The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Metre

Poetry is metrical writing.

If it isn’t that I don’t know what it is.

J.V. CUNNINGHAM

I

Some very obvious but nonetheless interesting observations about how English is spoken–meet metre–the iamb–the iambic pentameter–Poetry Exercises 1 & 2

YOU HAVE ALREADY achieved the English-language poet’s most important goal: you can read, write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence. If this were a book about painting or music there would be a lot more initial spadework to be got through.

Automatic and inborn as language might seem to be, there are still things we need to know about it, elements that are so obvious very few of us ever consider them. Since language for us, as poets in the making, is our paint, our medium, we should probably take a little time to consider certain aspects of spoken English, a language whose oral properties are actually very different from those of its more distant ancestors, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek and even from those of its nearer relations, French and German.

Some of what follows may seem so obvious that it will put you in danger of sustaining a nosebleed. Bear with me, nonetheless. We are beginning from first principles.

How We Speak

Each English word is given its own weight or push as we speak it within a sentence. That is to say:Each English word is given its own weight and push as we speak it within a sentence.

Only a very badly primitive computer speech programme would give equal stress to all the words in that example. Throughout this chapter I use bold type to indicate this weight or push, this ‘accent’, and I use italics for imparting special emphasis and SMALL CAPITALS to introduce new words or concepts for the first time and for drawing attention to an exercise or instruction.

A real English speaker would speak the indented paragraph above much, but certainly not exactly, as I (with only the binary choice of heavy/light available to me) have tried to indicate. Some words or syllables will be slid over with hardly a breath or a pause accorded to them (light), others will be given more weight (heavy).

Surely that’s how the whole world speaks?

Well, in the Chinese languages and in Thai, for example, all words are of one syllable (monosyllabic) and speech is given colour and meaning by variations in pitch, the speaker’s voice will go up or down. In English we colour our speech not so much with alterations in pitch as with variations in stress: this is technically known as ACCENTUATION.¹. English, and we shall think about this later–is what is known as a STRESS-TIMED language.

Of course, English does contain a great many monosyllables (many more than most European languages as it happens): some of these are what grammarians call PARTICLES, inoffensive little words like prepositions (by, from, to, with), pronouns (his, my, your, they), articles (the, an, a) and conjunctions (or, and, but). In an average sentence these are unaccented in English.From time to time and for as long as it takes.

I must repeat, these are not special emphases, these are the natural accents imparted. We glide over the particles (‘from’, ‘to’, ‘and’, ‘for’, ‘as’, ‘it’) and give a little push to the important words (‘time’, ‘long’, ‘takes’).

Also, we tend to accent the operative part of monosyllabic words when they are extended, only lightly tripping over the -ing and -ly, of such words as hoping and quickly. This light tripping, this gliding is sometimes called scudding.

We always say British, we never say British or Brit-ish, always machine, never machine or mach-ine. The weight we give to the first syllable of British or the second syllable of machine is called by linguists the TONIC ACCENT. Accent here shouldn’t be confused either with the written signs (DIACRITICAL MARKS) that are sometimes put over letters, as in café and Führer, or with regional accents–brogues and dialects like Cockney or Glaswegian. Accent for our purposes means the natural push or stress we give to a word or part of a word as we speak. This accent, push or stress is also called ictus, but we will stick to the more common English words where possible.

In many-syllabled or POLYSYLLABIC words there will always be at least one accent.Credit. Dispose. Continue. Despair. Desperate.

Sometimes the stress will change according to the meaning or nature of the word. READ THE FOLLOWING PAIRS OUT LOUD:He inclines to project bad vibesA project to study the inclines.He proceeds to rebel.The rebel steals the proceeds.

Some words may have two stresses but one (marked here with an ´) will always be a little heavier:ábdicate considerátion.

Sometimes it is a matter of nationality or preference. READ OUT THESE WORDS: Chicken-soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigarette. Magazine.

Those are the more usual accents in British English. NOW TRY THE SAME WORDS WITH THESE DIFFERENT STRESSES…Chicken-soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigarette. Magazine.

That is how they are said in America (and increasingly these days in the UK and Australia too). What about the following?Lámentable. Mándatory. Prímarily. Yésterday. In cómparable.

Laméntable. Mandátory. Primárily. Yesterdáy. Incompárable.

Whether the tonic should land as those in the first line or the second is a vexed issue and subject to much cóntroversy or contróversy. The pronunciations vary according to circumstances or circumstánces or indeed circum-stahnces too English, class-bound and ticklish to go into here.

You may think, ‘Well, now, hang on, surely this is how everyone (the Chinese and Thais aside) talks, pushing one part of the word but not another?’ Not so.

The French, for instance, tend towards equal stress in a word. They pronounce Canada, Can-a-da as opposed to our Canada. We say Bernard, the French say Ber-nard. You may have noticed that when Americans pronounce French they tend to go overboard and hurl the emphasis on to the final syllable, thinking it sounds more authentic, Ber-nard and so on. They are so used to speaking English with its characteristic downward inflection that to American ears French seems to go up at the end. With trademark arrogance, we British keep the English inflection. Hence the American pronunciation clichÉ, the English cliché and the authentic French cli-ché. Take also the two words ‘journal’ and ‘machine’, which English has inherited from French. We pronounce them journal and machine. The French give them their characteristic equal stress: jour-nal and ma-chine. Even words with many syllables are equally stressed in French: we say repetition, they say répétition (ray-pay-tee-see-on).

As you might imagine, this has influenced greatly the different paths that French and English poetry have taken. The rhythms of English poetry are ordered by SYLLABIC ACCENTUATION, those of French more by QUANTITATIVE MEASURE. We won’t worry about those terms or what they portend just yet: it should already be clear that if you’re planning to write French verse then this is not the book for you.

In a paragraph of written prose we pay little attention to how those English accents fall unless, that is, we wish to make an extra emphasis, which is usually rendered by italics, underscoring or CAPITALISATION. In German an emphasised word is s t r e t c h e d. With prose the eye is doing much more than the ear. The inner ear is at work, however, and we can all recognise the rhythms in any piece of writing. It can be spoken out loud, after all, for recitation or for rhetoric, and if it is designed for that purpose, those rhythms will be all the more important.

But prose, rhythmic as it can be, is not poetry. The rhythm is not organised.

Meet Metre

Poetry’s rhythm is organised.

THE LIFE OF A POEM IS MEASURED IN REGULAR HEARTBEATS.

THE NAME FOR THOSE HEARTBEATS IS METRE.

When we want to describe anything technical in English we tend to use Greek. Logic, grammar, physics, mechanics, gynaecology, dynamics, economics, philosophy, therapy, astronomy, politics–Greek gave us all those words. The reservation of Greek for the technical allows us to use those other parts of English, the Latin and especially the Anglo-Saxon, to describe more personal and immediate aspects of life and the world around us. Thus to be anaesthetised by trauma has a more technical, medical connotation than to be numb with shock, although the two phrases mean much the same. In the same way, metre can be reserved precisely to refer to the poetic technique of organising rhythm, while words like ‘beat’ and ‘flow’ and ‘pulse’ can be freed up for less technical, more subjective and personal uses.

PLEASE DO NOT BE PUT OFF by the fact that throughout this section on metre I shall tend to use the conventional Greek names for nearly all the metrical units, devices and techniques that poets employ. In many respects, as I shall explain elsewhere, they are inappropriate to English verse,² but English-language poets and prosodists have used them for the last thousand years. It is useful and pleasurable to have a special vocabulary for a special activity.³Convention, tradition and precision suggest this in most fields of human endeavour, from music and painting to snooker and snow-boarding. It does not make those activities any less rich, individual and varied. So let it be with poetry.

Poetry is a word derived from Greek, as is Ode (from poein, to make and odein, to sing). The majority of words we use to describe the anatomy of a poem are Greek in origin too. Metre (from metron) is simply the Greek for measure, as in metronome, kilometre, biometric and so on. The Americans use the older spelling meter which I prefer, but which my UK English spellcheck refuses to like.

In the beginning, my old cello teacher used to say, was rhythm. Rhythm is simply the Greek for ‘flow’ (we get our word diarrhoea from the same source as it happens). We know what rhythm is in music, we can clap our hands or tap our feet to its beat. In poetry it is much the same:

ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum

Say that out loud. Tap your feet, drum your fingers or clap your hands as you say it. It is a meaningless chant, certainly. But it is a meaningless regular and rhythmic chant.

Ten sounds, alternating in beat or accent. Actually, it is not very helpful to say that the line is made up of ten sounds; we’ll soon discover that for our prosodic purposes it is more useful to look at it as five repeating sets of that ti-tum heartbeat. My old cello teacher liked to do it this way, clapping her hands as she did so: