed that impermanence, the perpetual flux of all nature, is central to our understanding of existence and that clouds, air, earth and fire constantly transmute one into the other. The language again is almost entirely Anglo-Saxon in derivation. Hopkins uses virgules to mark the long lines for us into hemistichs.

C
LOUD PUFFBALL
, torn tufts, tossed pillows| flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven roisterers, in gay-gangs| they throng; they glitter in marches,

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash,| wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long| lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Essentially his technique was all about
compression
: sprung rhythm squeezes out weak or ‘slack’ syllables and condenses the strong stresses, one to each foot. ‘Sprung rhythm makes verse stressy,’ he wrote to his brother Everard, ‘it purges it to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm, as poetry in general is brighter than common speech.’

Writing to Bridges of his poem ‘The Eurydice’ he said this: ‘you must not slovenly read it with the eyes but with your ears as if the paper were declaiming it at you. For instance the line “she had come from a cruise training seamen” read without stress is mere Lloyds Shipping Intelligence; properly read it is quite a different story.
Stress is the life of it
.’ My italics, my
stress
.

The manner was designed to create an outward, poetic form (‘instress’) that mirrored what he saw as the ‘inscape’ of the world. He said in a letter to Patmore that stress is ‘the making of a thing more, or making it markedly, what it already is; it is the bringing out its nature’. His sense of instress and inscape is not unlike the medieval idea of haecceity or ‘thisness’
³⁵
and the later, modernist obsession with quiddity (‘whatness’). If such exquisite words are leaving you all of a doo-dah, it is worth remembering that for those of us with a high doctrine of poetry, the art is precisely concerned with precision, exactly about the exact, fundamentally found in the fundamental, concretely concrete, radically rooted in the thisness and whatness of everything. Poets, like painters, look hard for the exact nature of things and feelings, what they really, really are. Just as painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to move their form on, tried to find new ways to represent the ‘concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’ that T. E. Hulme saw as reality, so Hopkins attempted to create a prosodic scheme that went beyond the calm, regular certainties of iambs and anapaests (‘running rhythm’ as he called traditional metrics) in order to find a system that mirrored the (for him) overwhelming complexity, density and richness of nature. How they mocked Cézanne and Matisse for their pretension and oddity, yet how truthful to us their representations of nature now seem. The idiosyncrasy of Hopkins is likewise apparent, yet who can argue with such a concrete realisation of the skies? ‘Cloud puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows…’ The density and relentless energy of his stresses and word-yokings are his way of relaying to us the density and relentless energy of experience. There is nothing ‘primitivist’, ‘folksy’ or ‘naïve’ in Hopkins’s appropriation of indigenous, pre-Renaissance poetics, his verse strikes our ear as powerfully modern, complex and tense. ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness,’ he wrote to Bridges in 1879. ‘It is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’

One more excerpt, this time from ‘The Caged Skylark’, which, as you will see, refers to
us
more than to the bird:

As a
dare
-gale
sky
lark
scant
ed in a dull
cage

Man’s
mounting spirit in his
bone
-house,
mean
house,
dwells
.

How different from Blake’s Robin Red breast in
its
cage…

Five of those twenty-four syllables are slack and squeezed into the lightest of scudding trips (in order:
a, -ed, a, -it, his
), while the
in
of both lines takes fractionally more push. The others, with varying degrees of weight that you might like to decide upon, are stressed: I have emboldened the words that seem to me to take the primary stress, but I could well be wrong. Incidentally, ‘bone-house’ to mean ‘body’ is an example of a kenning: it doesn’t take too much to see that the adjectival ‘dare-gale’ could easily cross over into another kenning too.

All of which demonstrates, I hope, the way in which Hopkins backwards-leapfrogged the Romantics, the Augustans (Pope, Dryden et al.), Shakespeare, Milton and even Chaucer, to forge a distinct poetics of
stress metre
from the ancient verse of the Welsh, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon traditions. In turn, many British twentieth-century poets looked back the shorter distance to Hopkins, over the shoulders of Eliot, Pound and Yeats. I find it hard to read much of Ted Hughes, for example, without hearing Hopkins’s distinct music. Here are two fragments from ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’ for you to recite to yourself.

They clatter

Over worthless moraines, tossing

Their Ancient Briton draggle-tassel sheepskins

Or pose, in the rain-smoke, like warriors–…

This lightning-broken huddle of summits

This god-of-what-nobody-wants

Or this, from ‘Eagle’:

The huddle-shawled lightning-faced warrior

Stamps his shaggy-trousered dance

On an altar of blood.

