The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (40 page)

I make my shroud but no one knows,

So shimmering fine it is and fair,

With stitches set in even rows.

I make my shroud but no one knows.

In door-way where the lilac blows,

Humming a little wandering air,

I make my shroud and no one knows,

So shimmering fine it is and fair.

W. E. Henley (on whom Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver) believed triolets were easy and was not afraid to say so. He also clearly thought, if his rhyming is anything to go by, that they were pronounced English-fashion, probably
tree-o-
let
:

EASY
is the Triolet,

If you really learn to make it!

Once a neat refrain you get,

Easy is the Triolet.

As you see!–I pay my debt

With another rhyme. Deuce take it,

Easy is the Triolet,

If you really learn to make it!

They are certainly not easy to master but–as my maudlin attempt suggests, and as Wendy Cope’s ‘Valentine’ rather more stylishly proves–they seem absolutely tailor-made for light love poetry:

My heart has made its mind up

And I’m afraid it’s you.

Whatever you’ve got lined up,

My heart has made its mind up

And if you can’t be signed up

This year, next year will do.

My heart has made its mind up

And I’m afraid it’s you.

One more repeating form to look at before we atrophy.

K
YRIELLE

The chanting of a
KYRIELLE

Tolls like the summons of a bell

To bid us purge our black disgrace.

Lord a-mercy, shut my face.

Upon my knees, I kiss the rod,

Repent and raise this cry to God–

I am a sinner, foul and base

Lord a-mercy, shut my face.

And so I make this plaintive cry:

‘From out my soul, the demons chase

Prostrate before thy feet I lie.’

Lord a-mercy, shut my face.

There is no health or good in me,

Nor in the wretched human race.

Therefore my God I cry to thee.

Lord a-mercy, shut my face.

Let sins be gone without a trace

Lord have mercy, shut my face.

You’ve heard my pleas, I rest my case.

Lord have mercy! Shut my face.

The name and character of the
KYRIELLE
derive from the Mass, whose wail of
Kyrie eleison
!–‘Lord, have mercy upon us’–is a familiar element. For those of us not brought up in Romish ways it is to be heard in the great requiems and other masses of the classical repertoire.

The final line of every stanza is the same, indeed
rime en kyrielle
is an alternative name for repeated lines in any style of poetry. Most examples of the kyrielle to be found in English are written, as mine is, in iambic tetrameter. As I have tried to demonstrate, quatrains of
aabB
and
abaB
or couplets of
aA, aA
are all equally acceptable. There is no set length. The Elizabethan songwriter and poet Thomas (‘Cherry Ripe’) Campion wrote a ‘Lenten Hymn’ very much in the spirit, as well as the letter, of the kyrielle:

With broken heart and contrite sigh,

A trembling sinner, Lord, I cry:

Thy pard’ning grace is rich and free:

O God, be merciful to me.

I smite upon my troubled breast,

With deep and conscious guilt opprest,

Christ and His cross my only plea:

O God, be merciful to me.

Incidentally, many kyrielles were written in 1666. Not just to apologise to God for being so sinful and tasteless as to perish in plague and fire, but because numbers were considered important and the Roman numerals in ‘
L
or
D
ha
V
e
M
er
CI
e
V
pon
V
s’ add up to 1666: this is called a
CHRONOGRAM
.

The kyrielle need not exhibit agonised apology and tortured pleas for mercy, however. The late Victorian John Payne managed to be a little less breast-beating in his ‘Kyrielle’ as well as demonstrating the scope for
slight
variation in the repeat:

A lark in the mesh of the tangled vine,

A bee that drowns in the flower-cup’s wine,

A fly in sunshine,–such is the man.

All things must end, as all began.

A little pain, a little pleasure,

A little heaping up of treasure;

Then no more gazing upon the sun.

All things must end that have begun.

Where is the time for hope or doubt?

A puff of the wind, and life is out;

A turn of the wheel, and rest is won.

All things must end that have begun.

Golden morning and purple night,

Life that fails with the failing light;

Death is the only deathless one.

All things must end that have begun

Well,
haven’t
we learned a lot! Bags of French forms beginning with ‘r’ that repeat their lines
en kyrielle
. To be honest, you could call them all rondeaux and only a pedant would pull you up on it. It is not too complicated a matter to invent your own form, a regular pattern of refrains is all it takes. You could call it a
rondolina
or
rondismo
or a
boundelay
or whatever you fancied. Destiny and a place in poetic history beckon.

