The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (52 page)

tetractys
Bizarre form of syllabic verse developed by Mr Stebbing.

tetrameter
A four-stress line.

transferred epithet
Illogical (often comic) use of image, transferring meaning from mood of person to object: ‘I lit a moody cigarette’, ‘sad elms’ etc.

triad, triadic
The three-part structure of Pindaric Odes. Each triad consists of
strophe, antistrophe
and
epode
or
turn, counter-turn
and
stand
as Ben Jonson dubbed them. Originated as actual physical movements in Greek choric dances.

tribrach
Ternary unit of three unstressed syllables. Forget it.

trimeter
A three-stress line.

triolet
A closed French form of some sweetness. Or perhaps it’s just the name. It rhymes
ABaAbbAB
where
A
and
B
are
rentrements
.

triple rhyme
Tri-syllabic (usually dactylic) rhyme,
merited/inherited, eternal/infernal, merrier/terrier
etc.

triplet
Three-line couplet,
aaa
,
bbb
etc. Augustan poets braced them in a curly bracket.

trochee
A binary metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables:

.

trope
Any rhetorical or poetic trick, device or figure of speech that changes the literal meaning of words.
Metaphor
and other common figures are tropes.

tumbling verse
See
Skeltonics.

turn
Ben Jonson’s word for a
strophe
.

twiner
Term used by Walter de la Mare to describe a kind of double limerick form.

ubi sunt
Lit. ‘where are they?’ Poetic formula addressing something vanished: ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ (Keats, ‘Ode to Autumn’),
‘Où sont les neiges d’antan
? Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ (Ballade by François Villon).

vatic
A poetic prophecy.

Venus and Adonis Stanza
A six-line stanzaic form of iambic pentameter that takes its name from Shakespeare’s
Venus and Adonis
. It rhymes
ababcc
. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ etc.

vers libre
French for free verse.

vignette
In poetry, a delicate but precise scene or description.

villanelle
See section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

virgule
In metrics, the mark used for foot division.

volta
The ‘turn’ marking the change of mood or thought between the (Petrarchan) sonnet’s
octave
and
sestet
q.q.v.

Vorticism
Word coined by Pound for British phalanx of the modernist movement. Most often used to refer to work (in paint and verse) of Wyndham Lewis. They had their own fanzine–
Blast!.
Rejection of sentimentality and verbal profusion.

waka
Original Japanese verse from which
haikai
and
haiku
descended.

weak ending
See
feminine ending
, but take no offence therefrom.

wrenched accent
Sound and sense of words vitiated by the need for them to fit the metre.

wrenched rhyme
A word forced out of its natural pronunciation by its need to rhyme.

wretched rhyme
Bad rhyme.

wretched sinner
Me.

zeugma
Lit. ‘yoking’: ‘she wore a Chanel dress and an expression of disappointment’. Essentially the same as
syllepsis
q.v. The differences between them are trivial and undecided.

zymurgy
Word that always tries to get into glossaries and dictionaries last but is often beaten by
zythum
, which, ironically perhaps, it helps create. Something to do with fermentation. More connected to Yeast than Yeats.

zythum
Ancient Egyptian beer.

APPENDIX

Arnaut’s Algorithm

The line-ends of the first stanza (A, B, C, D, E and F) are chosen for the second and subsequent stanzas according to a ‘spiral’ algorithm illustrated in Figure 1. It can be seen that the position and relative order of the line ending alters in a complex manner from stanza to stanza.

Figure 1: The ‘spiral’ algorithm

Consider line-end A: it moves down one line for the second stanza and then down two lines for the third stanza, down one line again for the fourth stanza and so on. The algorithm can therefore be considered as the sequence of displacements from the starting position, namely, +1; +2; +1,–2; +3;–5. The last displacement returns the first line-end (A) from the last line of the last stanza to the starting position.

Defining the sequence of translations as
a
we see that:

How do the other line-ends behave after six iterations? Well, consider the situation after the first iteration; line-end A now occupies the position previously occupied by line-end B. Now carry out six iterations, namely +2; +1;–2; +3;–5 and finally the first of the next cycle: +1. This sequence also sums to zero, meaning that the line-end returns to where it was. In general therefore we can say for all line ends in the first stanza corresponding to the position of line-end A after interation
m
;

which proves that the entire set of line-ends returns to the original position and order after a full cycle of six iterations, or in other words a seventh stanza would be identical (in respect of line-ends) to the first.

Acknowledgements

My thanks, as always, go to J
O
C
ROCKER
for running my life with such efficiency, understanding and good humour while I have been engaged upon this book. My publisher S
UE
F
REESTONE
has shown her usual blend of patience, kindness, enthusiasm and accommodation, as have A
NTHONY
G
OFF
and L
ORRAINE
H
AMILTON
, my literary and dramatic agents. Thanks to J
O
L
AURIE
for her game guinea-piggery in reading early sections on metre and trying out some of the exercises, and to my father for his baffling but beautiful sestina algorithm. Especial gratitude must go to I
AN
P
ATTERSON
, poet, Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, for casting his learned and benevolent eye over the manuscript–all errors are mine, not his. I thank him also for allowing me to include his excellent centos and sestina. My thanks to his predecessors at Queens’, Professors A. C. S
PEARING
and I
AN
W
RIGHT
, and to P
ETER
H
OLLAND
of Trinity Hall, who between them did their doomed best to make a scholar of me during my time there. Aside from my mother, the person who most awoke me to poetry was R
ORY
S
TUART
, a remarkable teacher who has now retired to Italy. I send him my eternal thanks. If every schoolchild had been lucky enough to have a teacher like him, the world would be a better and happier place.