Certainly the sensibility is different: Hopkins is all wonderment, worship, dazzle and delight, where Hughes is often (but certainly not always) in a big mood: filled with disgust, doubt and granite contempt. Nonetheless, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the generally four-stressed split line and use of alliteration and other ‘echoic’ devices (we’ll come to them in a later chapter) reveal much common ground. Many modern British poets show the influence of ancient forms filtered through Hopkins. We’ve already met this perfect Langlandian line from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

On a bleak background of bald stone.

From the same poem comes this:

the leaves’

Intricate filigree falls, and who shall renew

Its brisk pattern?

We feel a faint echo of Hopkins there, I think, for all that it is more controlled and syntactically conventional. I am not denying the individuality of Hughes or Thomas: the point is that Hopkins cleared a pathway that had long been overgrown, a pathway that in the twentieth century became something of a well-trodden thoroughfare, almost a thronging concourse. Hopkins himself said in a letter to Bridges in 1888 after he had just completed the ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, inspired as it was by the distillation ‘of a great deal of early philosophical thought’:

…the liquor of the distillation did not taste very Greek, did it? The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.

I have taken a little time over the style, purpose and influence of Hopkins because his oppo, as you might say, Walt Whitman–very different man, but so alike too–was busy in America tearing up the prosodic manuals round about the time Hopkins was experimenting with his sprung rhythms.

Whitman is considered by many to be the father of English language
free verse
³⁶
: verse without traditional patterning, stanza form, rhyme, metre, syllabic count or regular accentuation. Since such verse is beyond the reach and aim of this book, much of the pleasures of Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, the American ‘Open Field’ School and Whitman
³⁷
himself (and very real pleasures they are) will not be looked at here. As I have already said, I do not look down on free verse at all: I admire the poet who can master it.

There are two kingdoms of life: Flora and Fauna. In the natural history of poetry there are likewise two kingdoms: there is the kingdom of Accentual-Syllabic Verse and there is the kingdom of Accentual Verse.

Hang on a mo…

There are actually
three
kingdoms in the natural world–we have forgotten the kingdom of
Fungi.
And likewise there is a third kingdom of Poetry: the Kingdom of
Syllabic
verse.

VI

Syllabic Verse

These three then:

• A
  accentual-syllabic verse
  —the number of syllables and stresses in a line is fixed.
  
• B
  accentual verse
  —the number of stresses in a line is fixed, but the number of syllables varies (includes
  alliterative-accentual
  verse).
  
• C
  syllabic verse
  —the number of syllables in a line is fixed, but the number of stresses varies.
  
• A Meters and feet—iambs, pentameters, trochees, tetrameters and so on.
  
• B Anglo-Saxon four-stress verse—Hopkins and much song, ballad, folk, hip-hop and nursery rhyme forms.
  
• C ??
  

We have spent a fair amount of time looking at categories A and B but C remains unexplored.

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress
at all
? What is the
point
?

Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it. Much syllabic verse is from other linguistic cultures than our own. Perhaps the best known is the Japanese
haiku
which, as you may already know, is a three-line verse of five, seven and five syllables. In Japanese this syllable count is imperative and the form contains other rules which we can examine (as well as seeing whether it is feasible to write haikus in the strict Japanese manner in English) in the chapter on Verse Forms. The Tagalog
tanaga
is another such syllabic measured verse-form. Japanese and Tagalog
³⁸
are syllable-timed languages
³⁹
as are Spanish and many others European and worldwide. English, however, is
stress
-timed. What this means is beyond the scope of this book (or my poor grasp of phono-linguistics) but the upshot is that while verse ordered by syllabic count is popular in many other cultures, and indeed is often the norm, it is a rarity in English, since the lack of equal spacing between syllables in our stress-timed utterance renders such elaborate schemes very different from the foreign mode. They will never carry the
music
that native speakers of syllable-timed languages find in their syllabic verse, the English type involves a mostly visual engagement with the reader, sometimes resulting in a kind of
concrete
or
shaped
poetry. The moment a poet writing in this manner tries to arrange the stress–
voilà!
–we arrive back where we started at accentual-syllabic verse and our good friend the metric foot.

Nonetheless English-language poets have tried to write syllabic verse. The history of it may be stated briefly: with the exception of a few Elizabethan examples the mode did not come into prominence until Hopkins’s friend Robert Bridges wrote extensively on the subject and in the manner–including his unreadable ‘The Testament of Beauty’, five thousand lines of twelve-syllable tedium.
⁴⁰
His daughter Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977) took up the standard and wrote many syllabic poems, usually in lines of equal syllabic count, managing artfully to avoid iambic or any other regular stress patterns, as in the decasyllabic ‘Still Life’, a poem published in 1936:

Through the open French window the warm sun

lights up the polished breakfast table, laid

round a bowl of crimson roses, for one–

a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed

near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot

rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,