The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (28 page)

Hussar
is a bummer, only para-rhymes seem to fit:
bizarre, beaux arts, faux pas, disbar, ajar, papa
and
hurrah
might do at a pinch, but they hardly promise suitably solemn material; besides, the plural
Hussars
excludes at least half of them.
Lancers
is OK:
dancers, prancers, answers
–some suggestive possibilities there.
Dragoons
is if anything worse than Hussars:
lagoons
seems to be the only proper rhyme, the slant-rhyme
racoon
is unlikely to come in handy, nor are
jejune, cartoon
and
baboon
, one feels.
Brigade
is better, much better.
Made, invade, fade, raid, dismayed, laid
, all words that might offer some connection with the subject matter.
Russian
? There’s
Prussian
which is of no relevance, otherwise there are only bad para-rhymes available,
hushin’, cushion, pushin’
.
Horses
gives the rather obvious
forces
and
courses
, while
steeds
offers
deeds
…

Off on their galloping steeds

Praise for their marvellous deeds…

Hmmm…bit lame. Rhymes for
guns
might come in handy.
Buns, runs, sons, Huns
(shame the enemy are Ruskies),
stuns, shuns
? Hm, come back to that later.
Six hundred and seventy three
is simply too long: a whole three-beat line used up.

Six hundred and seventy-three

Charging to victory!

Only it isn’t a victory–it is a terrible defeat.

Six hundred and seventy-three

Charging for Queen and Country!

Oh what a wonder to see,

Marvellous gallantry

Six hundred and seventy-three!

This is
dreadful
. Six hundred and seventy-three sounds too perky and too literal at the same time. Should we round it up or down? Six hundred or seven hundred?
Hundred
doesn’t rhyme with much though–oh, hang on, there are some
good
slant-rhymes here:
thundered, sundered, blundered, wondered, onward
.

Onward, Light Brigade, Onward

Onward you splendid six-hundred.

‘There are the guns to raid,

Charge them,’ brave Nolan said.

On rode the Light Brigade,

Not knowing that Nolan had blundered!

It is getting there. The accidental consonance/assonance of knowing/Nolan is inelegant. But a bit of a polish and who knows?

Your turn now. See if you can come up with some phrases with that metre and those rhyme words, or ones close to them.

Well, as you probably know, Tennyson did
not
retire from his laureateship and this is what he came up with to mark the calamity.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Their’s not to make reply,

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made,

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

Naturally, I cannot tell how Tennyson embarked upon the preparation and composition of his poem. Quite possibly he charged (as it were) straight in. Maybe the rhythm and some of the phrasing came to him in the bath or while walking. It is possible that he made notes not unlike those we’ve just made or that the work emerged whole in one immediate and perfect Mozartian stream. We shall never know. What we can agree upon I hope, is that the rhyming is perfect.
Shell/hell, brigade/made/dismayed
and the
wondered/blundered, thundered/sundered, hundred/onward
group work together superbly. A small nucleus of rhyming words like this throughout one poem can set up a pattern of expectation in the listener’s or reader’s ear. ‘Thundered’ is close to
onomatopoeic
, it seems somehow more than just descriptive of thunder, it actually seems to mimic it–and those thunderous qualities are in turn passed on to its rhyme-partners, lending a power and force to
wondered
and
hundred
that they would not otherwise possess. The
rhyming
, quite as much as the rhythm, helps generate all the pity, pride and excitement for which the poem is renowned.

We do know that in writing this Tennyson created a rod for the back of all subsequent British Poets Laureate who have struggled in vain to come up with anything that so perfectly captures an important moment in the nation’s history. It was perhaps the last great Public Poem written in England, the verse equivalent of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

It is a hoary old warhorse to our ears now I suppose, as much as a result of social change as literary. Most modern readers, academic, poetic or amateur, would probably feel that Hopkins and Hardy engage our sensibilities more directly than Tennyson, in the same way that–for all their technical mastery–we are less moved by the painters of the mid-Victorian period than by the later impressionists and post-impressionists. Nonetheless, there is always much to be learned from virtuosity and I disbelieve any poet who does not confess that he would give even unto half his wealth to have come up with ‘Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die’. We should recognise that Tennyson’s is a poem written for the nation while the Hopkins and Hardy are essentially inward looking. Indeed, ‘The Wreck of the
Deutschland
’ is much more an autobiographical contemplation of the poet’s religious development than a commemoration of a shipwreck.

Whatever our feelings we can surely acknowledge that Tennyson’s versifying is magnificent. It is pleasingly typical, at all events, that this, the best-known poem we have on a military theme, memorialises failure. There are no stirring odes celebrating Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar or the Battle of Britain in our popular anthologies. No English verse equivalent of the
1812 Overture
for us to cheer at and weep over. Earlier on the morning of that same October day in 1854, on the same Crimean battlefield, the Heavy Brigade had fought a supremely
successful
battle during which more men died than in the later disaster, they were just as gallant but
their
heroism goes unremembered.
¹¹
Misfortune, failure and incompetence remain our great themes. It is probable that without the poem the Light Brigade’s futile charge would have vanished into history. Among the many books on the subject there are works whose titles and subtitles include: ‘Honour the Charge they Made’, ‘Noble Six Hundred’, ‘Do or Die’, ‘Into the Valley of Death’, ‘The Reason Why’, ‘The Real Reason Why’ and ‘Someone Had Blundered’. Not many poems that I can think of can have so completely caught the public attention or for ever defined our understanding of an historical event. Anyway, I hope I have convinced you that in great part, it is the rhyming that has contributed to this immortality. Tennyson’s discovery of the
hundred/blundered wondered/thundered
group is the heart of the poem, its engine.

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail. I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming. Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words. It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting ‘ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace…’ when surely a proper poet should be thinking high, pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus. Well, yes. But a rhyme is a rhyme and won’t come unless searched for. Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme. To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas. It is one of the things we
do
.

Rhyming Practice

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things.

G
ERTRUDE
S
TEIN

On that head. Should you use a rhyming dictionary? I must confess that I do, but only as a last resort. They can be frustrating and cumbersome, they can break concentration, they offer no help with assonance or consonance rhymes and are too crammed with irrelevant words like
multicollinearity
and
cordwainer
and
eutectic
(something to do with melting points apparently) or types of Malayan cheese and Albanian nose-flutes which are never going to be of the least use to one’s poetry. I prefer first simply to chant the sound to myself in the rhythm the word needs to fit. If that doesn’t bear fruit I will write all the letters of the alphabet at the top of a page and then go through the permutations one by one. It is easy enough to find monosyllabic masculine rhymes, they get harder to pop into your mind when you try to think of their compound versions, the various syllables that can precede the word. For
boy
, words like
joy, toy, soy, cloy, coy, ploy
slip into the mind quite quickly.
Employ, deploy, alloy, annoy, destroy
and
enjoy
might take a little longer.
Decoy
and
convoy
have just occurred to me (although they would need careful use as there is a little more stress on their first syllables) and now I am going to turn to the dictionary. Hm. I’ve missed
buoy
, but that’s a silly rich-rhyme (besides, it doesn’t rhyme for Americans, who pronounce it
boo-ey
).
McCoy
is there (as in ‘the real’ I suppose),
Hanoi, savoy
and
bok choi
(strange to find two different types of cabbage).
Envoy,
c
arboy, borzoi
and
viceroy
are there, though I would argue that they are usually stressed on their first syllable. There are compounds of words we have already found:
redeploy
and
overjoy
. I’m
very
cross that I failed to find
corduroy
for myself and I would like to think that given enough time
saveloy, hobbledehoy
and
hoi polloi
might have come to me unaided. The assonance rhymes
void, Lloyd, Freud, hoik, foil
and so on are naturally not shown. By all means invest in a good rhyming dictionary, there are several available from the usual publishing houses and they are all much the same so far as I can tell. If it is musical lyrics you are thinking of then I would recommend Sammy Cahn’s
The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary
; the lyricist who gave us ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’ is full of excellent and affable advice. There is no index, however, so it will take a bit of getting used to. There are also software rhyming dictionaries available either as stand-alone applications or as online resources. Personally I feel that a poet’s words are better mumbled out or scribbled on paper. Words have colour, feel, texture, density, shape, weight and personality, they are–I have said this before–all we have. Deeply dippy about most things digital I may be, but when it comes to poetry I want the words to have been uttered with my breath and shaped by my hand
¹²
I am writing this now on my computer, but even the most frivolous sample lines of verse I have composed for you have been sketched on paper first. You may feel differently and no doubt some reader yet unborn who chances upon this book in an antiquarian bookshop of the future will marvel at such distinctions. I send you greetings from the grave: I do trust the sun hasn’t exploded yet and that
The Archers
is still running.

Poetry Exercise 10

Your task now is to discover as many rhymes as you can for the word
girl
(my rhyming dictionary offers twenty-four, many of which are absurd dialect words). As many syllables as you like, but obviously it is a masculine rhyme so the ‘url’ sound will terminate each word you find. When you’ve done that, you have to do the same for the feminine-rhyming
martyr
(the dictionary offers twenty-eight, many of which are again farcically weird). This is not Scrabble: proper nouns, place names, foreign words and informal language of any description all count. Ten for each would be an excellent score, but don’t worry if you can’t manage it. Facility and speed in the hunting down of rhyme-words is hardly a sign of poetic genius.