The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Lord, on thee my trust is grounded:Leave me not with shame confounded

As is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha:

Often stopped and gazed imploringAt the trembling Star of Evening,At the tender Star of Woman;And they heard him murmur softly

Now look at the following two four-stress lines, which reiterate the point I made earlier about question and answer: the obvious but crucial difference in the way each foot as it were distributes its weight.Trochees end their lines in weaknessIambic lines resolve with strength

But as we know, iambic lines don’t have to end with a stressed syllable: you can add an extra weak syllable (hypermetric addition). Similarly, trochaic lines can have their weak ending dropped (catalectic subtraction). In both cases you’re either adding or subtracting a weak syllable: the number of stresses stays the same.Tyger, tyger burning brightIn the forests of the night

Blake’s famous opening lines drop the natural weak ending of the fourth trochees, giving a seven syllable count and a strong resolution.Dum-di, dum-di, dum-di dum

orTrochee, trochee, trochee troke

The full trochaic line ‘Tiger, tiger burning brightly’ would be rather fatuous, don’t we feel? The conclusiveness of a strong ending frames the image so much more pleasingly. Here is the opening to Keats’s poem ‘Fancy’:Ever let the Fancy roam,Pleasure never is at home:At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Both lines of the first couplet (a couplet is a pair of rhyming lines) have their final weak endings docked. The second couplet is of four full trochees. Why?

Well, at the risk of taking us back to English classes, it is worth considering this, for the sake, if not of appreciation, then at least of one’s own poetry. The strong endings of the opening give a sense of the epigrammatic and purposeful: they offer a firm opening statement:Ever let the Fancy roam,Pleasure never is at home:

The weak endings of ‘melteth’ and ‘pelteth’ (after all, in his time Keats could perfectly well have said ‘melts’ and ‘pelts’) echo the meaning of the image by melting and popping to their end rather than banging to a solid conclusion. Sweet Pleasure’s evanescence is evoked by the evanescence of the metre. At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Did he consciously set out to do this and for that reason? Well, I think someone with a sensitive ear for the rhythms and cadences of verse wouldn’t need to be taught something like that. To anybody with the slightest instinct such use in metre would come as naturally as finding the right musical phrase for the right emotion comes to a composer. It is true, however, that Keats from an early age completely soaked himself in poetry and (despite being labelled a ‘Cockney poet’ by literary snobs of the time) experimented all his life with poetic form and constantly wrote about prosody and chewed over its nuances passionately with his friends and fellow poets. A mixture of absorption in poetry, obsession with technique and, of course, natural talent culminates in what you might call ‘poetic taste’–a feel for precisely which techniques to reach for.

Incidentally, for some reason Keats’s ‘Fancy’ was one of my favourite poems when I was a mooncalf teenager. Don’t ask me why: it is after all a slight work compared to ‘Endymion’, ‘Lamia’ and the great Odes.

MIXED FEET

Let us consider the whole issue of mixing feet within a poem. The end of writing poetry is not to write ‘perfect’ metre with every line going da-dum or dum-da into the distance, it is to use the metre you’ve chosen to reflect the meaning, mood and emotional colour of your words and images. We’ve already seen how subtle variations such as pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions stand as perfectly acceptable ways of bringing iambic pentameter to life. What about mixing up whole lines of iambic and trochaic metre in the same verse?He bangs the drums and makes a noiseScaring girls and waking boys

Nothing necessarily wrong with that either. Don’t get hung up on writing perfectly symmetrical parades of consistent rhythm. Utterance, sung or spoken, underlies poetry. Human utterance, like its heartbeat and its breathing, quickens, pauses and breaks its patterns according to states of relaxation, excitement, passion, fear and all manner of moods and feelings: this is precisely why I took so long over caesura and enjambment earlier. No one could say that the above two lines are wrong, it is surprisingly rare, however, to find two metres mixed in this fashion (in ‘literary’ verse, as opposed to popular ballad and song lyrics, at least) and you would want to alternate trochaic and iambic lines for a good reason: the ‘ear’ of the reader would note (however subconsciously) the variation and expect something from it. Perhaps in the above example the alternating trochaic lines could form a kind of chorus or explanatory aside:He bangs the drums and makes a noise(Scaring girls and waking boys) He makes a row till dawn unfurls(Waking boys and scaring girls) I never knew a greater pest(Even squirrels need a rest)He drives his wretched family wild(Spare the rod and spoil the child)

So long as you are in control of the metre, using its swing and balance to fit the mood, motion or story of your poem there is no reason not to use a variety of beats within the same piece. I would only repeat this observation: well-made poems do not mix up their metric scheme carelessly. Have you ever seen a parish magazine or some other flyer, newsletter, brochure or poster where the designer has got too excited about the number of fonts available on his computer and created a great crashing mess of different typefaces and sizes? Musical pieces often go into double time or modulate up or down for effect, but generally speaking such techniques are crass and ugly unless there is a good purpose behind it all. Most of the paintings we admire use a surprisingly small palette of colours. A profusion of herbs in a dish can cancel out each flavour or drown the main ingredients. You get the idea.

Having said all that, let’s look at the whole first stanza of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’.Tyger, tyger, burning brightIn the forests of the nightWhat immortal hand or eyeCould frame thy fearful symmetry?

As we observed earlier, these are trochaic four-stress lines (docked of their last weak syllable). That holds true of the first three lines, but what’s afoot with the last one? It is a regular iambic four-stress line. Here’s the third stanza:And what shoulder and what artCould twist the sinews of thy heart?And, when thy heart began to beat,What dread hand and what dread feet?

Trochaic first and last lines ‘enveloping’ two central iambic lines; and the poem’s penultimate stanza runs:When the stars threw down their spears,And water’d heaven with their tears,Did He smile His work to see?Did He who made the lamb make thee?

In this case we alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters. The rest of the poem is trochaic. With a little casuistry one could, I suppose, make the argument that Blake’s shift between metres ‘stripes’ the verse as a tiger is striped. I think that is more than a little tenuous: there is no plan to the changes between metre, no apparent design at work: certainly, poets in the past and present have employed metre, rhyme and even the shape of the words on a page further to conjoin form with subject matter, but I do not believe this applies here.

Nonetheless, the variations can hardly be said to spoil the poem: the docking of the final trochaic foot matches the standard male endings of the iambic. After all, one could look at it this way: are the odd lines out really iambic, or are they trochees with an extra weak syllable at the beginning? Trochees are the opposite of iambs: if you can pop a weak syllable at the end of an iambic line, why not shove one on to the beginning of a trochaic one? If you read those stanzas above, missing out the unstressed syllables at the start of each iambic line you will see what I mean. It is finally a matter of nomenclature and one’s own ear. For many modern metrists there’s no such thing as the iamb or the trochee at all, there are only lines with a set number of beats or stresses to them. Where the weak syllables come is, for them, irrelevant. They would have us believe that English verse should be treated as if it is accentual, but not accentual-syllabic. I can’t go that far, myself: there is an obvious and to my ear absolute difference between the whole nature of Hiawatha and that of, say, ‘She walks in beauty’. There certainly was to Longfellow and Byron.

Here is a well-known couplet from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’:A Robin Red breast in a Cage²³Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

That is metrically identical to my made-up hybrid line: He bangs the drums and makes a noiseScaring girls and waking boys

Heartless to quibble with Blake’s sentiment, but to most ears, trained or otherwise, it is a bit of a dud, isn’t it? This is a naïvety one expects, forgives and indeed celebrates with Blake (‘look at his paintings: couldn’t draw, couldn’t colour in’ as Professor Mackenny of Edinburgh University once excellently remarked) and from any poetic sensibility but his one might wrinkle one’s nose at such childlike versifying. If the poem went on alternating in regular fashion as I suggested with the drum-banging boy one could understand. In fact the next lines are:A dove house filled with doves and PigeonsShudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

That couplet does conform with the plan, the second line is completely trochaic, with weak ending and all, but now Blake continues with:A dog starv’d at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.