Poetry Exercise 16

Your
FIRST
task is to write a less emetic triolet than mine for your true love, as sweet without being sickly as you can make it, your
SECOND
to compose a
RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ
on any subject you please.

VIII

Comic Verse

The cento–the limerick and the clerihew–reflections on comic verse, light verse and parody

C
ENTO

Wordsworth Comes Out

My heart leaps up when I behold

The pansy at my feet;

Ingenuous, innocent and bold

Beside a mossy seat.

For oft when on my couch I lie

Upon the growing boy,

A little Cyclops with one eye

Will dwell with me–to heighten joy.

C
ENTOS
are cannibalised verse, collage poems whose individual lines are made up of fragments of other poetry. Often each line will be from the same poet. The result is a kind of enforced self-parody. In mine above, all the lines are culled from different poems by Wordsworth. Ian Patterson has produced some corkers. Here are two, one from A. E. Housman, the other a cento stitched from Shakespeare sonnets. Just to emphasise the point:
all
the lines are genuine lines from the poet in question, panels torn from their own work to make a new quilt. First, his Housman Cento:

The happy highways where I went

Warm with the blood of lads I know

Have willed more mischief than they durst

A hundred years ago.

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover

Safe through jostling markets borne;

The nettle nods, the wind blows over,

With hurts not mine to mourn.

When you and I are spilt on air,

What’s to show for all my pain?

Duty, friendship, bravery o’er,

And Ludlow fair again.

Extraordinary how much sense it seems to make. This is Patterson’s Shakespeare Cento:

When in the chronicles of wasted time

That thy unkindness lays upon my heart,

Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime

To guard the lawful reasons on thy part,

My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie

The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,

And scarcely greet me with that sun thine eye

To change your day of youth to sullen night,

Then in the number let me pass untold

So that myself bring water for my stain,

That poor retention could not so much hold

Knowing thy heart torment me in disdain:

O cunning love, with tears thou keep’st me blind,
Since I left you my eye is in my mind.

They are, I suppose, no more than a game, but one which can be surprisingly revealing. If nothing else, they provide a harmlessly productive way of getting to know a particular poet’s way with phrase and form. Centos that mix completely dissimilar poets’ lines are another harmless kind of comic invention.

T
HE
C
LERIHEW

E
LIZABETH
B
ARRETT

Was kept in a garret.

Her father resented it bitterly

When Robert Browning took her to Italy.

A
LFRED
, L
ORD
T
ENNYSON

Preferred Victoria Sponge to venison.

His motto was ‘Regina semper floreat’

And that’s how he became Poet Laureate.

O
SCAR
W
ILDE

Had his reputation defiled.

When he was led from the dock in tears

He said ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking
at two years.’

D. H. L
AWRENCE

Held flies in abhorrence.

He once wrote a verse graffito

Deploring the humble mosquito.

T
ED
H
UGHES

Had a very short fuse.

What prompted his wrath

Was being asked about Sylvia Plath.

The
CLERIHEW
is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, father of Nicolas, that peerless illustrator who always signed his work ‘Nicolas Bentley Drew the pictures’. The rules state that clerihews be non-metrically written in two couplets, the first of which is to be a proper name and nothing else. The best-known originals include:

Christopher Wren

Said ‘I am going to dine with some men,

‘If anyone calls

Say I am designing St Paul’s.’

Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having discovered sodium.

John Stuart Mill,

By a mighty effort of will,

Overcame his natural bonhomie

And wrote ‘Principles of Economy’.

Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum; indeed, it is considered extremely bad form for a clerihew to scan. Properly done, they should tell some biographical truth, obvious or otherwise, about their subject, rather than be sheer nonsense. Sir Humphrey’s dislike of gravy, for example, may well be whimsical tosh, but he did discover sodium: I have tried to cleave to this requirement in my clerihews on the poets. Clerihews have therefore some utility as biographical mnemonics.

T
HE
L
IMERICK

There was a middle-aged writer called Fry

Whose book on verse was a lie.

For
The Ode Less Travelled

Soon unravelled

To reveal some serious errors in its scansion and rhy…

Unlike clerihews,
LIMERICKS
, as we discovered when considering their true metrical nature (we decided they were anapaestic, if you recall), do and must scan. I am sure you need to be told little else about them. The name is said to come from a boozy tavern chorus ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’. Although they are popularly associated with Edward Lear, anonymous verses in the ‘There was an old woman of…’ formulation pre-dated him by many years: