The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

and one and two and three and four and five

In music that would be five bars (or five measures if you’re American). In poetry such a bar or measure is called a foot.

Five feet marching in rhythm. If the foot is the heartbeat, the metre can best be described as the readout or cardiogram trace.

1

2

3

4

5

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

Let’s give the metre meaning by substituting words.He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise

That line consists of FIVE ti-tum feet:

1

2

3

4

5

He bangs

the drum

and makes

a dread

ful noise

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

ti tum

It is a line of TEN syllables (decasyllabic):

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

He

bangs

the

drum

and

makes

a

dread

ful

noise

Ten syllables where in this metre the accent always falls on the even-numbered beat. Notice, though, that there aren’t ten words in this example, there are only nine. That’s because ‘dreadful’ has two syllables.

Bangs, drum, makes, dread and noise are those even-numbered accented words (and syllable) here. You could show the rhythm of the line like this:

Some metrists would call ‘he’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’ and ‘-ful’ DEPRESSIONS. Other words to describe a non-stressed syllable are SLACK, SCUD and WEAK. The line has a rising rhythm, that is the point: from weak to strong, terminating in its fifth stressed beat.

The most usual way to SCAN the line, in other words to demonstrate its metric structure and show the cardiogram trace as it were, is to divide the five feet with this mark| (known as a VIRGULE, the same as the French word for ‘comma’ or ‘slash’ that you might remember from school) and use symbols to indicate the accented and the weak syllables. Here I have chosen to represent the off-beat, the depressed, unaccented syllable, and for the beat, stress or accented syllable.

There are other accepted ways of marking SCANSION: using–or u or x for an un accented beat and / for an accented one. If you were taught scansion at school or have a book on the subject you will often see one of the following:

For the most part I shall be sticking to and however, as I find they represent the ti and the tum more naturally. Besides, the other scansion marks derive from classical metre, which was concerned with vowel length rather than stress.

The Great Iamb (and other binary feet)

The word for a rising-rhythm foot with a ti-tum, beat like those above is an iambus, more usually called an IAMB.

I remember this by thinking of Popeye, whose trademark rusty croak went:I yam what I yam…Iámb, iámb, iámb

We will concentrate on this foot for the rest of this section, but you should know that there are three other feet in the same BINARY (two unit) family.

The TROCHEE is a backwards iamb, a falling rhythm, tum-ti:

The trochee obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with poky or choky.

Thus was born my Hiawatha,Thus was born the child of wonder;LONGFELLOW: The Song of Hiawatha

As a falling rhythm, a tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, it finishes on an unaccented syllable–an ‘and’ if you’re counting and clapping musically:

The SPONDEE is of equal stressed units:This also obeys its own definition and is pronounced to rhyme with the name John Dee. You may feel that it is almost impossible to give absolutely equal stress to two successive words or syllables in English and that there will always be some slight difference in weight. Many metrists (Edgar Allan Poe among them) would argue that the spondee doesn’t functionally exist in English verse. Again, we’ll think about the ramifications later, for the time being you might as well know it.

The fourth and final permutation is of unstressed units and is called the PYRRHIC foot. Don’t bother to think about the pyrrhic either for the moment, we’ll be looking at it later. All the feet possible in English are gathered in a table at the end of the chapter, with examples to demonstrate their stresses.

The iamb is the hero of this chapter, so let us take a closer look at it:

Ten syllables, yes, but a count, or measure, of five feet, five iambic feet, culminating (the opposite of the trochaic line) in a strong or accented ending. SAY IT OUT LOUD AGAIN:and one and two and three and four and fiveHe bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise

It is a measure of five and the prosodic word, from the Greek again, for ‘measure of five’ is PENTAMETER. That simple line is an example therefore of IAMBIC PENTAMETER.

The Iambic Pentameter

The rising rhythm of the five-beat iambic pentameter has been since the fourteenth century the most widely used metre in English poetry. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the preponderance of verse by Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Owen, Yeats and Frost, all written in iambic pentameter. It is the very breath of English verse and has earned the title the HEROIC LINE.

Poetry Exercise 1

Try reading the following extracts out loud to yourself, noting the varying pulses, some strong and regularly accented, others gentler and more flowing. Each pair of lines is an example of ‘perfect’ iambic pentameter, having exactly ten syllables, five iambic feet (five stresses on the even-numbered beats) to the line. Once you’ve read each pair a few times, TAKE A PENCIL AND MARK UP EACH FOOT. Use a or a / for the accented syllables or words and a or a–for the un accented syllables or word. I have double-spaced each pair to make it easier for you to mark them.

I really would urge you to take time over these: savour every line. Remember GOLDEN RULE ONE–reading verse can be like eating chocolate, so much more pleasurable when you allow it slowly to melt inside you, so much less rewarding when you snap off big chunks and bolt them whole, all but untasted.

DON’T LET YOUR EYE FALL FURTHER DOWN THE PAGE THAN THIS LINE until you have taken out your pencil or pen. You may prefer a pencil so that you can rub out your marks and leave this book in pristine condition when you lend it to someone else–naturally the publishers would prefer you to buy another copy for your friends–the important thing is to get used to defacing this book in one way or another. Here are the rules of the exercise again:

Read each pair of lines out loud, noting the ti-tum rhythms.

Now MARK the weak/strong (accented/unaccented) syllables and the ‘bar lines’ that separate each foot in this manner:

Or you may find it easier with a pencil to do it like this:

When you have done this, read each pair of lines OUT LOUD once more, exaggerating the stresses on each beat.He sit hym up withouten wordes mo,And with his ax he smoot the corde atwo,⁴

CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales, The Reeve’s TaleThat time of year, thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 73In sooth I know not why I am so sad:It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 1Their wand’ring course, now high, now low, then hidProgressive, retrograde, or standing still

MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book VIIIOft has our poet wisht, this happy SeatMight prove his fading Muse’s last retreat.

DRYDEN: ‘Epilogue to Oxford’And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,One truth is clear, ‘Whatever is, is right.’

POPE: An Essay on Man, Epistle 1And thus they formed a group that’s quite antique,Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.

BYRON: Don Juan, Canto II, CXCIVNow fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sightAnd all the air a solemn stillness holds.

GRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’And certain hopes are with me, that to theeThis labour will be welcome, honoured Friend!