Those are both iambic lines. And the next couplet?A Horse misus’d upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human blood

Well, I mean I’m sorry, but that’s just plain bad. Isn’t it? The syntax (grammatical construction) for a start: bit wobbly isn’t it? Does he really mean that the horse is calling to heaven: the other animals don’t, surely he means the misuse of horses calls to heaven? But Blake’s sentence structure invites us to picture a calling horse. And, my dear, the scansion! Presumably Blake means to elide Heaven into the monosyllable Heav’n (a perfectly common elision and one we might remember having to sing in school hymns), but it is odd that he bothers in earlier lines to put apostrophes in ‘starv’d’ and ‘misus’d’ and even shortens through to thro’²⁴yet fails to give us an apostrophe here where it really would count: he has already used the word Heaven once without elision, as a disyllabic word, six lines earlier: perhaps, one might argue, he felt that as a holy word it shouldn’t be altered in any way. I think this unlikely, he tends not to use capitals for God, although he uses them for ‘Me’ and ‘My’ and just about every word he can (incidentally, why does Horse deserve majuscules here, but not dog, I wonder? Why Pigeon and not dove?). Well, perhaps the unelided ‘Heaven’ is a misprint: if so, it is one that all the copies²⁵of Blake I have seen repeat. It is fairly obvious that this is how he wrote it in his manuscript.

No, I think we can confidently state that there is no metrical scheme in place here: Blake seems to be in such a hurry to list the abominable treatment that animals suffer and the dire consequences attendant upon mankind if this cruelty continues that measured prosody has taken a back seat. Well, may be that’s the point. Any kind of control or cunning in versification would mediate between Blake’s righteous indignation and the conscience and compassion of the reader, resulting in ‘better’ metre perhaps, but less direct and emotionally involving poetry. A more conventional poet might have written something like this:Robin redbreasts in a cagePut all heaven in a rageDovecotes filled with doves and pigeonsShudder hell through all its regionsDogs starved at their masters’ gateAugur ruin for the state.Horses beaten on the roadCall to Heav’n for human blood.

There is a loss there: Blake’s point is that a robin, one single caged bird, is enough to put heaven in a rage (admittedly that isn’t true of the dove house, which has to be filled to cause hell to shudder, but no matter). Pluralising the animals for the sake of trochees does alter the sense, so let us try pure iambs:A robin redbreast in a cageDoth put all heaven in a rage.A dove house filled with doves and pigeonsWill shudder hell through all its regions.A dog starved at his master’s gatePredicts the ruin of the state.A horse misused upon the roadDoth call to heav’n for human blood.

Neither, incidentally, solves the curious incident of the dog starved at his master’s gate: trochaic or iambic, the line’s a bitch. Surely it is the starving that needs the emphasis? ‘A dog that starves at’s master’s gate’ would do it, but it isn’t nice.

We have seen two non-hybrid versions of the verse. Let us now remind ourselves of what Blake actually gave us:A Robin Red breast in a CagePuts all Heaven in a Rage.A dove house filled with doves and PigeonsShudders Hell thro’ all its regions.A dog starv’d at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.A Horse misus’d upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human blood.

I have mocked the scansion, syntax and manifold inconsistencies; I have had sport with these lines, but the fact is I love them. They’re messy, mongrel and mawkish but such is the spirit of Blake that somehow these things don’t matter at all–they only go to convince us of the work’s fundamental honesty and authenticity. Am I saying this because Blake is Blake and we all know that he was a Seer, a Visionary and an unique Genius? If I had never seen the lines before and didn’t know their author would I forgive them their clumsiness and ill-made infelicities? I don’t know and I don’t really care. It is a work concerned with innocence after all. And, lest we forget, this is the poem that begins with the quatrain (a quatrain is a stanza of four lines) that might usefully be considered the Poet’s Credo or Mission Statement.To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

The metre is shot to hell in every line, but who cares. It is the real thing. I think it was worth spending this much time on those lines because this is what you will do when you write your own verse–constantly make series of judgements about your metre and what ‘rules’ you can break and with what effect.

Poetry Exercise 5

It is now time, of course, to try writing your own verse of shorter measure. Here is what I want you to do: give yourself forty-five minutes; if you haven’t got the time now, come back to the exercise later. I believe it is much simpler if you have a subject, so I have selected Television. As usual I have had a go myself. Rhyming seems natural with lines of this length, but if you’d rather not, then don’t. I remind you once again that it is the versification that matters here, not any verbal or metaphysical brilliance. This is what I would like, with my attempts included.

Two quatrains of standard, eight-syllable iambic tetrameter:

They’re always chopping bits of meat–Forensic surgeons, daytime cooks.Extracting bullets, slicing hamDetecting flavours, grilling crooks.My new TV has got no knobsIt’s sleeker than a marble bowl.I’m sure this suits designer snobs,But where’s the damned remote control?

Two quatrains of alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter:

Big Brother’s on the air again,Polluting my TV.Who was it said, ‘Mankind can’t bearToo much reality?²⁶Sir Noël Coward drawled, when askedWhich programmes he thought shone:‘TV is not for watching, dear–It’s just for being on.’

Two quatrains of trochaic tetrameter: one in ‘pure trochee’ à la Hiawatha, and one with docked weak endings in the second and fourth lines, à la ‘Tyger’.

Soap stars seem to do it nightly–Slap and shag and rape each other.If I heard the plot-line rightlyDarren’s pregnant by his brother.News of bombs in Central London,Flesh and blood disintegrate.Teenage voices screaming proudly,‘Allah akbar! God is great!’

So, your turn. Relax and feel the force.

IV

Ternary Feet: we meet the anapaest and the dactyl, the molossus, the tribrach, the amphibrach and the amphimacer

Ternary Feet

Now that you are familiar with four types of two-syllable, binary (or duple as a musician might say) foot–the iamb, the trochee, the pyrrhic and the spondee–try to work out what is going on metrically in the next line.In the dark of the forest so deepI can hear all the animals creep.

Did you get the feeling that the only way to make sense of this metre is to think of the line as having feet with three elements to them, the third one bearing the beat? A kind of Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum triple rhythm? A ternary foot in metric jargon, a triple measure in music-speak.

Such a titty-tum foot is called an anapaest, to rhyme with ‘am a beast’, as if the foot is a skiing champion, Anna Piste. It is a ternary version of the iamb, in that it is a rising foot, going from weak to strong, but by way of two unstressed syllables instead of the iamb’s one.

Any purely anapaestic line is either a monometer of three syllables…Unconvinced

…a dimeter of six…Unconvinced, at a loss

…a trimeter of nine…Unconvinced, at a loss, discontent

…or a tetrameter of twelve…Unconvinced, at a loss, discontent, in a fix.

And so on. Don’t be confused: that line of twelve syllables is not a hexameter, it is a tetrameter. It has four stressed syllables.

