The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (9 page)

If you think about it, the very nature of the iamb means that if this additional trick were disallowed to the poet then
all
iambic verse would have to terminate in a stressed syllable, a masculine ending…

If winter comes can spring be far behind?

…would be possible, but

A thing of beauty is a joy for ev(er)

…would not. Keats would have had to find a monosyllabic word meaning ‘ever’ and he would have ended up with something that sounded Scottish, archaic, fey or precious even in his own day (the early nineteenth century).

A thing of beauty is a joy for ay.

Words like ‘excitement’, ‘little’, ‘hoping’, ‘question’, ‘idle’, ‘widest’ or ‘wonder’ could
never
be used to close an iambic line. That would be a ridiculous restriction in English. How absurdly limiting not to be able to end with an -ing, or an -er or a -ly or a -tion or any of the myriad weak endings that naturally occur in our language.

B
UT THERE IS MORE TO IT THAN THAT
. A huge element of all art is constructed in the form of
question
and
answer
. The word for this is
dialectic
. In music we are very familiar with this call-and-response structure. The opening figure of Beethoven’s Fifth is a famous example:

Da-da-da-Dah

Da-da-da-Derr

Beethoven actually went so far as to write the following in the score of the Finale of his String Quartet in F major:

Muss es sein?
Must it be?

Es muss sein!
It must be!

In poetry this is a familiar structure:

Q: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

A: Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

It is common in rhetoric too.

Ask not what your country can do for you

But what you can do for your country.

This is a deep, instinctive property of so much human communication. In the Greek drama and dance it was called
strophe
and
antistrophe
, in the liturgy of the Church it is known as
versicle
and
response
.

One might suggest that this is something to do with the in-and-out pumping of the heart itself (
systole
and
diastole
) and the very breath of life (
inhalation
and
exhalation
). Yin and yang and other binary oppositions in thought and the natural world come to mind. We also reason dialectically, from problem to solution, from proposition to conclusion, from
if
to
then
. It is the copulation of utterance: the means by which thought and expression mimic creation by taking one thing (
thesis
), suggesting another (
antithesis
) and making something new of the coupling (
synthesis
), prosecution, defence, verdict.

The most obvious example of a poem with an
if
then
structure is of course Kipling’s poem ‘If’, regularly voted ‘the nation’s favourite’. It is written in strict iambic pentameter, but with alternating feminine and masculine line endings throughout. He does this with absolute regularity throughout the poem: switching between lines of weak (eleven syllable) and strong (ten syllable) endings, which gives a characteristic swing to the verse. Try reading out loud each
stanza
(or verse) below, exaggerating the
tenth
syllable in each line as you read, tapping the table (or your thigh) and really emphasising the last beat. Do you see how this metrical alternation precisely suggests a kind of dialectical structure?

If you can keep your head when all a
bout
you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on
you
,

If you can trust yourself when all men
doubt
you

But make allowance for their doubting
too
,

If you can dream–and not make dreams your
mas
ter,

If you can think–and not make thoughts your
aim
;

If you can meet with Triumph and Dis
ast
er

And meet those two impostors just the
same
;

And meet those two impostors just the
same
;

If you can fill the unforgiving
min
ute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance
run
,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s
in
it,

And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my
son
!

What’s actually happening is that the wider line structures echo the metrical structure: just as the
feet
go weak-
strong
, so the lines go weak-
strong
.

You might put the thought into iambic pentameters:

The weaker ending forms a kind of question
The stronger ending gives you your reply.

The finality of downstroke achieved by a strong ending seems to answer the lightness of a weak one. After all, the most famous weak ending there is just happens to be the very word ‘question’ itself…

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

It is not a rule, the very phrase ‘question-and-answer’ is only an approximation of what we mean by ‘dialectic’ and, naturally, there is a great deal more to it than I have suggested. Through French poetry we have inherited a long tradition of alternating strong-weak line endings, which we will come to when we look at verse forms and rhyme. The point I am anxious to make, however, is that metre is more than just a ti-
tum
ti-
tum
: its very regularity and the consequent variations available within it can yield a structure that
EXPRESSES MEANING QUITE AS MUCH AS THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO
.

Which is not to say that eleven syllable lines
only
offer questions: sometimes they are simply a variation available to the poet and result in no particular extra meaning or effect. Kipling does demonstrate though, in his hoary old favourite, that when used deliberately and regularly, alternate measures can do more. The metrist Timothy Steele
¹²
has pointed out how Shakespeare, in his twentieth sonnet ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted’ uses
only
weak endings throughout the poem: every line is eleven syllables. Shakespeare’s
conceit
in the poem (his image, or overarching concept) is that his beloved, a boy, has all the feminine graces. The proliferation of feminine endings is therefore a kind of metrical pun.

Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is another celebrated example of iambic pentameter ending with that extra or
hypermetrical
unstressed syllable. Note, incidentally, that while you would not normally choose to emphasise a word like ‘and’ in a line of poetry, the beauty of Shakespeare’s iambs here is that the rhythm calls for the actor playing Macbeth to hit those ‘ands’ harder than one would in a line like:

I want some jam and tea and toast today

With Shakespeare’s line…

To
mor
row
and
to
mor
row
and
to
mor
row

…the futility and tedium of the succession of tomorrows is all the more manifest because of the metrical position of those ‘ands’. Which of us hasn’t stressed them in sentences like ‘I’ve got to mow the lawn
and
pick up the kids from school
and
do the tax returns
and
write a thank you letter
and
cancel the theatre tickets
and
ring the office…’?

An eleven-syllable line was more the rule than the exception in Italian poetry, for the obvious reason that an iambic hendecasyllabic line must have a
weak
ending, like-a almost-a ever-y word-a in Italian-o. Dante’s
Inferno
is written in iambic
endecasíllabo
.

Nel
mez
zo
del
camm
in
di
nost
ra
vit
a

An English translation might go, in iambic pentameter:

Mid
way
up
on
the
journ
ey
through
our
life

There would be no special reason to use hendecasyllables in translating the
Inferno
: in fact, it would be rather difficult. English, unlike Italian, is full of words that end with a stressed syllable. The very nature of the iamb is its light-heavy progression, it seems to be a deeply embedded feature of English utterance: to throw that away in the pursuit of imitating the metrics of another language would be foolish.

Lots of food for thought there, much of it beyond the scope of this book. The point is that the eleven-syllable line is open to you in
your
iambic verse.

Why not
nine
syllables, you may be thinking? Why not
dock
a syllable and have a nine-syllable line with a weak ending?

Let’s
sit
our
selves
be
side
this
riv
er

Well, this docking, this
catalexis
, results in an iambic
tetrameter
(four accents to a line) with a weak ending, that extra syllable. The point about pentameter is that it must have
five
stresses in it. The above example has only
four
, hence
tetra
meter (pronounced, incidentally, tetr
A
meter, as pentameter is pent
A
meter).

Writers of iambic pentameter always
add
an unstressed syllable to make eleven syllables with five beats, they don’t take off a strong one to make four. They must keep that count of five. If you choose iambic pentameter you stick to it. The heroic line, the five-beat line, speaks in a very particular way, just as a waltz has an entirely different quality from a polka. A four-beat line, a tetrameter, has its individual characteristics too as we shall soon see, but it is rare to mix them up in the same poem. It is no more a
rule
than it is a rule never to use oil paints and watercolours in the same picture, but you
really have to know what you’re doing
if you decide to try it. For the purposes of these early exercises, we’ll stay purely pentametric.

Here are a few examples of hendecasyllabic iambic pentameter, quoting some of the same poets and poems we quoted before. They all go:

O
UT WITH YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THEM UP:
don’t forget to
SAY THEM OUT LOUD
to yourself to become familiar with the
effect
of the weak ending.

So priketh hem nature in hir corages;

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
¹³

C
HAUCER:
The Canterbury Tales
, General Prologue

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

S
HAKESPEARE:
Sonnet 20

That thou shall see the diff’rence of our spirits,

I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:

S
HAKESPEARE:
The Merchant of Venice
, Act IV, Scene 1