WORDSWORTH: The Prelude, Book OneSt Agnes’ Eve–Ah, bitter chill it was!The owl for all his feathers was a-cold;

KEATS: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,The vapours weep their burthen to the ground

TENNYSON: ‘Tithonus’If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

WILFRED OWEN: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’When you are old and grey and full of sleepAnd nodding by the fire, take down this book

W. B. YEATS: ‘When You Are Old’And death is better, as the millions know,Than dandruff, night-starvation, or B.O.

W. H. AUDEN: ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, IIHe’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,

ROBERT FROST: ‘The Death of the Hired Man’Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drillsWe trekked and picked until the cans were full,

SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘Blackberry Picking’And praised his wife for every meal she made.And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

SIMON ARMITAGE: ‘Poem’

Nearly seven hundred years of iambic pentameter represented there. Marking the beats is not a supremely challenging exercise, but remains a good way of becoming more familiar with the nature of the line and its five regular accents.

Having marked the couplets up, now GO BACK AND READ THEM, either out loud or to yourself. Simply relish them as if you were tasting wine.

Lines of iambic pentameter are, as I hope you will agree, capable of being formal, strongly accented, flowing, conversational, comic, descriptive, narrative, contemplative, declamatory and any combination of those and many other qualities. I deliberately chose pairs of lines, to show the metre flowing in more than just one line.

For all that the progression of beats is identical in each extract I hope you also saw that there are real differences of bounce and tempo, rise and fall, attack and cadence. Already it should be apparent that a very simple form, constructed from the most basic rules, is capable of strikingly different effects.

Armed with nothing more than the knowledge that an iambic pentameter is a line of five alternating weak-strong beats, it is time to attempt our own!

Poetry Exercise 2

What I want you to do in a moment is to put down this book, pick up your notepad and write out at least twenty lines of your own iambic pentameter. If you haven’t time, or you’re in an unsuitable place, then wait until the moment is right or go back and read the samples above again. I don’t want you to read any further until you’ve tried this exercise. Before we begin, here are the rules:

Write some SINGLE LINES and some PAIRS OF LINES.

For this exercise, do not use rhyme.

Write some lines, or pairs, that are conversational, some that are simple, some that are more complicated in construction, some that are descriptive, some that are silly, some that are grave.

Write with increasing speed: allow the rhythm and line length to become second nature. You will find yourself feeling ten syllables and five accents in an iambic line very quickly. You will hear the feet falling ahead of you to their final stressed syllable.

By all means revise and rewrite your lines but DO NOT polish or strive for any effect beyond the metrical.

This is an exercise: even if you already know about enjambment and feminine endings, or trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions avoid them. If you don’t know about them, don’t worry or be put off. You soon will.

Give yourself about thirty seconds a line. That’s ten minutes for twenty. No more. This is not about quality, it is about developing a feel for the metre and allowing it to become second nature.

Try to use a variety of word lengths: heed Alexander Pope’s warning against monosyllables:

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line⁵

Avoid ‘wrenching’: a wrenched accent is a false stress applied to a word in order for it to fit the metre, thus:

He chose a word to force a wrenched accént

Write in contemporary English, avoiding archaic ‘poetical’ vocabulary, word order inversions, unnecessary (‘expletive’) filler words like ‘did’ and ‘so’ in tortured constructions of this kind:

The swain did stand ’midst yonder sward so green

Then heard I wide the vasty portals ope

I shall do the exercise myself now, adhering to all the conditions, just to give a vague idea of the kind of thing I’m expecting.

Tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick tock-tick…

Right. This is what I have come up with.I wonder why the postman hasn’t come.I looked at eight, I’ll look again at nine.The curtains closed remind me of my death.You might induce excretion using figs.Don’t worry if the words don’t make no sense.You look at me, your looking turns me on.I haven’t time to take your call right now,So leave a message when you hear the tone.The mind of man can not contain itself.Some people eat like pigs and some like birds,Some eat like horses nosing in a trough.I write the line and feel the metre flow.There’s nothing you can say to ease my pain.You can’t explain the beauty of a desk–That rightness ink and paper seem to breathe.The needs of many far outweigh our own.Oh Christ, I hate the way you do your hair,Expect you feel the same about my tie.Your sharpness rips my paper heart in two.I’ve been and gone and done a stupid thing.

I hope that gives you the confidence to see that this exercise isn’t about quality, poetic vision or verbal mastery.

Your turn now. I’ll give you some blank space. It’s just in case you’ve come without a pad. Well, blow me, look at that line ‘it’s just in case you’ve come without a pad’–iambic pentameter gets into the system like a germ, as a seasoned Shakespearean actor will tell you.

By all means refer to the samples of iambic pentameter above: mine or those of the Masters…

It is time to make your metre…now.

How did you do? Did you get any feeling that, crude, elementary, nonsensical and bizarre as some of the lines you’ve written may be, they nonetheless hint at that thing we call poetry? That nothing more than the simplest use of the simplest metre suggested to you a way of expressing thoughts, stories, reflections, ideas and passions that ordinary speech or prose could never offer? Above all, that writing in strict metre doesn’t result in stiff, formal or old-fashioned English?

I would recommend doing that exercise whenever you can. It is like performing scales on your piano or sketching sugar bowls and wineglasses for practice. You just get better and better and better as the extraordinary possibilities of this most basic form begin to open up.

‘Nothing more than taking a line for a walk.’ That is how the artist Paul Klee described drawing. It can be much the same with poetry.

For the next few days, take lots of iambs for a walk and see where their feet lead you. With notebook in hand and a world of people, nature, thoughts, news and feelings to be compressed into iambic pentameter you are taking your first poetic steps.

II

End-stopping–enjambment–caesura–weak endings–trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions

End-stopping, Enjambment and Caesura

In our first exercise we looked at existing fragments of iambic pentameter:The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.

And we had a go at producing our own:I haven’t time to take your call right now,So leave a message when you hear the tone.

In both examples each line contains a single thought that finishes with the line. This is called end-stopping, which we could mark like this.The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.I haven’t time to take your call right now.

The iambic pentameter would be a dull dog indeed if that were all it could do.