Remember: it is the number of stresses, not the number of syllables, that determines whether it is penta-or tetra-or hexa-or any other kind of -meter:

Now look at the anapaestic tetrameter above and note one other thing: the first foot is one word, the second foot is two thirds of a single word, foot number three is two and a third words and the fourth foot three whole words. Employing a metre like the anapaest doesn’t mean every foot of a line has to be composed of an anapaestic word:

That would be ridiculous, as silly as an iambic pentameter made up of ten words, as mocked by Pope–not to mention fiendishly hard. Nor would an anapaestic tetrameter have to be made up of four pure anapaestic phrases:

The rhythm comes through just as clearly with…

or…

…where every foot has a different number of words. It is the beats that give the rhythm. Who would have thought poetry would be so arithmetical? It isn’t, of course, but prosodic analysis and scansion can be. Not that any of this really matters for our purposes: such calculations are for the academics and students of the future who will be scanning and scrutinising your work.

Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ is in anapaestic ballad form (four-stress lines alternating with three-stress lines):

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.

I suppose the best-known anapaestic poem of all (especially to Americans) is Clement Clarke Moore’s tetrametric ‘The Night Before Christmas’:

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;The stockings were hung by the chimney with care In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The second couplet has had its initial weak syllable docked in each line. This is called a clipped or acephalous (literally ‘headless’) foot. You could just as easily say the anapaest has been substituted for an iamb, it amounts to precisely the same thing.

Both the Poe and the Moore works have a characteristic lilt that begs for the verse to be set to music (which they each have been, of course), but anapaests can be very rhythmic and fast moving too: unsuited perhaps to the generality of contemplative poetry, but wonderful when evoking something like a gallop. Listen to Robert Browning’s ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’:I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and heI galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

It begs to be read out loud. You can really hear the thunder of the hooves here, don’t you think? Notice, though, that Browning also dispenses with the first weak syllable in each line. For the verse to be in ‘true’ anapaestic tetrameters it would have to go something like this (the underline represents an added syllable, not a stress):Then I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and heAnd I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

But Browning has given us clipped opening feet:Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumDa-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum.

instead of the fullTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

If you tap out the rhythms of each of the above with your fingers on the table, or just mouth them to yourself (quietly if you’re on a train or in a café, you don’t want to be stared at) I think you will agree that Browning knew what he was about. The straight anapaests are rather dull and predictable. The opening iamb or acephalous foot, Da-dum! makes the whole ride so much more dramatic and realistic, mimicking the way horses hooves fall. Which is not to say that, when well done, pure anapaests can’t work too. Byron’s poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacharib’ shows them at their best.

TAKE OUT YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THE ANAPAESTS HERE (Assyrian is three syllables, by the way, not four):The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea,And the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Byron doesn’t keep this up all the way through, however: For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

He could have written the anapaest ‘And he breathed…’ but I think his instinct to use the clipped ‘And breathed’ instead is exactly right for the conceit. It is a very subtle difference. What do you think? Try saying each alternative aloud. I think the clipping causes us to linger a tiny bit longer on the word ‘breathed’ than we would in strict anapaestic rhythm and this brings the image to life. Now, back to those standard anapaests beating:Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

Imagine that, instead of doing what Browning and Byron did and clipping off the head like so:Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumDa-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

you started with anapaests and ended with a spondee which, as I mentioned earlier, is a double-stressed foot: Hard cheese. HumdrumAnapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!Anapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!

That might remind you of the gallop from Rossini’s overture to William Tell, famously used for the TV series The Lone Ranger and the three-way orgy in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

The spondee (inasmuch as it truly exists in English) makes a great full stop, either serious like a tolling bell or comic, as in the famous knocking rhythm that Americans express as:Shave and a hair cut, two bits!

Tum-titty tum tum. Tum tum!

If you wanted to scan that line, you would say ‘haircut’ and ‘two bits’ were both spondaic. But what is ‘shave-and-a’? When you think about it, it is an anapaest in reverse. Instead of titty-tum (), it is tum-titty. (). A new ternary foot for us to meet and its name is dactyl.

THE DACTYL

As a matter of fact the earliest and greatest epics in our culture, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were written in dactylic hexameters. Remember, though, classical poetry was written in quantitative measure, where those feet were better described as ‘long short short’,—––‘wait for it’, ‘cool, not hot’, ‘smooth black pig’ rather than our sprightly tum-titty. The word dactyl comes from the Greek for ‘finger’: fingers have one long joint and two short ones. In reality, Greek metrical units are closer to musical notes in that they tell you their duration: a long syllable takes exactly twice as long to utter as a short one, hence you could say a dactyl for Greek-style quantitative verse should be written thus:

Homer’s verse didn’t swing along in a bouncy rhythmic way, it pulsed in gentle lo-o-o-ng short-short, lo-o-o-ng short-short waves, each line usually ending with a spondee. As I hope I have made pretty clear by now, that sort of metrical arrangement isn’t suited to the English tongue. We go, not by duration, but by syllabic accentuation.

Tennyson’s dialect poem ‘Northern Farmer’ shows that, as with Browning’s anapaests, a dactyl in English verse, using stressed-weak-weak syllables instead of lo-o-o-ng-short-short, has its place, also here imitating the trot of a horse’s hooves as it sounds out the word ‘property’. (I have stripped it of Tennyson’s attempts at phonetic northern brogue–‘paäins’, for example.)Proputty, proputty, proputty–that’s what I ’ears ’em sayProputty, proputty, proputty–Sam, thou’s an ass for thy pains

The poem ends with the line:

Five dactyls and a single full stop stress on the ‘way’ of ‘away’. As with anapaests, lines of pure dactyls are rather predictable and uninteresting:Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty

Just as the anapaest in its rising rhythm, its move from weak to strong, is a ternary version of the iamb, so the dactyl, in its falling rhythm, its move from strong to weak, is a ternary version of the trochee. Furthermore, just as it is rewarding to clip the first weak syllable of an anapaestic line, as we saw Browning do (in other words substitute the first foot with an iamb) so dactylic verse can be highly compelling when you dock the last weak syllable (in other words substitute the final foot with a trochee).Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-ti

Or you could use a single beat as Tennyson does above (a docked trochee, if you like):Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum.

Browning uses this kind of dactylic metre to great effect in ‘The Lost Leader’, his savage attack on Wordsworth. Browning regarded him as a sell-out for accepting the post of Poet Laureate:

Just for a handful of silver he left usJust for a riband to stick in his coat.

This creates verse with great rhythmic dash and drive. Some poets, however, in their admiration for Homer, attempted to construct quantitative English dactylic hexameters, ending them, as is common in classical verse, with spondees. Edgar Allan Poe had this to say about Longfellow’s stab at translating the Swedish dactyls of a poet called Tegner:In attempting (what never should be attempted) a literal version of both the words and the metre of this poem, Professor Longfellow has failed to do justice either to his author or himself. He has striven to do what no man ever did well and what, from the nature of the language itself, never can be well done. Unless, for example, we shall come to have an influx of spondees in our English tongue, it will always be impossible to construct an English hexameter. Our spondees, or, we should say, our spondaic words, are rare. In the Swedish they are nearly as abundant as in the Latin and Greek. We have only ‘compound’, ‘context’, ‘footfall’, and a few other similar ones.

Longfellow’s Evangeline might be considered a more successful attempt to write English dactylic hexameter in the classical style:This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks.

Poe and modern English metrists might prefer that last foot ‘hemlocks’ not be called a classical spondee but a trochee. Those last two feet, incidentally, dactyl-spondee, or more commonly dactyl-trochee, are often found as a closing rhythm known as an Adonic Line (after Sappho’s lament to Adonis: ‘O ton Adonin!’ ‘Oh, for Adonis!’). The contemporary American poet Michael Heller ends his poem ‘She’ with an excellent Adonic line (or clausula, the classical term for a closing phrase): AndI am happy, happier even then when her mouth is on me and I gasp at the ceiling.

