The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (31 page)

Whose coils, caressing with sublime conceit,

Engirdle and embrace each separate line:

But Spenser, with an extra final beat,

Unsnakelike ends his verse on hexametric feet.

An open form whose qualities have appealed to few in recent times is the S
PENSERIAN
S
TANZA
, which Edmund Spenser developed from the ottava rima of Tasso and Ariosto for his epic,
The Faerie Queen
. But you never know, it might be the very structure you have been looking for all these years. The rhyme-scheme is seen to be
ababbcbcc
, and is cast in eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by an iambic alexandrine. Byron used the form in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, and Keats in ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:

Saint Agnes’ Eve–Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told

His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Clive James is one of the few poets I know to have made something new and comic of the Spenserian Stanza: his epistolary verse to friends published in his collection
Other Passports
contains some virtuoso examples, well worth looking at if you are thinking of trying the form: it includes the excellent admonitory alexandrine, ‘You can’t just arse around for ever having fun.’ Martin Amis, to whom the verse was written, certainly took the advice, as we know. I am aware of few modern serious poems in the form, the last significant work appearing to be Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, although Cambridge University offers an annual
⁵
Spenserian Stanza Competition open to all comers of any age or fighting weight, which ‘fosters and recognizes student excellence in the writing of Spenserian stanzas’ and is sponsored by the International Spenser Society, no less. The past winners appear to have written theirs very much in the style of Spenser himself, complete with phalanxes of recondite archaic Spenserian words and syntax, rather than to have exhibited any interest in demonstrating the form’s fitness for modern use, which seems a pity.

A
DOPTING AND
A
DAPTING

Other stanzaic forms are mentioned in the Glossary, the V
ENUS AND
A
DONIS
S
TANZA
, for example. Of course it remains your decision as to how you divide your verse: into general quatrains or tercets and so on, or into more formal stanzaic arrangements such as ottava rima or ruba’iat, or any self-invented form you choose. Ted Hughes wrote his poem ‘Thistles’ in four stanzas of three-line verse. Tercets, if one wishes to call them that, but very much his own form for his own poem.

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistles spike the summer air

Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst

Of resurrection, a grasped fistful

Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decaying Viking.

They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.

Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey, like men.

Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,

Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

You may think that this is arbitrary–enjambment between stanzas two and three shows that each does not wholly contain its own thought. Hughes is following no closed or open form, why then should he bother to set his verse in stanzas at all? Why not one continuous clump of lines? All kinds of neat arguments could be made about the poem itself needing, as the ground does, to fight the random aggression of its thistling, bristling words, to be farmed; then again, maybe four stanzas reflect the four seasons of the thistles’ birth, flourishing, death and rebirth; or one might think the stanzas in their short definitive shape chime with the plainly laid down statements Hughes makes, but I do not think such sophistry, even when it convinces, is necessary. We see, we feel, we know that the layout is just plain
right
. Imagine the same lines in one group:
something
is lost. Perhaps Hughes wrote it as a single stream of lines and then realised that they needed arrangement into four groups of three much as an artist might realise that he needs to regroup his landscape, rubbing out a tree in the background, foregrounding that clump of bushes, moving the church spire to the right and so on. The artist does not consult a book on composition or apply absolutely set rules learned at art school, he just feels, he just
knows
. Experience and openness, instinct and a feel for order, these are not taught, but they are not entirely inborn either. Reading, preparation, concentration and a poetic eye that is every bit as attuned as a poetic ear all contribute to the craftsmanship, the poetic skill that might, in time, make such judgements second nature.

If, then, you wish to use your own stanzas, rhyming or not, organised in traditional or personal ways, allow yourself to feel that same sense of composition and rightness, just as you might when arranging knick-knacks and invitations on a mantelpiece or designing a birthday card. It is not a question of right and wrong, but nor is it a question of anything goes. Incidentally, do allow yourself to enjoy Hughes’s use of the word ‘fistful’–a fabulous consonantal
and
assonantal play on ‘thistle’, rhyming back to the first word of the second line. Is it not
divine
?

An open quatrain form whose qualities are
sui generis
enough to deserve a whole section on its own is the
ballad
. It is our next stop–once the following exercise is done.

Poetry Exercise 11

As you can see I have headed each section above with my own attempts to describe each stanza form under discussion in its own dress. Your exercise is to do the same
but better
. I look forward to bumping into you one day in the street or on a train and hearing you recite to me in triumphal tones your self-referential rhymes royal and auto-descriptive Ruba’iyat.