I have already included (in Poetry Exercise 1) a couplet from Wilfred Owen where the meaning doesn’t stop with the line, but RUNS ON through to the next:If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

No end-stopping there. The term used to describe such a running on is enjambment, from the French enjamber to stride, literally to get one’s leg over…His mother was a learned lady, famed For every branch of every science known.BYRON: Don Juan, Canto I, XSo threatened he, but Satan to no threats Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book IV

Look closely at those two examples above. Not only do they feature these run-ons or enjambments, which allow a sense of continual flow, they also contain pauses which break up that flow; in the examples above it happens that these pauses are expressed by commas that serve the office of a breath, or change of gear: I shall render them like this ¶.His mother was a learned lady ¶ famed For every branch of every science known.So threatened he ¶ but Satan to no threats Gave heed ¶ but waxing more in rage replied:

The name for such a pause or break is a caesura⁶ (from the Latin caedere, caesum, to cut.⁷ You’d pronounce it as in ‘he says YOU’RE a fool’).

Caesuras don’t by any means have to lead on to an enjambment as in the two examples above, however. You can have a caesura in an end-stopped line.The woods decay ¶ the woods decay and fall.St Agnes’ Eve ¶ Ah, bitter chill it was!.And, spite of Pride ¶ in erring Reason’s spite.One truth is clear ¶‘Whatever is, is right.’

Not every comma will signal a caesura, by the way. In Poetry Exercise 1 I included this pair of lines from Paradise Lost:Their wand’ring course, now high, now low, then hidProgressive, retrograde, or standing still.

Only the first comma of the first line is a caesura.Their wand’ring course ¶ now high, now low, then hid.Progressive, retrograde, or standing still.

Commas in lists (serial commas and Oxford commas as grammarians would call them–a now archaic usage of commas, placing them before conjunctions like ‘and’, ‘with’ and ‘or’) do not usually herald a caesura; though some readers might argue that the second comma of the second line above could betoken the small pause or breath that defines a caesura.

How can a scrutiny of such minuscule nuances possibly help you in your writing of poetry? Well, you wait until Exercise 3: I confidently predict that you will astonish yourself.

The fact is, enjambment and caesura, these two–what shall we call them? techniques, effects, tricks, devices, tools?–however we describe them, are crucial liberators of the iambic line. They either extend or break the flow, allowing the rhythms and hesitations of human breath, thought and speech to enliven and enrich the verse. They are absolutely not a failure to obey the rules of pentameter. Let’s look at the Byron and the Milton again:His mother was a learned lady, famedFor every branch of every science known.So threatened he, but Satan to no threatsGave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:

You might be tempted to believe that for the sake of sense the lines should be written thus:His mother was a learned lady,Famed for every branch of every science known.So threatened he,But Satan to no threats gave heed,But waxing more in rage replied:

And Wilfred Owen’s two lines could become: If you could hear, at every jolt,The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

This arrangement would enable us to end-stop in our heads or out loud as we read the verse. Surely that’s a better way of organising things? That is the sense after all, so why not therefore break the lines accordingly? This is the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

NO, DAMN YOU, NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!

THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE VERSE IS NOT THE

SENSE BUT THE METRE.

Metre is the primary rhythm, the organised background against which the secondary rhythms of sense and feeling are played out. This is a crucial point. You may think that the idea of feeling and thought being subservient to metre is a loopy one. Why should poets build themselves a prison? If they’ve got something to say, why don’t they get on and say it in the most direct manner possible? Well, painters paint within a canvas and composers within a structure. It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. Poets sometimes squeeze their forms to breaking point, this is what energises much verse, but if the forms were not there in the first place the verse would be listless to the point of anomie. Without gravity all would float free: the ballet leaps of the poet’s language would lose almost all their power. ‘Souls who have felt too much liberty’, as Wordsworth said, welcome form: ‘In truth the prison, into which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is.’⁸

Back to our caesuras and enjambments. We may not consciously be aware as we listen or read on the page, but the five beats, even when paused or run through, predominate in the inner ear. The fact that the sense runs through, doesn’t mean the lines shouldn’t end where they do.If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Although there is run-on, consider in your mind and your poet’s ear the different value that is given to ‘blood’ in the example above and in this:If you could hear, at every jolt,The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

READ THEM BOTH ALOUD and note how much more stress is placed on ‘blood’ in the proper, pentametric layout. I’m sure you agree that Owen knew what he was doing and that the line structure should stay.

There will always be a tiny sense of visual or aural end-stopping at the end of a line no matter how much its sense runs on.

Shakespeare, as you would expect, in the blank (unrhymed) verse of his plays, uses caesura and enjambment a great deal. They are keys that unlock the dramatic potential of iambic pentameter. Look at this speech from the first scene of The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, crazed by jealousy, believes his wife to have cuckolded him (that she’s slept with another man). Here he is with their small son, Mamillius. Don’t forget to recite or move your lips!Go play, boy, play. ¶ Thy mother plays, and I Play too; ¶ but so disgraced a part, ¶ whose issueWill hiss me to my grave. ¶ Contempt and clamour Will be my knell. ¶ Go play, boy, play. ¶ There have been,Or I am much deceived, ¶ cuckolds ere now,And many a man there is, ¶ even at this present,Now, ¶ while I speak this, ¶ holds his wife by th’arm That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence,And his pond fished by his next neighbour, ¶ by Sir Smile, his neighbour. ¶ Nay there’s comfort in’t,Whiles other men have gates, ¶ and those gates opened,As mine, against their will. ¶ Should all despair That have revolted wives, ¶ the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves. ¶ Physic for’t there’s none.

Fourteen lines, but sixteen caesuras and seven enjambments: the verse in its stop-start jerking is as pathological and possessed as the mind of the man speaking. Compare it to another fourteen lines, the fourteen lines of the famous Eighteenth sonnet: out loud, please, or as near as dammit:Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed,And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shadeWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, ¶ and this gives life to thee.

No run-ons at all, and just one caesura,⁹ an absolute killer example, which gives weight to the grand and glorious resolution of the sonnet delivered by those three final feet: ‘and this gives life to thee’. The perfectly end-stopped verse, unbroken by caesura up until that point, perfectly reflects a sense of assurance, just as the broken, spasmodic breaks and runs of Leontes’s ravings perfectly reflect the opposite: a crazed and unstable state of mind.

Macbeth, considering whether or not to kill Duncan and grasp his destiny, is in something of a dither too. Say this:–I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent ¶ but only Vaulting ambition ¶ which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other ¶–How now! what news?Macbeth, Act I, Scene 7

How insupportably dull and lifeless dramatic verse would be if made up only of end-stopped lines. How imponderably perfect a poem can be if it is all end-stopped.

I should mention here that in performance many Shakespearean actors will give a vocal (and often almost imperceptible) end-stop to a line, even when there is clear run-on in its sense. In the same way that the verse works better to the eye and inner ear when the metric structure is in clear pentameters, so spoken verse can work better when the actor represents each line with a faint pause or breath. It is a matter of fashion, context and preference. Some theatre directors hate dramatic end-stopping and are determined that meaning should take precedence over metre, others insist upon it (sometimes at the expense of clarity). An actor friend of mine, unaware of the jargon, was very alarmed on his first day as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company to hear an old hand ask the director before the first read-through of a new production: ‘Are we end-stopping, darling?’ Took him three weeks to dare to ask what it meant: he had imagined it was something to do with rehearsal tea breaks.

Robert Browning, some of whose most memorable verse took the form of the dramatic monologue (not verse written for the stage, but poems written as if spoken by a first-person narrator), was an absolute master of the interior rhythmic play possible within the wider structures of the metre. Out loud:No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why!The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,Is not to fancy what were fair in lifeProvided it could be,–but, finding firstWhat may be, then find how to make it fairUp to our means; a very different thing!BROWNING: ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’

I’ll let you mark that with caesuras and enjambments yourself. It is a marvellously complex and animated series of clauses and subordinate clauses, yet all subservient to the benign tyranny of pure iambic pentameter. Not a syllable out of place, not a ‘cheat’ (rogue extra syllable or rogue docked one) anywhere. A complicated and disgracefully self-justifying point is being made by the bishop, who is excusing his life of cheating, double-dealing and irreligious selfishness by means of subtle and sophisticated argument. The pauses, inner rhythms and alterations of momentum provided by the use of enjambment and caesura echo this with great wit and precision.

Doubt, assertion, reassurance, second thoughts, affirmation, question and answer, surprise and the unstable rhythms of thought and speech are some of the effects that can be achieved with these two simple devices, caesura and enjambment, within verse that still obeys the ‘rules’ of iambic pentameter.

I wouldn’t want you to believe that they are only for use in dramatic verse like Shakespeare’s and Browning’s, however. After all, it is unlikely that this is the kind of poetry you will be writing yourself. Verse as reflective and contemplative as that of Wordsworth’s Prelude makes great use of them too. MARK THE CAESURAS AND ENJAMBMENTS HERE: I shan’t let you read on till you’ve fished out a pencil and begun, saying out loud as you go:Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to makeA present joy the matter of a song,Pour forth that day my soul in measured strainsThat would not be forgotten, and are hereRecorded: to the open fields I toldA prophecy: poetic numbers cameSpontaneously to clothe in priestly robeA renovated spirit singled out,

How did it go? You might have found as I did that it was tricky to decide precisely whether or not there were caesuras in the third and seventh lines and whether there was more than one in the first. I have put the doubtful ones in brackets.Thus far, O Friend! did I, ¶ not used to make ¶A present joy the matter of a song,Pour forth that day my soul (¶) in measured strains (¶)That would not be forgotten, ¶ and are here ¶Recorded: ¶ to the open fields I told ¶A prophecy: ¶ poetic numbers came ¶Spontaneously (¶) to clothe in priestly robe (¶)A renovated spirit singled out,

If you read the poem to yourself I think the bracketed caesuras do indicate the faintest of breaths or pauses which would in turn suggest the bracketed run-ons. It is not an exact science despite the claims of some scholiasts and poetasters.¹⁰ Of course, it is only of importance or interest to us here because we are examining the verse as budding poets eager to think about how life and variation is given to an otherwise over-drilled regiment of foot; we are not marking verse up either for performance or for correction by a teacher.

Enjambment and caesura can pack a great comic punch, which Byron demonstrates when he opens his mock epic Don Juan with a savage blast aimed precisely at the Wordsworth of the Prelude above and his fellow Lake District romantic poets, Coleridge and Southey. Byron hated them and what he saw as their pretension and vain belief that theirs was the only Poesy (poetry) worthy of wreaths (prizes and plaudits). Say this out loud:You–Gentlemen! ¶ by dint of long seclusion From better company, ¶ have kept your own At Keswick, and, ¶ through still continued fusion Of one another’s minds, ¶ at last have grown To deem as a most logical conclusion,That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:There is a narrowness in such a notion,Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean.

I am sure you have now got the point that pausing and running on are an invaluable adjunct to the basic pentametric line. I have taken a long time over this because I think these two devices exemplify the crucial point that ADHERENCE TO METRE DOES NOT MILITATE AGAINST NATURALNESS. Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny. Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy. As Auden suggested in his analogy of Robinson Crusoe, some poets might be able to live outside convention and rules, but most of us make a hash of it.

It is time to try your own. This exercise really is fun: don’t be scared off by its conditions: I’ll take you through it all myself to show you what is required and how simple it is.

Poetry Exercise 3

Write five pairs of blank (non-rhyming) iambic pentameter in which the first line of each pair is end-stopped and there are no caesuras.

Now write five pairs with (give or take) the same meaning in which there is enjambment.

Make sure that each new pair also contains at least two caesuras.

This may take a little longer than the first writing exercise, but no more than forty-five minutes. Again, it is not about quality.

To make it easier I will give you a specific subject for all five pairs.

1. Precisely what you see and hear outside your window.

2. Precisely what you’d like to eat, right this minute.

3. Precisely what you last remember dreaming about.

4. Precisely what uncompleted chores are niggling at you.

5. Precisely what you hate about your body.

Once again I have had a pitiful go myself to give you an idea of what I mean.

WITHOUT caesura or enjambment:1 Outside the WindowI hear the traffic passing by my house,While overhead the blackbirds build their nests.2 What I’d Like to EatI’d really like some biscuits I can dunk,Unsalted crisps would fill a gap as well.3 A Recent DreamI dreamt an airport man had lost my bagsAnd all my trousers ended up in Spain.4 Pesky Tasks OverdueI need to tidy up my papers nowAnd several ashtrays overflow with butts.5 My BodyToo many chins and such a crooked nose,Long flabby legs and rather stupid hair.

With caesura and enjambment:1 Outside the WindowThe song of cars, so like the roar the seaCan sing, has drowned the nesting blackbirds’ call.2 What I’d Like to EatSome biscuits, dunked–but quick in sudden stabsLike beaks. Oh, crisps as well. Unsalted, please.3 A Recent DreamSecurity buffoons, you sent my stridesTo Spain, and all my bags to God knows where.4 Pesky Tasks OverdueMy papers seethe. Now all my writing deskErupts. Volcanic mountains cough their ash.5 My BodyThree flobbing chins are bad, but worse, a bentAnd foolish nose. Long legs, fat thighs, mad hair.

These are only a guide. Go between each Before and After I have composed and see what I did to enforce the rules. Then pick up your pencil and pad and have a go yourself.

Use the same titles for your couplets that I did for mine. The key is to find a way of breaking the line, then running on to make the enjambment. It doesn’t have to be elegant, sensible or clever, mine aren’t, though I will say that the very nature of the exercise forces you, whether you intend it or not, to concentrate the sense and movement of the phrasing in a way that at least gestures towards that distillation and compactness that marks out real poetry. Here’s your blank space.

Weak Endings, Trochaic and Pyrrhic Substitutions

Let us now return to Macbeth, who is still considering whether or not he should kill Duncan. He says out loud, as indeed do you: ‘I have no spur…To prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other.–How now! what news?

Forgetting caesuras and enjambments this time, have a look at the three lines as an example of iambic pentameter. Get that pencil out and try marking each accented and unaccented syllable.

Eleven syllables! There’s a rogue extra syllable at the end of line 1, isn’t there? An unstressed orphan bringing up the rear. The line scans like this:

There is more: the next line doesn’t start with an iamb at all! Unless the actor playing Macbeth says ‘vaulting ambition’ the line goes…

The mighty Shakespeare deviating from metre? He is starting an iambic line with a tum-ti, a trochee.

Actually, in both cases he is employing two variations that are so common and necessary to lively iambic verse that they are not unusual enough even to call deviations.

We will attend to that opening trochaic foot in a moment. Let us first examine this orphan or ‘rogue’ unaccented syllable at the end of the line. It makes the line eleven syllables long or hendecasyllabic.

It results in what is called a weak or feminine ending (I hope my female readers won’t be offended by this. Blame the French, we inherited the term from them. I shall try not to use it often). Think of the most famous iambic pentameter of all:

To be or not to be that is the question

Count the syllables and mark the accents. It does the same thing (‘question’ by the way is disyllabic, two syllables, any actor who said quest-i-on would be laughed off the stage and out of Equity. It is certainly kwestchn¹¹ ).¹¹

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, butA 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.

BUT 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-DahDa-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 youBut 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 about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt youBut make allowance for their doubting too,If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd meet those two impostors just the same;And meet those two impostors just the same;If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith 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 Steele¹²has 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…Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

…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 mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

An English translation might go, in iambic pentameter:Midway upon the journey 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 ourselves be side this river

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, tetrAmeter, as pentameter is pentAmeter).

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:

OUT 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 pilgrimages¹³CHAUCER: The Canterbury Tales, General PrologueA woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 20That thou shall see the diff’rence of our spirits,I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:SHAKESPEARE: The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1How heinous had the fact been, how deservingContempt, and scorn of all to be excludedMILTON,¹⁴Samson AgonistesOur Brethren, are from Thames to Tweed departed,And of our Sisters, all the kinder hearted,To Edenborough gone, or Coacht, or Carted.DRYDEN: ‘Prologue to the University of Oxford’What can enable sots, or slaves or cowards?Alas! not all the blood of all the HOWARDS.POPE:¹⁵ Essay on ManIt gives to think that our immortal being…WORDSWORTH:¹⁶The PreludeA thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will neverPass into nothingness;KEATS: Endymion, Book OneAnd like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,ROBERT FROST: ‘Spring Pools’With guarded unconcerned accelerationSEAMUS HEANEY: ‘From the Frontier of Writing’There’s far too much encouragement for poets–WENDY COPE: ‘Engineers’ Corner’

Substitutions

I hope you can see that the feminine ending is by no means the mark of imperfect iambic pentameter. Let us return to Macbeth, who is still unsure whether or not he should stab King Duncan:To prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other.–How now! what news?

We have cleared up the first variation in this selection of three lines, the weak or unstressed ending. But what about this ‘vaulting ambition’ problem? Keats has done it too, look, at the continuation to his opening to Endymion:A thing of beauty is a joy for everIts loveliness increases: it will neverPass into nothing ness; but still will keepA bower quiet for us, and a sleepFull of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

The first feet of lines 3 and 5 are ‘inverted iambs’ or trochees. What Keats and Shakespeare have employed here is sometimes called trochaic substitution, a technique, like weak endings, too common to be considered a deviation from the iambic norm. It is mostly found, as in the above instances and the following, in the first foot of a line. You could call it a trochaic substitution, or the inversion of an iamb–it amounts to the same thing.

Mix’d in each other’s arms, and heart in heart,BYRON: Don Juan, Canto IV, XXVIIWell have ye judged, well ended long debate,Synod of gods, and like to what ye are,MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book IIFar from the madding crowd’s ignoble strifeGRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?SHAKESPEARE: Sonnet 18

That’s an interesting one, the last. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet opens in a way that allows different emphases. Is it Shall I compare thee, Shall I compare thee or Shall I compare thee? The last would be a spondaic substitution. You remember the spondee, two equally stressed beats?¹⁷What do you feel? How would you read it out? There’s no right or wrong answer.

Trochaic substitution of an interior foot is certainly not uncommon either. Let’s return to the opening of Hamlet’s great soliloquy:

Here, the fourth foot can certainly be said to be trochaic. It is helped, as most interior trochaic switches are, by the very definite caesura, marked here by the colon. The pause after the opening statement splits the line into two and allows the trochaic substitution to have the effect they usually achieve at the beginning of a line. Without that caesura at the end of the preceding foot, interior trochaic substitutions can be cumbersome.

That’s not a very successful line, frankly it reads as prose: even with the ‘and’ where it is, the instinct in reading it as verse is to make the caesural pause after ‘makes’–this resolves the rhythm for us. We don’t mind starting a phrase with a trochee, but it sounds all wrong inserted into a full flow of iambs.

That’s better: the colon gives a natural caesura with which to split the line allowing us to start the new thought with a trochee.

For this reason, you will find that initial trochaic substitution (i.e. that of the first foot) is by far the most common.Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:England hath need of thee: she is a fenWORDSWORTH: ‘Milton!’Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!KEATS: ‘Ode to Autumn’

Just as it would be a pointless limitation to disallow unstressed endings to a line, so it would be to forbid stressed beginnings. Hence trochaic substitution.

There’s one more inversion to look at before our heads burst.

Often in a line of iambic pentameter you might come across a line like this, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1:But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes

How would you scan it?

‘Contracted to thine own bright eyes’ is rather ugly, don’t we think? After all there’s no valuable distinction of meaning derived by hitting that innocent little particle. So has Shakespeare, by only the fifth line of his great sonnet sequence already blown it and mucked up his iambic pentameters?

Well no. Let’s scan it like this:¹⁸

That third foot is now pyrrhic, two unaccented beats: we’ve taken the usual stress off its second element, we have ‘demoted’ the foot, if you like. We have, in metrical jargon, effected pyrrhic substitution.

This is most likely to occur in the third or fourth foot of a line, otherwise it disrupts the primary rhythm too much. It is essential too, in order for the metre to keep its pulse, that the pyrrhic foot be followed by a proper iamb. Pyrrhic substitution results, as you can see above, in three unaccented beats in a row, which are resolved by the next accent (in this case own).

Check what I’m saying by flicking your eyes up and reading out loud. It can all seem a bit bewildering as I bombard you with references to the third foot and the second unit and so on, but so long as you keep checking and reading it out (writing it down yourself too, if it helps) you can keep track of it all and IT IS WORTH DOING.

Incidentally, Vladimir Nabokov in his Notes on Prosody is very unkind about calling these effects ‘substitutions’–he prefers to call a pyrhhic substitution a ‘scud’ or ‘false pyrrhic’ and a trochaic substitution a ‘tilted scud’ or ‘false trochee’. I am not sure this is any clearer, to be honest.

Anyway, you might have spotted that this trick, this trope, this ‘downgrading’ of one accent, has the effect of drawing extra attention to the following one. The next strong iambic beat, the own has all the more emphasis for having followed three unstressed syllables.

If the demotion were to take place in the fourth foot it would emphasise the last beat of the line, as in this pyrrhic substitution in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which as it happens also begins with a trochaic switch. READ IT OUT LOUD:

Both the excerpts above contain pyrrhic substitution, Shakespeare’s in the third foot, Owen’s in the fourth. Both end with the word ‘eyes’, but can you see how Shakespeare’s use of it in the third foot causes the stress to hammer harder down on the word own and how Owen’s use of it in the fourth really pushes home the emphasis on eyes? Which, after all, is the point the line is making, not in their hands, but in their eyes. (Incidentally, I think the trochaic substitution in the first foot also helps emphasise ‘hands’. Thus, when read out, the line contrasts hands and eyes with extra emphasis.)

Owen’s next line repeats the pyrrhic substitution in the same, fourth, foot.Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

A stressed of would be a horrid example of what’s called a wrenched accent, an unnatural stress forced in order to make the metre work: scudding over the ‘of’ and making the foot pyrrhic does not sacrifice the metre.

Owen was a poet who, like Shakespeare, really knew what he was doing. These effects are not accidental, the substitutions do not come about by chance or through some carefree inability to adhere to the form and hoping for the best. Owen studied metre and form constantly and obsessively, as did Keats, his hero, as indeed did all the great poets. They would no more be unaware of what they were doing than Rubens could be unaware of what he was doing when he applied an impasto dot of white to give shine to an eye, or than Beethoven could be unaware of what happened when he diminished a seventh or syncopated a beat. The freedom and the ease with which a master can do these things belies immense skill derived from practice.

Incidentally, when Rubens was a young man he went round Rome feverishly drawing and sketching antique statues and Old Master paintings, lying on his back, standing on ladders, endlessly varying his viewpoint so as to give himself differing angles and perspectives. He wanted to be able to paint or draw any aspect of the human form from any angle, to master foreshortening and moulding and all the other techniques, spending months on rendering hands alone. All the great poets did the equivalent in their notebooks: busying themselves endlessly with different metres, substitutions, line lengths, poetic forms and techniques. They wanted to master their art as Rubens mastered his. They say that the poet Tennyson knew the quantity of every word in the English language except ‘scissors’. A word’s quantity is essentially the sum of the duration of its vowels. We shall come to that later. The point is this: poetry is all about concentration, the concentration of mind and the concentration of thought, feeling and language into words within a rhythmic structure. In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated.

It may seem strange for us to focus in such detail on something as apparently piffling as a pyrrhic substitution, but I am convinced that a sense, an awareness, a familiarity and finally a mastery of this and all the other techniques we have seen and will see allow us a confidence and touch that the uninformed reading and writing of verse could never bestow. It is a little like changing gear in a car: it can seem cumbersome and tricky at first, but it soon becomes second nature. It is all about developing the poetic equivalent of ‘muscle memory’. With that in mind, here are some more lines featuring these stress demotions or pyrrhic substitutions. I have boxed the first two examples and explained my thinking. Here is one from the Merchant’s Tale:

You would not say ‘a roaring AND a cry’ unless the sense demanded it. Chaucer, like Owen, shows that a demotion of the fourth beat throws more weight on to the fifth: CRY. Owen demonstrates that it is possible with the second beat too.

‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’ seems a bit wrenched. The demotion allows the push here on ‘garg’ and ‘froth’ to assume greater power: ‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’.

Look at these lines from a poem that every American schoolchild knows: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, by Robert Frost. It is the literary equivalent of ‘The Night Before Christmas’, quoted and misquoted every holiday season in the States:The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go be fore I sleep,

To read the phrase ‘promisés to keep’ would be an absurd wrench, wouldn’t it? Clearly that’s a pyrrhic substitution too.

The opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III has a demoted third beat: note that the first line begins with a trochaic substitution:Now is the winter of our discontent

So here is a summary of the six new techniques we’ve learned to enrich the iambic pentameter.

1. End-stopping: how the sense, the thought, can end with the line.

2. Enjambment: how it can run through the end of a line.

3. Caesura: how a line can have a break, a breath, a pause, a gear change.

4. Weak endings: how you can end the line with an extra, weak syllable.

5. Trochaic substitution: how you can invert the iamb to make a trochee.

6. Pyrrhic substitution: how you can downgrade the beat of an interior (second, third or fourth) foot to turn it into a doubly weak or pyrrhic foot.