‘Gasp at the ceiling’ is an exact ‘Oh for Adonis’ Adonic clausula. We shall meet it again when we look at Sapphic Odes in Chapter Three.

Robert Southey (Byron’s enemy) and Arthur Hugh Clough were about the only significant English poets to experiment with consistent dactylic hexameters: one of Clough’s best-known poems ‘The Bothie of Tober Na-Vuolich’ is in a kind of mixed dactylic hexameter. By happy chance, I heard a fine dactylic tetrameter on the BBC’s Shipping Forecast last night:

Dogger, cyclonic becoming northeasterly…

By all means try writing dactyls, but you will probably discover that they need to end in trochees, iambs or spondees. As a falling rhythm, there is often a pleasingly fugitive quality to dactylics, but they can sound hypnotically dreary without the affirmative closure of stressed beats at line-end.

Bernstein’s Latin rhythms in his song ‘America’ inspired a dactyl-dactyl-spondee combination from his lyricist Stephen Sondheim:

I like the city of San Juan

I know a boat you can get on

And for the chorus:

I like to be in America

Everything’s free in America.

You have to wrench the rhythm to make it work when speaking it, but the lines fit the music exactly as I have marked them. Amérícá, you’ll notice, has three stressed final syllables, a kind of ternary spondee, tum-tum-tum.

THE MOLOSSUS AND TRIBRACH

The tum-tum-tum has the splendid name molossus, like Colossus, and is a foot of three long syllables———or, if we were to use it in English poetry, three stressed syllables,. Molossus was a town in Epirus known for its huge mastiffs, so perhaps the name of the foot derives from the dog’s great bow-wow-wow. If a spondee, as Poe remarked, is rare in spoken English, how much rarer still is a molossus. We’ve seen one from Sondheim, and songwriting, where wrenched rhythms are permissible and even desirable, is precisely where we would most expect to find it. W. S. Gilbert found four triumphant examples for his matchless ‘To Sit in Solemn Silence’ from The Mikado.To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock,In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock,From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!

The molossus, like its smaller brother the spondee, is clearly impossible for whole lines of poetry, but in combination with a dactyl, for example, it seems to suit not just Gilbert’s and Sondheim’s lyrics as above, but also call and response chants and playful interludes, like this exchange between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.Why do you bother me? Go to hell!I am your destiny. Can’t you tell?You’re not my father. Eat my shorts.Come to the dark side. Feel the force.

As you might have guessed, that isn’t a poem, but a children’s skipping rhyme popular in the eighties. Lines three and four use a trochaic substitution for the dactyl in their second foot, but I wouldn’t recommend going on to a playground and pointing this out.

I suppose Tennyson’sBreak, break, breakAt the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

could be said to start with a molossus, followed by two anapaests and a spondee.

If a molossus is the ternary equivalent of the spondee, is there a ternary version of the pyrrhic foot too? Well, you bet your boots there is and it is called a tribrach (literally three short). A molossus you might use, but a tribrach? Unlikely. Of course, it is very possible that a line of your verse would contain three unstressed syllables in a row, as we know from pyrrhic substitution in lines of binary feet, but no one would call such examples tribrachs. I only mention it for completeness and because I care so deeply for your soul.

THE AMPHIBRACH

Another ternary, or triple, foot is the amphibrach, though it is immensely doubtful whether you’ll have cause to use this one a great deal either. Amphi in Greek means ‘on both sides’ (as in an amphitheatre) and brachys means ‘short’, so an amphibrach is short on both sides. All of which means it is a triplet consisting of two short or unstressed syllables either side of a long or stressed one: --—-or, in English verse: . ‘Romantic’ and ‘deluded’ are both amphibrachic words and believe me, you’d have to be romantic and deluded to try and write consistent amphibrachic poetry. Romantic, deluded, a total disaster.Don’t do it I beg you, self-slaughter is faster

Goethe and later German-language poets like Rilke were fond of it and it can occasionally be found (mixed with other metres) in English verse. Byron experimented with it, but the poet who seemed most taken with the metre was Matthew Prior. This is the opening line of ‘Jinny the Just’.

And this of ‘From my own Monument’:

You might think amphibrachs (with the weak ending docked) lurk in this old rhyming proverb:

But that’s just plain silly:²⁷it is actually more like the metre of Browning’s ‘Ghent to Aix’: anapaests with the opening syllable docked.If wishes were horses then beggars would rideI sprang to the saddle and Joris and he.

Just as my amphibrachic doggerel could be called a clipped anapaestic line with a weak ending:Romantic, deluded, a total disaster.Don’t do it I beg you, self-slaughter is faster

Some metrists claim the amphibrach can be found in English poetry. You will see it and hear it in perhaps the most popular of all verse forms extant, they say. I wonder if you can tell what this form is, just by READING OUT THE RHYTHM?

Ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-tiTi-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-tiTi-tum-ti ti-tumTi-tum-ti ti-tumTi-tum-ti ti-tum-ti ti-tum-ti

It is, of course, the limerick.There was a young man from AustraliaWho painted his arse like a dahlia.Just tuppence a smellWas all very well,But fourpence a lick was a failure.

So, next time someone tells you a limerick you can inform them that it is verse made up of three lines of amphibrachic trimeter with two internal lines of catalectic amphibrachic dimeter. You would be punched very hard in the face for pointing this out, but you could do it. Anyway, the whole thing falls down if your limerick involves a monosyllabic hero:There was a young chaplain from King’s,Who discoursed about God and such things:But his deepest desireWas a boy in the choirWith a bottom like jelly on springs.Ti-tum titty-tum titty-tumTitty-tum titty-tum titty-tumTitty-tum titty-tumTitty-tum titty-tumTitty-tum titty-tum titty-tum

You don’t get much more anapaestic than that. A pederastic anapaestic quintain, ²⁸²⁸in fact. Most people would say that limericks are certainly anapaestic in nature and that amphibrachs belong only in classical quantitative verse. Most people, for once, would be right. The trouble is, if you vary an amphibrachic line even slightly (which you’d certainly want to do whether it was limerick or any other kind of poem), the metre then becomes impossible to distinguish from any anapaestic or dactylic metre or a mixture of all the feet we’ve already come to know and love. Simpler in verse of triple feet to talk only of rising three-stress rhythms (anapaests) and falling three-stress rhythms (dactyls). But by all means try writing with amphibrachs as an exercise to help flex your metric muscles, much as a piano student rattles out arpeggios or a golfer practises approach shots.

THE AMPHIMACER

It follows that if there is a name for a three-syllable foot with the beat in the middle (romantic, despondent, unyielding) there will be a name for a three-syllable foot with a beat either side of an un stressed middle (tamper proof, hand to mouth, Oxford Road).²⁹ Sure enough: the amphimacer (macro, or long, on both sides) also known as the cretic foot (after the Cretan poet Thaletas) goes tum-ti-tum in answer to the amphibrach’s ti-tum-ti. Tennyson’s ‘The Oak’, which is short enough to reproduce here in full, is written in amphimacers and is also an example of that rare breed, a poem written in monometer, lines of just one foot. It could also be regarded as a pattern or shaped poem (of which more later) inasmuch as its layout suggests its subject, an oak tree.Live thy life,Young and old,Like yon oak,Bright in spring,Living gold;Summer-richThen; and thenAutumn-changed,Soberer huedGold again.All his leavesFall’n at length,Look, he stands,Trunk and bough,Naked strength.

Alexander Pope a century earlier had written something similar as a tribute to his friend Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels:In amazeLost I gazeCan our eyesReach thy size?

…and so on. Tennyson’s is more successful, I think. You won’t find too many other amphimacers on your poetic travels: once again, English poets, prosodists and metrists don’t really believe in them. Maybe you will be the one to change their minds.

QUATERNARY FEET

Can one have metrical units of four syllables? Quaternary feet? Well, in classical poetry they certainly existed, but in English verse they are scarce indeed. Suppose we wrote this:

That’s a hexameter of alternating pyrrhic and spondaic feet and might make a variant closing or opening line to a verse, but would be hard to keep up for a whole poem. However, you could look at it as a trimeter:

The name for this titty-tum-tum foot is a double iamb, sometimes called an ionic minor. Again, these are incredibly rare in English poetry. One such foot might be used for emphasis, variation or the capturing of a specific speech pattern, but it is never going to form the metrical pattern for a whole poem, save for the purposes of a prosodic equivalent of a Chopin étude, in other words as a kind of training exercise. Whether you call the above line an ionic minor or double iambic trimeter, a pyrrhic spondaic hexameter or any other damned thing really doesn’t matter. Rather insanely there is a quaternary foot called a diamb, which goes ti-tum-ti tum, but for our purposes that is not a foot of four, it is simply two standard iambic feet. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a diamb. Some people, including a couple of modern practising poets I have come across, like the double iamb, however, and would argue that the Wilfred Owen line I scanned as a pyrrhic earlier:

Should properly be called a double iamb or ionic minor since ‘good-bye’ is double-stressed:

Well, hours of lively debate down the pub over that one. We will tiptoe away and leave them to it.

You may have guessed that if a double iamb or ionic minor goes titty-tum-tum, then an ionic major might well do the opposite: tum-tum-titty, tum-tum-titty:: ‘make much of it’, that sort of rhythm:Lee Harvey the lone gunman, did cold heartedlyShoot fatally John Kennedy: poor Jacqueline.

You’d be right to think it ought to be called a double trochee too, but so far as I am aware this term isn’t used for such a foot, just ionic major.

For the record, you’ll find the other quaternary feet in the table at the end of this chapter: they include the antispast, the choriamb and the epitrite and paeon families. Again, good for name-dropping at parties, but like the other measures of four, vestiges of Greek poetry that really don’t have a useful place in the garden of English verse. Rupert Brooke experimented with accentual versions of choriambs, which go tum-titty-tum: Billy the Kid. True classical choriambic verse lines should start with a spondee followed by choriambs and a pyrrhic:

Brooke came up with lines like:Light-foot dance in the woods, whisper of life, woo me to wayfaring

To make the last two syllables a pyrrhic foot you have to read the word as ‘wafering’, which is not quite what Brooke means. He, of course, was classically educated to a degree unimaginable today and would from his early teens have written Greek and Latin poems scanned according to quantitative vowel length, not stress. The vast bulk of successful English verse is, as we know, accentual-syllabic. Nonetheless, he shows that all the metres lie in readiness, waiting for someone to experiment with them. The problem comes when a form is so specific as to cause you to cast about for what fits the metre rather than what fits the true sense of what you want to say. How far the meaning and feeling drives you and how far, as a poet, you allow form and metre to guide you where you never expected to go is for a later section of the book.

There is another kind of native metre, however, the accentual, at which we will take a look when you have completed one more drill.

Poetry Exercise 6

Write some anapaestic hexameters describing how to get to your house.

Just as far as the motorway takes you then straight past theLakenheath bend.Take a left on the Narborough Road then a right when youcome to the end.It’s the house with the shutters all closed and a garden that’s frankly a slum.When you’re there, why not park round the back or justhoot on your horn till I come?

And some dactylic pentameter on the subject of cows. For fun these should be in the classical manner: four dactyls and a spondee: try to make the spondee as spondaic as the English tongue will allow–two solid bovine stressed syllables.

Standing in randomly curious huddles in long grassPatient as statues, but twitching and steaming like stoppedtrainsPensively waiting for something to happen that just won’tProbably thinking we’re nervous and skittish as new calves.

Your turn now. You have forty minutes for your two verses.

V

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Accentual verse–alliteration and the two-beat hemistich

English verse sprang, like the English language, from two principal sources, Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon. From the Greeks and Romans we took ordered syllabic measures, from the Old English we took accent. We put them together to make the native accentual-syllabic verse that we have been looking at thus far. It is the classical stream that had the most obvious influence on our poetry and certainly on the technical language we use to describe it, but the Anglo-Saxon tributary has carved its way through our literary landscape too. For hundreds of years it lay isolated, like an old oxbow lake, cut off from the flow, but over the last century or more it has snaked its way back into the mainstream. It is worth dipping our toes in to see if we find it congenial. I suspect that after the syllable counting and footwatching of the foregoing pages, you will find its comparative freedom a great delight.

ANGLO-SAXON and OLD ENGLISH are (more or less) interchangeable terms used for verse written in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. MIDDLE ENGLISH or MEDIEVAL applies to a later, post-Norman revival of the Old English style. These are loose ascriptions but will do for our purposes.

With Old English poetry there is NO SYLLABIC COUNT and there is NO RHYME. Is it free verse, then, unbounded by rules? By no means. Old English verse is distinctly patterned. Until now we have been looking at metre composed according to rules of syllabic accentuation: Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed according to rules of accent only: it is a form of accentual verse. Accentual-alliterative to be precise. Oo-er, sounds a bit scary. It really isn’t, I promise you.

Alliteration is the trick of beginning a succession of words with the same consonant.³⁰W. S. Gilbert’s ‘life-long lock’, ‘short sharp shock’ and ‘big black block’ are examples of alliterative phrases that we have already met. Alliteration is still rife in English–advertisers and magazine sub-editors seem obsessed with it. Next time you find yourself out and about with your notebook, write down examples from advertising hoardings and newspaper headlines. It is an English disease: you won’t find it to anything like the same degree in Spanish, French or Italian. It lives on in phrases like ‘wit and wisdom’, ‘parent power’, ‘feast or famine’, ‘sweet sixteen’, ‘dirty dozen’, ‘buy British’, ‘prim and proper’, ‘tiger in your tank’, ‘you can be sure of Shell’ and so on. As we have seen, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream mocked its overuse when Bottom and his friends attempt dramatic verse. Here is another part of their dreadful ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;

That is cast in standard Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Old English verse made no such regular, organised use of iambs or any other kind of foot; instead, their verse was based on a much simpler kind of accentuation. The poetic line is divided in two. Two parts, each containing two stressed elements, two beats. The Greek for half a line is hemistich (pronounced hemmy-stick) and so, Greek being the language even of native English prosody, hemistich is the word commonly used to describe the Anglo-Saxon half-line.

Each hemistich must contain two stressed syllables. It doesn’t matter where they come or how many unstressed syllables surround them. For now, we will call the stressed syllables one, two, three and four. One and two are placed in the first hemistich, three and four in the second. I have left a deliberately wide gap to denote the vital caesura that marks the division into hemistichs.

One comes along with two

and three is there with four

Let old one take two’s hand

while young three has a word with four

Here come one and two

three is there with four

Although ‘comes’, ‘along’, ‘there’, ‘hand’, ‘young’ and ‘word’ might seem to be words which ought properly to receive some stress, it is only the numbers here that take the primary accent. Try reading the three lines aloud, deliberately hitting the numbers hard.

You get the idea. Of course there will always be minor, secondary stresses on the other words, but it is those four stressed elements that matter. You could say, if you love odd words as much as most poets do, that a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is in reality a syzygy of dipodic hemistichs. A pair of yoked two-foot half-lines, in other words. But I prefer syzygy. It really is a word, I promise you.³¹

Now for the alliterative principle, christened by Michael Alexander, Anglo-Saxon scholar and translator of Beowulf, the BANG, BANG, BANG–CRASH! rule.