III

The Ballad

In fours and threes and threes and fours

The
BALLAD
beats its drum:

‘The Ancient Mariner’ of course

Remains the exemplum.

With manly eights (or female nines)

You are allowed if ’tis your pleasure,

To stretch the length to equal lines

And make a ballad of
LONG MEASURE
.

Well, what more need a poet know?

In technical prosodic parlance we could say that most ballads present in
quatrains of alternate cross-rhymed iambic tetrameter and trimeter
. However, since the ballad is a swinging, popular form derived from song and folk traditions it is much better described as a form that comes in four-line verses, usually alternating between four and three beats to line. The word comes from
ballare
, the Italian for ‘to dance’ (same root as ballet, ballerina and ball).

The ballad’s irresistible lilt is familiar to us in everything from nursery rhymes to rugby songs. We know it as soon as we hear it, the shape and the rhythm seem inborn:

There’s nothing like a ballad song

For lightening the load–

I’ll chant the buggers all day long

Until my tits explode.

A sweetly warbled ballad verse

Will never flag or tire

I sing ’em loud for best or worse

Though both my balls catch fire.

I’ll roar my ballads loud and gruff,

Like a lion in the zoo

And if I sing ’em loud enough

’Twill tear my arse in two.

Or whatever. Old-fashioned inversions, expletives (both the rude kind
and
the kind that fill out the metre) and other such archaic tricks considered inadmissible or old-fashioned in serious poetry suit the folksy nature of ballad. The ballad is pub poetry, it is naughty and nautical, crude and carefree. Its elbows are always on the table, it never lowers the seat for ladies after it’s been or covers its mouth when it burps. It can be macabre, brutal, sinister, preachy, ghostly, doom-laden, lurid, erotic, mock-solemn, facetious, pious or obscene–sometimes it exhibits all of those qualities at once. Its voice is often that of the club bore, the drunken rogue, the music hall entertainer or the campfire strummer. It has little interest in descriptions of landscape or the psychology of the individual. Chief among its virtues is a keen passion to tell you a story: it will grab you by the lapels, stare you in the eyes and plunge right in:

Now gather round and let me tell

The tale of Danny Wise:

And how his sweet wife Annabelle

Did suck out both his eyes.

And if I tell the story true

And if I tell it clear,

There’s not a mortal one of you

Won’t shriek in mortal fear.

How could we not want to know more? Did she
really
suck them out? Was Danny Wise
asleep
? Was Annabelle a witch? How did it all turn out? Did he get his revenge? Is the teller of the tale poor Danny himself? Sadly, I have no idea because the rest of it hasn’t come to me yet.

While the second and fourth lines should rhyme, the first and third do not need to, it is up to the balladeer to choose,
abab
or
abcb
: nor is any regularity or consistency in your rhyme-scheme required throughout, as this popular old ballad demonstrates:

In Scarlet Town, where I was born,

There was a fair maid
dwellin’

Made every lad cry wellaway,

And her name was Barbara
Allen
.

All in the merry month of
May
,

When green buds they were
swellin’
,

Young Jemmy Grove on his deathbed
lay
,

For love of Barbara
Allen
.

A quatrain is by no means compulsory, a six-line stanza is commonly found, rhyming
xbxbxb
, as in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and Wilde’s
Ballad of Reading Gaol
.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Were walking close at
hand
:

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of
sand
:

‘If this were only cleared away,’

They said, ‘it would be
grand
.’

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be
heard
,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering
word
,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a
sword
!

Although more ‘literary’ examples may favour a regular accentual-
syllabic
measure, ballads are perfect examples of accentual verse: it doesn’t matter how many
syllables
there are, it is the beats that matter. Here is Marriot Edgar’s ‘Albert and the Lion’, which was written as a comic monologue to be recited to a background piano that plunks down its chords on the beats of each four-or three-stress line. Part of the pleasure of this style of ballad is the mad scudding rush of
un
accented syllables, the pausing, the accelerations and decelerations: when Stanley Holloway performed this piece, the audience started to laugh simply at his
timing
of the rhythm. I have marked with underlines the syllables that might receive a little extra push if required: it is usually up to the performer. Recite it as you read.

There’s a
fam
ous seaside place called
Black
pool,

That’s
noted
for
fresh
-air and
fun
,

And
Mr
and
Mrs
Rams
bot
tom

Went
there with young
Al
bert, their
son
.

A
grand
little
lad
was their
Al
bert

All
dressed
in his
best
; quite a
swell

’E’d a
stick
with an
’ors
e’s ’ead
’and
le

The
fin
est that
Wool
worths could
sell
.