Poetry Exercise 4

You can probably guess what I’m going to ask for here. Sixteen unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The idea is to use pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions (five points for each), weak endings–that extra syllable at the end (two points for each) but all without going overboard and losing the primary iambic rhythm. You can also award yourself two points for every successful enjambment.

Before you embark upon your own, we are going take a look at and mark my attempt at the exercise. I have sought inspiration, if that is the word, from the headlines on today’s BBC news website and would recommend this as preferable to staring out of the window chewing the end of a pencil awaiting the Muse’s kiss. Four news stories in all.Policemen, in a shocking poll revealedThey have no time for apprehending felonsCriminals now at last are free to work.Why can’t the English play the game of cricket?Inside a tiny wooden urn are buriedThe Ashes of a great and sporting nation.¹⁹Babies are now available in femaleOr male. Hard to decide which sex I’ll pick.Maybe I’ll wait till gender is redundant.Towards the middle of a mighty oceanSquats a forgotten island and its people;The sea that laps the margins of the atollBroadcasts no mindless babble on its waves;No e-mail pesters the unsullied palm grovesNewspaper stories pass it quietly by.How long before we go there and destroy it?

I know. Pathetic, isn’t it? I hope you are filled with confidence. Once again, I must emphasise, these are no more poems than practise scales are sonatas. They are purely exercises, as yours should be. Work on solving the problems of prosody, but don’t get hung up about images, poetic sensibility and word choices. The lines and thoughts should make sense, but beyond that doggerel is acceptable.

GET YOUR PENCIL OUT and mark the metre in each line of my verses. It should be fairly clear when the line starts with a trochee, but pyrrhics can be more subjective. I shall do my marking below: see if you agree with me. P for a pyrrhic substitution, T for a trochaic. H for hendecasyllable (or for hypermetric, I suppose). E is for enjambment.

That’s a pretty clear pyrrhic in the second foot: no need to stress the ‘in’ and I reckon the rest of the line recovers its iambic tread, so five points to me.

Straight iambics, just two points for the hypermetric ending.

Five points for the initial trochee.

Five for the opening trochee (I think you’ll agree that it is ‘why can’t’, not ‘why can’t’) plus two for the weak ending.

Iambics: just two for the ending (it’s a bit like scoring for cribbage, this…)

Five for the pyrrhic and two for the ending. 7

High-scoring one here: five for the trochaic switch in the first foot, five for the pyrrhic in the fourth: plus two for the ending and two for the enjambment. The question is: does it still feel iambic with all those bells and whistles? My view is that it would if it were in the midst of more regular iambic lines, but since it is the first line of a stanza it is hard for the ear to know what is going on. A trochaic first foot allied to a weak ending gives an overall trochaic effect, especially when the middle is further vitiated by the slack syllables of the pyrrhic. Also, the end word ‘female’ is almost spondaic. So I shall deduct five for bad style.

A trochaic switch mid line for five points: since it follows a caesura the rest of the line picks up the iambic pulse adequately.

Trochaic of the first with pyrrhic of the fourth again. For some reason I don’t think this one misses its swing so much as the other, so I’ll only deduct three. Then again, perhaps it keeps its swing because it isn’t a real pyrrhic: hard not to give a push to the ‘is’ there, don’t we feel?

I make my score 106. I’m sure you could do better with your sixteen lines. To recap:

16 lines of iambic pentameter

5 points for trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions

2 points for enjambments

2 points for feminine endings

Be tough on yourself when marking. If, in a bid to make a high score, you have lost the underlying rising tread of the iambic pentameter, then deduct points with honesty. Have fun!

III

More Meters

Octameters–hexameters–heptameters–tetrameters–trimeters–dimeters–monometers

Why five feet to a line, why not four or six? Three or seven? Eight even.

Why not indeed. Here’s a list of the most likely possibilities:1 Beat–MonometerHe bangsThe drum.2 Beats–DimeterHis drumming noiseA wakes the boys.3 Beats–TrimeterHis drumming makes a noise,And wakes the sleeping boys.4 Beats–TetrameterHe bangs the drum and makes a noise,It shakes the roof and wakes the boys.5 Beats–PentameterHe bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise,It shakes the roof and wakes the sleeping boys.6 Beats–HexameterHe bangs the drum and makes the most appalling noise,It shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.7 Beats–HeptameterHe bangs the wretched drum and makes the most appalling noise,Its racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.8 Beats–OctameterHe starts to bang the wretched drum and make the most appalling noise,Its dreadful racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

I have hardly given more information in the octameter, heptameter, hexameter or pentameter than there is in the tetrameter–of course the boys are sleeping, you can’t wake someone who isn’t, and a very roof is still a roof. I have made up my own nonsense specifically to show the variation in feel when the sense or narrative is broadly the same and the number of feet marks the only real difference. Generally speaking, and I do mean very generally, the pentameter is used for ‘serious’ poetry, for contemplative, epic, heroic and dramatic verse. That doesn’t mean that the other measures can’t be. We will come to how we choose a particular form or line of verse later. At the moment we are more interested in discovering and defining terms than ascribing value or function to them. The technical difference is what concerns us, the stylistic difference is for a later section of the book.

Six feet give us a hexameter, the line of choice in most classical verse:

As a single line it works fine. The experience of writing whole poems in hexameters, in six footers, is that they turn out to be a bit cumbersome in English. The pentameter seems to fit the human breath perfectly (which is why it was used, not just by Shakespeare, but by just about all English verse dramatists). French poets and playwrights like Racine did use the hexameter or alexandrine²⁰all the time, in English verse it is rare. What’s so different about French, then? I think the most important reason is, as I made clear earlier, that French words tend not to be so varied in their accentuation as English. Why is this relevant? Well, it means that French poetry, since so many words are equally stressed, relies more on what is known as ‘quantitative measure’–divisions based on the temporal duration of long and short vowels.²¹ This is how classical Greek and Latin poetry was constructed. Most English verse–as I hope we have discovered–is metred by syllabic accentuation, the rises and falls of stress.