ONE, TWO AND THREE ARE ALLITERATED, FOUR ISN’T

It is as simple as that. No rhyming, so syllable counting. In fact, why bother with the word hemistich at all? The line is divided into two: the first half has bang and bang, and the second half has bang and crash. That’s all you really need to know. Let us scan this kind of metre with bold for the first three beats and bold-underline for the fourth, to mark its unalliterated difference.

It embarks with a bang

sucking breath from the lungs

And rolls on directly

as rapid as lightning.

The speed and the splendour

come spilling like wine

Compellingly perfect and

appealingly clear

The most venerable invention

conveniently simple.

Important to note that it is the stressed syllables that matter: ‘compelling’ and ‘appealing’ are perfectly legitimate alliteration words, as are ‘invention’ and ‘convenient’, ‘rolls’ and ‘directly’. So long as the stress falls heavily enough on the syllable belonging to the alliterating consonant, everything’s hotsy-totsy and right as a trivet. And I say again, because it might seem unusual after all the syllabic counting of the previous section of the book, IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY SYLLABLES THERE ARE, ONLY HOW MANY BEATS. Occasionally, in defiance of the b-b-b-crash rule you may see the fourth beat alliterate with the others, but usually it does not.

Although I said that it does not matter where in each half of the line the stressed elements go, it is close enough to a rule to say that the fourth stress (the CRASH) is very likely to be in the last word of the line, which may (like ‘lightning’ and ‘simple’ above) have a feminine ending.

I could give you some examples of Anglo-Saxon verse, but they involve special letters (yoghs, eths and thorns) and the language is distant enough from our own to be virtually incomprehensible to all but the initiated.

Medieval verse is not so tricky to decipher. Round about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English poets began to write once more in the Anglo-Saxon style: this flowering, known as the Alliterative Revival, gave rise to some magnificent works. Here is the opening to William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’.³²In a somer sesoun, whan softe was the sonneI shope me into shroudes, as I a shep were,In habite as an heremite, unholy of werkes,Wente forth in the world wondres to here,And saw many selles and sellcouthe thynges.

You hardly need to know what every word means, but a rough translation would be:One summer, when the sun was gentleI dressed myself in rough clothes like a shepherdIn the habit of a lazy hermit³³Went forth into the world to hear wondersAnd saw many marvels and strange things.

You will notice that Langland does open with bang, bang, bang–bang. Perhaps it is his way of beginning his poem with special hoopla. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous work from the same period (late fourteenth century: contemporary with Chaucer) opens thus: Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at TroyeThe borgh brittened and brent to brondez and askezThe tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroghtWatz tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe;

My spellcheck has just resigned, but no matter. Here is a basic translation:Since the siege and the assault ceased at TroyThe town destroyed and burned to brands and ashesThe man that the wiles of treason there wroughtWas tried for his treachery, the veriest on earth;

The Gawain Poet (as he is known in the sexy world of medieval studies–he is considered by some to be the author of three other alliterative works–Pearl, Patience and Purity) occasionally breaks the ‘rule’ and includes an extra alliterating word, and therefore, one must assume, an extra beat, as he does here in the second line.

Modern poets (by which I mean any from the last hundred years) have tried their hands at this kind of verse with varying degrees of accomplishment. This is a perfect Langlandian four-stress alliterated line in two hemistichs and comes from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:On a bleak background of bald stone.

Ezra Pound’s ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo-Saxon’ contains lines like ‘Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth’ and ‘Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight’ but for the most part it does not follow the hemistich b-b-b-c pattern with such exactness. Among the more successful in this manner was that great prosodic experimenter, W.H. Auden. These extracts are from his verse drama The Age of Anxiety.Deep in my dark the dream shinesYes, of you, you dear always;My cause to cry, cold but myStory still, still my music.Mild rose the moon, moving through ourNaked nights: tonight it rains;Black umbrellas blossom out;Gone the gold, my golden ball.

What Auden manages, which other workers in this field often do not, is to imbue the verse with a sense of the modern and the living. He uses enjambment (something very rarely done by Old English and medieval poets) to help create a sense of flow. A grim failing when writing in alliterative four-stress lines is to overdo the Saxon and produce verse that is the poetic equivalent of morris dancing or Hobbit-speak.³⁴ When reading such verse out loud you feel the urge to put a finger to your ear and chant nasally like a bad folk singer. This unpleasantness can be aggravated by an over-reliance on a trope known as a kenning. Kennings are found in great profusion in Anglo-Saxon, Old German and especially Norse poetry. They are a kind of compound metonym (a metaphoric trope, see the glossary) used to represent a single object, person or concept: thus a ship becomes an oar steed, the sea is the whale road or the gannet’s bath (hron-rade or ganotes-bae?,) and din of spears would stand for ‘battle’. My favourite is brow-stars for eyes. Eddic and Icelandic bards were very fond of these devices: I suppose modern equivalents would be iron horse for train, chalk face for the classroom, fleapit for cinema, bunfight for party, devil’s dandruff for cocaine and Hershey highway for…well, ask your mother.

Modern prosodists and teachers (perhaps in a tragic and doomed attempt to get young people interested) have described alliterative-accentual verse of this kind as a sort of Old English forerunner of hip-hop. There is no doubt that hip-hop will often favour the four-beat line, as the Blazin’ Squad remind us…Me and the boys, we’ll be blazin’ it up

And certainly MC Hammer’s ‘Let’s Get It Started’ can be said to be formed in perfect hemistichs, two beats to each. Nobody knows how a rapper really feelsA mind full of rhymes, and a tongue of steelJust put on the Hammer, and you will be rewardedMy beat is ever boomin, and you know I get it started

To scan such lyrics in the classical manner would clearly be even more absurd than comparing them to Anglo-Saxon hemistichs, but somewhere between sociology, anthropology, prosody and neuro-linguistics there could be found an answer as to why a four-beat line divided in two has continued to have such resonance for well over a millennium. For our purposes, it can do no harm to be familiar with the feel of the Anglo-Saxon split line. To that end, we come to…

Poetry Exercise 7

Write a piece of verse following the rules above: each half-line to contain two beats, all four following the bang, bang, bang–crash rule (in other words alliteration on the first three beats).

To make it easier, I would suggest finding something very specific to write about. Poetry comes much more easily when concrete thoughts and images are brought to mind. For the sake of this exercise, since it is getting on for lunchtime and I am hungry, I suggest eighteen or twenty lines on the subject of what you would like, and wouldn’t like, to eat right this minute.

Once again, I have scribbled down some drivel to show you that quality is not the point here, just the flexing of your new accentual-alliterative muscles. I have not been able to resist rhyming the last two lines, something entirely unnecessary and, frankly, unacceptable. You will do much better, I know.Figs are too fussy and fish too dullI’m quite fond of quince, but I question its point.Most sushi is salty and somehow too rawI can’t abide bagels and beans make me fartThere’s something so sad about salmon and dillAnd goose eggs and gherkins are ghastlier still.But cheese smeared with chutney is cheerful enoughSo I’ll settle for sandwiches, sliced very thick The brownest of bread, buttered with love.A plate of ploughman’s will pleasure me well,I’ll lunch like a lord, then labour till fourWhen teacakes and toast will tempt me once more.

Sprung RhythmStress is the life of it.GMH–letter to Robert Bridges

One single name rises above all others when considering the influence of Anglo-Saxon modalities on modern poetry. Well–three single names, come to think of it…

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

It is possible that you came across this mysterious Jesuit priest’s verse at school and that someone had the dreadful task of trying to explain to you how sprung rhythm worked. Relax: it is like Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Only three people in the world understand it, one is dead, the other has gone mad and the third is me, and I have forgotten.

Hopkins was a nineteenth-century English–Welsh poet who developed his own metrics. Calling the system ‘sprung rhythm’, he marked his verse with accents, loops and foot divisions to demonstrate how his stresses should fall. Among his prosodic inventions were such devices as ‘outriders’, ‘roving over’ and ‘hanging stress’: these have their counterparts or at least rough equivalents in the sain and lusg that make up cynghanedd, the sound system of ancient Welsh poetry, which Hopkins had studied deeply. I am not going to go into them here for two simple reasons: firstly, they make my head ache and secondly, I think they would only be usefully covered in a much more detailed book than this aspires to be. If you really want to get to grips with what he was up to, I recommend a library. H is collected letters are available in academic bookshops and university collections; in these he explains to fellow poets like Robert Bridges and Coventry Patmore what he felt he was doing. Personally I find reading his poems a supreme pleasure unless I am trying to figure out their underlying metrical schemes.

Here is one of his best-known works ‘Pied Beauty’. YOU ARE

STILL READING OUT LOUD AREN’ T YOU? GOOD.

GLORY be to God for dappled things–

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ as he himself wrote of the windhover. I am sure you have seen that most of the words are Anglo-Saxon in origin, very few Latinate words there at all (counter, original, colour and trout are the only ones I am sure of ), the alliteration is fierce throughout, though not in the strict bang, bang, bang–crash! form we saw in Langland. You probably don’t need to count syllables to be able to tell that there is no standard metric regularity here. His own accents on ‘áll trádes’ reveal the importance he places on stress and the unusual nature of its disposition.

Now read out the opening of ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’. The endearing title refers to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who believed that impermanence, the perpetual flux of all nature, is central to our understanding of existence and that clouds, air, earth and fire constantly transmute one into the other. The language again is almost entirely Anglo-Saxon in derivation. Hopkins uses virgules to mark the long lines for us into hemistichs.CLOUD PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows| flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-Built thoroughfare: heaven roisterers, in gay-gangs| they throng; they glitter in marches,Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash,| wherever an elm arches,Shivelights and shadowtackle in long| lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Essentially his technique was all about compression: sprung rhythm squeezes out weak or ‘slack’ syllables and condenses the strong stresses, one to each foot. ‘Sprung rhythm makes verse stressy,’ he wrote to his brother Everard, ‘it purges it to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm, as poetry in general is brighter than common speech.’

Writing to Bridges of his poem ‘The Eurydice’ he said this: ‘you must not slovenly read it with the eyes but with your ears as if the paper were declaiming it at you. For instance the line “she had come from a cruise training seamen” read without stress is mere Lloyds Shipping Intelligence; properly read it is quite a different story. Stress is the life of it.’ My italics, my stress.

The manner was designed to create an outward, poetic form (‘instress’) that mirrored what he saw as the ‘inscape’ of the world. He said in a letter to Patmore that stress is ‘the making of a thing more, or making it markedly, what it already is; it is the bringing out its nature’. His sense of instress and inscape is not unlike the medieval idea of haecceity or ‘thisness’³⁵and the later, modernist obsession with quiddity (‘whatness’). If such exquisite words are leaving you all of a doo-dah, it is worth remembering that for those of us with a high doctrine of poetry, the art is precisely concerned with precision, exactly about the exact, fundamentally found in the fundamental, concretely concrete, radically rooted in the thisness and whatness of everything. Poets, like painters, look hard for the exact nature of things and feelings, what they really, really are. Just as painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to move their form on, tried to find new ways to represent the ‘concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’ that T. E. Hulme saw as reality, so Hopkins attempted to create a prosodic scheme that went beyond the calm, regular certainties of iambs and anapaests (‘running rhythm’ as he called traditional metrics) in order to find a system that mirrored the (for him) overwhelming complexity, density and richness of nature. How they mocked Cézanne and Matisse for their pretension and oddity, yet how truthful to us their representations of nature now seem. The idiosyncrasy of Hopkins is likewise apparent, yet who can argue with such a concrete realisation of the skies? ‘Cloud puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows…’ The density and relentless energy of his stresses and word-yokings are his way of relaying to us the density and relentless energy of experience. There is nothing ‘primitivist’, ‘folksy’ or ‘naïve’ in Hopkins’s appropriation of indigenous, pre-Renaissance poetics, his verse strikes our ear as powerfully modern, complex and tense. ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness,’ he wrote to Bridges in 1879. ‘It is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’

One more excerpt, this time from ‘The Caged Skylark’, which, as you will see, refers to us more than to the bird:As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cageMan’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.

How different from Blake’s Robin Red breast in its cage…

Five of those twenty-four syllables are slack and squeezed into the lightest of scudding trips (in order: a, -ed, a, -it, his), while the in of both lines takes fractionally more push. The others, with varying degrees of weight that you might like to decide upon, are stressed: I have emboldened the words that seem to me to take the primary stress, but I could well be wrong. Incidentally, ‘bone-house’ to mean ‘body’ is an example of a kenning: it doesn’t take too much to see that the adjectival ‘dare-gale’ could easily cross over into another kenning too.

All of which demonstrates, I hope, the way in which Hopkins backwards-leapfrogged the Romantics, the Augustans (Pope, Dryden et al.), Shakespeare, Milton and even Chaucer, to forge a distinct poetics of stress metre from the ancient verse of the Welsh, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon traditions. In turn, many British twentieth-century poets looked back the shorter distance to Hopkins, over the shoulders of Eliot, Pound and Yeats. I find it hard to read much of Ted Hughes, for example, without hearing Hopkins’s distinct music. Here are two fragments from ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’ for you to recite to yourself.They clatterOver worthless moraines, tossingTheir Ancient Briton draggle-tassel sheepskinsOr pose, in the rain-smoke, like warriors–…This lightning-broken huddle of summitsThis god-of-what-nobody-wants

Or this, from ‘Eagle’:The huddle-shawled lightning-faced warriorStamps his shaggy-trousered danceOn an altar of blood.

Certainly the sensibility is different: Hopkins is all wonderment, worship, dazzle and delight, where Hughes is often (but certainly not always) in a big mood: filled with disgust, doubt and granite contempt. Nonetheless, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the generally four-stressed split line and use of alliteration and other ‘echoic’ devices (we’ll come to them in a later chapter) reveal much common ground. Many modern British poets show the influence of ancient forms filtered through Hopkins. We’ve already met this perfect Langlandian line from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

On a bleak background of bald stone.

From the same poem comes this:the leaves’Intricate filigree falls, and who shall renewIts brisk pattern?

We feel a faint echo of Hopkins there, I think, for all that it is more controlled and syntactically conventional. I am not denying the individuality of Hughes or Thomas: the point is that Hopkins cleared a pathway that had long been overgrown, a pathway that in the twentieth century became something of a well-trodden thoroughfare, almost a thronging concourse. Hopkins himself said in a letter to Bridges in 1888 after he had just completed the ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, inspired as it was by the distillation ‘of a great deal of early philosophical thought’:…the liquor of the distillation did not taste very Greek, did it? The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.

I have taken a little time over the style, purpose and influence of Hopkins because his oppo, as you might say, Walt Whitman–very different man, but so alike too–was busy in America tearing up the prosodic manuals round about the time Hopkins was experimenting with his sprung rhythms.

Whitman is considered by many to be the father of English language free verse³⁶: verse without traditional patterning, stanza form, rhyme, metre, syllabic count or regular accentuation. Since such verse is beyond the reach and aim of this book, much of the pleasures of Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, the American ‘Open Field’ School and Whitman³⁷himself (and very real pleasures they are) will not be looked at here. As I have already said, I do not look down on free verse at all: I admire the poet who can master it.

There are two kingdoms of life: Flora and Fauna. In the natural history of poetry there are likewise two kingdoms: there is the kingdom of Accentual-Syllabic Verse and there is the kingdom of Accentual Verse.

Hang on a mo…

There are actually three kingdoms in the natural world–we have forgotten the kingdom of Fungi. And likewise there is a third kingdom of Poetry: the Kingdom of Syllabic verse.

VI

Syllabic Verse

These three then:

A accentual-syllabic verse—the number of syllables and stresses in a line is fixed.

B accentual verse—the number of stresses in a line is fixed, but the number of syllables varies (includes alliterative-accentual verse).

C syllabic verse—the number of syllables in a line is fixed, but the number of stresses varies.

A Meters and feet—iambs, pentameters, trochees, tetrameters and so on.

B Anglo-Saxon four-stress verse—Hopkins and much song, ballad, folk, hip-hop and nursery rhyme forms.

C ??

We have spent a fair amount of time looking at categories A and B but C remains unexplored.

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point?

Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it. Much syllabic verse is from other linguistic cultures than our own. Perhaps the best known is the Japanese haiku which, as you may already know, is a three-line verse of five, seven and five syllables. In Japanese this syllable count is imperative and the form contains other rules which we can examine (as well as seeing whether it is feasible to write haikus in the strict Japanese manner in English) in the chapter on Verse Forms. The Tagalog tanaga is another such syllabic measured verse-form. Japanese and Tagalog³⁸ are syllable-timed languages³⁹as are Spanish and many others European and worldwide. English, however, is stress-timed. What this means is beyond the scope of this book (or my poor grasp of phono-linguistics) but the upshot is that while verse ordered by syllabic count is popular in many other cultures, and indeed is often the norm, it is a rarity in English, since the lack of equal spacing between syllables in our stress-timed utterance renders such elaborate schemes very different from the foreign mode. They will never carry the music that native speakers of syllable-timed languages find in their syllabic verse, the English type involves a mostly visual engagement with the reader, sometimes resulting in a kind of concrete or shaped poetry. The moment a poet writing in this manner tries to arrange the stress–voilà!–we arrive back where we started at accentual-syllabic verse and our good friend the metric foot.

Nonetheless English-language poets have tried to write syllabic verse. The history of it may be stated briefly: with the exception of a few Elizabethan examples the mode did not come into prominence until Hopkins’s friend Robert Bridges wrote extensively on the subject and in the manner–including his unreadable ‘The Testament of Beauty’, five thousand lines of twelve-syllable tedium.⁴⁰His daughter Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977) took up the standard and wrote many syllabic poems, usually in lines of equal syllabic count, managing artfully to avoid iambic or any other regular stress patterns, as in the decasyllabic ‘Still Life’, a poem published in 1936:Through the open French window the warm sun lights up the polished breakfast table, laidround a bowl of crimson roses, for one–a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayednear it a melon, peaches, figs, small hotrolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,and, heaped, on a salver, the morning’s post.

Note that ‘porcelain’ in true upper-class British would have to be pronounced ‘porslin’ to make the count work. Some kind of form is offered by the rhyming–one feels otherwise that the heavily run-on lines would be in danger of dissolving the work into prose. It was Daryush’s exact contemporary the American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1969) who fully developed the manner. Her style of scrupulous, visually arresting syllabic verse has been highly influential. Here is an extract from her poem ‘The Fish’ with its syllable count of 1,3,9,6,8 per stanza.

As you can see, the count is important enough to sever words in something much fiercer than a usual enjambment. The apparent randomness is held in check by delicate rhyming: this/edifice, and/stand.

‘I repudiate syllabic verse’ Moore herself sniffed to her editor and went further in interview:

I do not know what syllabic verse is, can find no appropriate application for it. To be more precise, to raise to the status of science a mere counting of syllables seems to me frivolous.

As Dr Peter Wilson of London Metropolitan University has pointed out, ‘…since it is clear that many of her finest poems could not have been written in the form they were without the counting of syllables, this comment is somewhat disingenuous.’ Other poets who have used syllabics include Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn and Donald Justice, this from the latter’s ‘The Tourist from Syracuse’:You would not recognize me.Mine is the face which blooms inThe dank mirrors of washroomsAs you grope for the light switch.

Between the Daryush and the Moore I hope you can see that there are possibilities in this verse mode. There is form, there is shape. If you like the looser, almost prose-poem approach, then writing in syllabics allows you the best of both worlds: structure to help organise thoughts and feelings into verse, and freedom from what some poets regard as the jackboot march of metrical feet. The beauty of such structures is that they are self-imposed, they are not handed down by our poetic forebears. That is their beauty but also their terror. When writing syllabics you are on your own.

It must be time for another exercise.

Poetry Exercise 8

Two stanzas of alternating seven-and five-line syllabic verse: subject Rain.

Two stanzas of verse running 3, 6, 1, 4, 8, 4, 1, 6, 3: subject Hygiene.

Here are my attempts, vague rhymes in the first, some in the second: you don’t have to:Rainthey say there’s a taste before it comes; a tin tanglike tonguing a batteryor a cola canI know that I can’t smell itbut the animalsglumly lowering their headscan foretell its fall:they can remember rains pastas I come closertheir eyewhites flash in fear ofanother NoahHygieneI’m filthOn the outside I stink.But,There are peopleSo cleansed of dirt it makes you thinkUnhygienicThoughtsOf them. I’d much ratherStay filthy.Their latherCan’t reach where they reek,SudsCan’t soap inside.All hosed, scrubbed and oilily sleekThey’re still deep dyedTheyCan stand all day and drenchThey still stench.

We have come to the end of our chapter on metrical modes. It is by no means complete. If you were (heaven forbid) to go no further with my book, I believe you would already be a much stronger and more confident poet for having read thus far. But please don’t leave yet, there is much to discover in the next chapters on rhyming and on verse forms: that is where the fun really begins. Firstly, a final little exercise awaits.

Poetry Exercise 9

Coleridge wrote the following verse in 1806 to teach his son Derwent the most commonly used metrical feet. Note that he uses the classical ‘long’ ‘short’ appellation where we would now say ‘stressed’ ‘weak’. For your final exercise in this chapter, WHIP OUT YOUR PENCIL and see how in the first stanza he has suited the metre to the description by scanning each line. By all means refer to the ‘Table of Metric Feet’ below. You are not expected to have learned anything off by heart. I have included the second stanza, which does not contain variations of metre, simply because it is so touching in its fatherly affection.

Lesson for a Boy

Trochee trips from long to short;

From long to long in solemn sort

Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able

Ever to come up with Dactyl's trisyllable.

Iambics march from short to long;–

With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng;

One syllable long, with one short at each side,

Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;–

First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer

Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.

If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,

And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;

Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres to show it,

With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet,

May crown him with fame, and must win him the love

Of his father on earth and his Father above.

My dear, dear child!

Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge

See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge…

Table of Metric Feet

BINARY

TERNARY

QUATERNARY

QUATERNARY continued

Now about the metrics: the terminology you use–of amphibrachs, pyrrhics etc.–is obsolete in English. We now speak of these feet only in analyzing choruses from Greek plays–because Greek verse is quantitative […] we have simplified our metrics to five kinds of feet […] trochee, iambus, anapest, dactyl, spondee. We do not need any more.

Edmund Wilson in a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 1 September 1942