The author and publisher acknowledge use of lines from the following works:

Simon Armitage, ‘Poem’,
Kid
, Faber, 1999 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron, II’, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, ‘Meiosis’, ‘Precious Five’, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, ‘Miss Gee’, ‘Lullaby’,
Collected Poems
, ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber 1976, rev. 1991

Carolyn Beard Whitlow, ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’,
Wild Meat
, Lost Roads Publishers, USA, 1986

John Betjeman, ‘Death in Leamington’,
Collected Poems
, John Murray, 2003

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Sestina’,
Complete Poems
, ed. Tom Paulin, Chatto & Windus, 2004

Jorge Luis Borges, Haikus and Tanaka from
Obras Completas
(4 vols), Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, 2005

Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’,
The New Oxford Book of Light Verse
, ed. Kingsley Amis, OUP, 1978

Anne Carson, ‘Eros The Bittersweet’, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998

G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Ballade of Suicide’,
The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton
, Dodd Mead, 1980

Wendy Cope, ‘Valentine’,
Serious Concerns
, Faber, 1992

–––‘Engineer’s Corner’,
Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis
, Faber, 1986

Frances Cornford, ‘Fat Lady Seen From A Train’,
Collected Poems
, Enitharmon Press, 1996

Cummings, E. E., ‘1 (a’, ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’,
Selected Poems
, Liveright Books, 1994

Elizabeth Daryush, ‘Still Life’,
Collected Poems
, Carcanet, 1972

Hilda Doolittle, ‘Sea Poppies’,
Selected Poems
, Carcanet, 1997

Norman Douglas, ‘Wagtail’ and Anacreontics from
Norman Douglas: A Portrait
, Edizioni La Conchiglia, Capri, Italy, 2004 Marriott Edgar,
The Lion and Albert
, Methuen, 1978

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’,
Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot
, Faber, 1969

Robert Frost, ‘Spring Pools’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Mending Wall’,
The Poetry of Robert

Frost
, Vintage, 2001

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)’, ‘The Lacking Sense’,
Collected Poems
, Wordsworth Editions, 1994

Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry Picking’, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’,
Opened Ground: Poems 1966–96
, Faber, 1998

Michael Heller, ‘She’,
Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems
, Salt Publishing, 2003

A. E. Housman, ‘The Colour of his Hair’,
Collected Poems
, ed. J. Sparrow, Penguin, 1995

Ted Hughes, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, ‘Thistle’, ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’, ‘Eagle’,
Collected Poems
, ed. Paul Keegan, Faber, 2003

Donald Justice, ‘The Tourist from Syracuse’,
Collected Poems
, Knopf, USA, 2004

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’, ‘If’,
The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling
, Wordsworth Editions, 1994

Carolyn Kizer, ‘Parents’ Pantoum’, Copper Canyon Press, USA, 1996

Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Toads’, ‘For Sidney Bechet’, ‘The Trees’,
Collected Poems
, ed. Anthony Thwaite, Faber, 2003

Derek Mahon, ‘Antarctica’,
Collected Poems
, Gallery Press, 1999

Marianne Moore, ‘The Fish’,
The Poems of Marianne Moore
, ed. Grace Schulman, Penguin, 2005

Ogden Nash, ‘The Sniffle’,
Best of Ogden Nash
, ed. Smith and Eberstadt, Methuen, 1985

Dorothy Parker, ‘Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That)’, ‘Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals’,
The Collected Dorothy Parker
, Penguin, 2001

Ian Patterson, ‘Sestina’,
Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969–2002
, Salt Publishing, 2003

–––‘Shakespeare Cento’ and ‘A. E. Housman Cento’ are previously unpublished and are reproduced with the author’s permission

Ezra Pound, ‘In A Station of the Metro’, ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo Saxon’,
ABC of Reading
, Norton, 1960

–––‘Apparuit’,
Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound
, Faber, 2001

Robert Service, ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’,
The Best of Robert Service
, A. & C. Black, 1995 (first English edition edited by Ernest Benn, 1978) ©1960 Germaine Service

Wallace Stevens, ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’,
The Complete Poems
, Vintage, 1990

Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, ‘In My Craft and Sullen Art’,
Collected Poems
, Everyman Edition, Phoenix, 2000

R. S. Thomas, ‘The Welsh Hill Country’,
Everyman Selected Poems of R. S. Thomas
, ed. Anthony Thwaite, J. M. Dent, 1996

W. B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, ‘The Choice’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘When You Are Old’,
The Poems
, ed. Richard Finneran, Macmillan, 1983

Benjamin Zephaniah, ‘Talking Turkey’,
Talking Turkeys
, Puffin Books, 1995