You can certainly try to write whole English poems composed of iambic hexameter, but I suspect you’ll find, in common with English language poets who experimented with it on and off for the best part of a thousand years, that it yields rather clumsy results. Its best use is as a closing line to stanzas, as in Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)’:And consummation comes and jars two hemispheres.

Keats ends each stanza of ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ with an alexandrine in a style derived from the verse of Edmund Spenser.She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.

Alexander Pope in his (otherwise) pentametric An Essay on Criticism was harsh on these Spenserian mannerisms and included this self-descriptive hexameter:A needless Alexandrine ends the song,That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

There are very few examples of eight-beat lines in English verse. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ is a rare successful example of a trochaic octameter:

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the Robin’s breast;In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Another very familiar example is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

You will notice Poe chooses to end the even-numbered lines strongly, docking the final weak syllable, as Tennyson does for every line of ‘Locksley Hall’. You might also notice how in reading, one tends to break up these line lengths into two manageable four-stress half-lines: Poe’s lines have very clear and unmistakable caesuras, while Tennyson’s are less forceful. The four-stress impulse in English verse is very strong, as we shall see. Nabokov, in his Notes on Prosody, suggests that the hexameter is a limit ‘beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks in two’.

Heptameters, seven-stress lines, are possible, and certainly do tend to ‘break in two’. They are known in the trade as ‘fourteeners’, referring to the usual syllable count. Here’s a line from Hardy’s ‘The Lacking Sense’.Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may

As you can see, it is perfectly iambic (though one could suggest demoting the fourth foot to a pyrrhic):

Actually, fourteeners were very popular in the sixteenth century, although Shakespeare disdained their use, a fact which has been adduced by some to damn the claims of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the Shakespearean canon, for Oxford loved them:My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways,My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days.

This preposterously over-alliterated couplet hardly seems Shakespearean–in fact, Shakespeare mocked precisely such bombastic nonsense in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the other unlettered ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, having great fun at the expense of Oxfordian fourteeners and their vulgar alliterations:But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here?Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear.

You may notice that Hardy’s example is a ‘true’ heptameter, whereas Oxford’s lines (and Shakespeare’s parody of them) are in effect so broken by the caesuras after the fourth foot that they could be written thus:My life through lingering long is lodged,In lair of loathsome ways,My death delayed to keep from life,The harm of hapless days.But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight,What dreadful dole is here?Eyes, do you see? How can it be?O dainty duck, O dear.

We can do the same thing with Kipling’s popular ‘Tommy’, which he laid out in fourteeners:Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleepIs cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bitIs five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniformsThat guard you while you sleepIs cheaper than them uniforms,An’ they’re starvation cheap;An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiersWhen they’re goin’ large a bitIs five times better businessThan paradin’ in full kit.

What we have there are verses in lines footed in alternating fours and threes: tetrameters and trimeters, a metrical scheme you will see again and again in English poetry. Such four and three beat lines are also common in verse designed for singing which, after all, uses up more breath than speech. It would be rather difficult to sing a whole heptametric line without turning purple. The long and winding road

andYou are the sunshine of my life

could be called (by an ass) iambic trimeters and tetrameters respectively, whileThat’s the way I like it

andI can’t get no satisfaction

are trochaic trimeter and tetrameter. Of course, it is fundamentally daffy to scan lyrics (a word derived from the Greek lyre, the harp-like instrument used to accompany song) since it is the musical beat that determines emphasis, not the metrical stress. You could never guess the very particular emphasis on ‘get no’ just by reading the lyrics of ‘Satisfaction’ unless you knew the tune and rhythm it was written to fit.

FOUR BEATS TO THE LINE

Wordsworth wrote ‘Daffodils’ in straight four-beat tetrameters.I wander’d lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hillsWhen all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;

Tetrameter, the four-stress line, is immensely popular in English verse. If iambic pentameter, the Heroic Line, may be described as the great joint of beef, then tetrameters are the sandwiches–the everyday form if you like, and no less capable of greatness. If you ask someone to write a poetic ditty on a Valentine’s card or something similar, nine times out of ten they will write tetrameters, whether they do so consciously or not: the four-beat instinct is deep within us, much as in music the four/four time signature is so standard as to be the default: you don’t have to write it in the score, just a letter C for Common Time.

Four stresses also mark the base length of a form we will meet later called the ballad, where they usually alternate with three-stress lines, as in the anonymous seventeenth-century ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’:And many was the feather-bedThat fluttered on the foam;And many was the good lord’s sonThat never more came home.

Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free:We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.

and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’:I never saw a man who lookedWith such a wistful eyeUpon that little tent of blueWhich prisoners call the sky.

In each of these ballad verses the first and third lines have four stresses (eight syllables) and the second and fourth lines have three (six syllables):

It might have struck you that all three extracts could have come from the same poem, despite their each being separated by roughly a hundred years. We will hold that thought until we come to look at the ballad later. You will remember, I hope, that the Earl of Oxford’s duff heptameters and Kipling’s rather better managed ones seemed to beg to be split into a similar arrangement:My life through lingering long is lodged,In lair of loathsome ways,Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniformsThat guard you while you sleep

Tetrameters, even if they follow ballad form and alternate with trimeters, don’t need to have the swing and narrative drive of a ballad: they can be used in more lyrical and contemplative poetry too, as we have already seen with Wordsworth’s use of them for his daffodils. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is perhaps the poet who most completely mastered the reflective aspect of the four-beat/three-beat measure. Almost none of her poetry is in lines of longer than four feet, yet its atmosphere of depth, privacy and (often sad) thoughtfulness is a world away from lusty narrative ballads.712²²Because I could not stop for deathHe kindly stopped for meThe carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.1612The Auctioneer of PartingHis ‘Going, going, gone’Shouts even from the Crucifix,And brings his Hammer down–He only sells the Wilderness,The prices of DespairRange from a single human HeartTo Two–not any more–

Lord Byron shows that pure four-beat tetrameters can be blissfully lyrical: note the initial trochaic substitution in the last line.She walks in beauty like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skiesAnd all that’s best of dark and brightMeets in her aspect and her eyes.

While Humbert Wolfe demonstrates here their appropriateness for comic satire:You cannot hope to bribe or twist,Thank God, the British journalist.But seeing what the man will doUnbribed, there’s no occasion to.

The above examples are of course in iambic four-beats.

Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke’s metrical version of Psalm 71 is written in trochaic tetrameters: