The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Form

I

The Stanza

So we can write metrically, in iambs and anapaests, trochees and dactyls. We can choose the length of our measure: hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter. We can write accentually, in three-stress and four-stress lines. We can alliterate and we can rhyme, but thus far our verse has merely been stichic, presented in a sequence of lines. Where those lines terminate is determined, as we know, by the measure or, in the case of syllabic verse, by the syllable count. Prose, such as you are reading now, is laid out (or lineated) differently–as I write this I have no reason to start a new line (to ‘press the return key’) until it is time for a new paragraph or a quotation and you certainly won’t

find me doing this

or this, for that

matter; it would be

highly

odd,

not to mention confusing:

in poetry such a procedure

would not be considered

strange at all, although as

we shall see, how we

manage the lineation of our poems is not a question of random line

breaks, or it had better not be…

Our first clue that the written words on a page might qualify as poetry may indeed be offered by lineation, but an even more obvious indicator is the existence of stanzas. The word derives from the Italian for ‘stand’, which in turn developed into the word for ‘room’ (stanza di pranzo is ‘dining room’, for example). In everyday speech, in songwriting, hymn singing and many other popular genres a stanza will often be referred to as a verse (meaning ‘turn’, as in ‘reverse’, ‘subvert’, ‘diversion’ and so on). I will be keeping to the word stanza, allowing me to use verse in its looser sense of poetic material generally. Also, I like the image of a poem being a house divided into rooms. Some traditional verse forms have no stanzaic layout, for others it is almost their defining feature. But first we need to go deeper into this whole question of form…

What is Form and Why Bother with It?Stephen gets all cross

By form, just so that we are clear, we mean the defining structure of a genre or type. When we say formal, the word should not be thought of as bearing any connotations of stiffness, starchiness, coldness or distance–formal for our purposes simply means ‘of form’, morphological if you like.

In music, some examples of form would be sonata, concerto, symphony, fugue and overture. In television, common forms include sit-com, soap, documentary, mini-series, chat show and single drama. Over the years docu-dramas, drama-docs, mockumentaries and a host of other variations and sub-categories have emerged: form can be undermined, hybridised and stretched almost to breaking point.

Poetic forms too can be cross-bred, subverted, made sport of, mutilated, sabotaged and rebelled against, but HERE IS THE POINT. If there is no suggestion of an overall scheme at work in the first place, then there is nothing to subvert or undermine: a whole world of possibility is closed off to you. Yes, you can institute your own structures, you can devise new forms or create a wholly original poetic manner and approach, but there are at least three major disadvantages to this. First, it is all too often a question of reinventing the wheel (all the trial-and-error discoveries and setbacks that poetic wheelwrights have undergone over two millennia to be caught up with in one short lifetime); second, and this flows from the first point, it is fantastically difficult and lonely; third, it requires the reader to know what you are up to. Since human beings first sang, recited and wrote they have been developing ways of structuring and presenting their verse. Most readers of poetry, whether they are aware of it or not, are instinctively familiar with the elemental forms–for a practising poet to be ignorant of them is foolish at best, perverse and bloody-minded at worst. We can all surely admit without sacrificing any cherished sense of our bold modernity and iconoclastic originality that a painter is in a better position to ignore the ‘rules’ of composition or perspective if he knows exactly what those rules are. Just because poems are made of our common currency, words, it does not mean that poets should be denied a like grounding and knowledge. Besides, as I have emphasised before, initiation into the technique of poetry is all part of becoming a poet and it is pleasurable: one is in the company of one’s forebears, one is not alone.

Ezra Pound, generally regarded as the principal founder of modernism, wrote of the need to refresh poetics: ‘No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.’ He went further, asserting that extant poetical language and modes were in fact defunct, he declared war on all existing formal structures, metre, rhyme and genre. We should observe that he was a researcher in Romance languages, devoted to medieval troubadour verse, Chinese, Japanese, Sicilian, Greek, Spanish, French and Italian forms and much besides. His call to free verse was not a manifesto for ignorant, self-indulgent maundering and uneducated anarchy. His poems are syntactically and semantically difficult, laden with allusion and steeped in his profound knowledge of classical and oriental forms and culture: they are often laid out in structures that recall or exactly follow ancient forms, cantos, odes and even, as we shall discover later, that most strict and venerable of forms, the sestina. Pound was also a Nazi-sympathising, anti-Semitic,¹ antagonistic son of a bitch as it happens: he wasn’t trying to open poetry for all, to democratise verse for the kids and create a friendly free-form world in which everyone is equal. But if the old fascist was right in determining that his generation needed to get away from the heavy manner and glutinous clichés of Victorian verse, its archaic words and reflex tricks of poetical language, and all out-dated modes of expression and thought in order to free itself for a new century, is it not equally true that we need to escape from the dreary, self-indulgent, randomly lineated drivel that today passes for poetry for precisely the same reasons? After a hundred years of free verse and Open Field poetry the condition of English-language poetics is every bit as tattered and tired as that which Pound and his coevals inherited. ‘People find ideas a bore,’ Pound wrote, ‘because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.’ Unfortunately the tide has turned, and now it is some of Pound’s once new ideas that have been stuffed and shelved and become a bore. He wrote in 1910: ‘The art of letters will come to an end before AD 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.’ It might be tempting to agree that ‘the art of letters’ has indeed come to an end, and to wonder whether a doctrinaire abandonment of healthy, living forms for the sake of a dogma of stillborn originality might not have to shoulder some of the responsibility for such a state of affairs.

Add a feeble-minded kind of political correctness to the mix (something Pound would certainly never have countenanced) and it is a wonder that any considerable poetry at all has been written over the last fifty years. It is as if we have been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism and that to acquire knowledge is to drive a jackboot into the face of those poor souls who are too incurious, dull-witted or idle to find out what poetry can be. Surely better to use another word for such free-form meanderings: ‘prose-therapy’ about covers it, ‘emotional masturbation’, perhaps; auto-omphaloscopy might be an acceptable coinage–gazing at one’s own navel. Let us reserve the word ‘poetry’ for something worth fighting for, an ideal we can strive to live up to.

What, then, is the solution? Greeting-card verse? Pastiche? For some the answer lies in the street poetry of rap, hip-hop, reggae and other musically derived discourses: unfortunately this does not suit my upbringing, temperament and talents; I find these modes, admirable as they no doubt are, as alien to my cultural heritage and linguistic tastes as their practitioners no doubt find Browning and Betjeman, Pope, Cope and Heaney. I will try to address this problem at the end of the book, but for now I would urge you to believe that a familiarity with form will not transform you into a reactionary bourgeois, stifle your poetic voice, imprison your emotions, cramp your style, or inhibit your language–on the contrary, it will liberate you from all of these discomforts. Nor need one discourse be adopted at the expense of another, eclecticism is as possible in poetry as in any other art or mode of cultural expression.

There are, to my mind, two aesthetics available when faced by the howling, formless, uncertain, relative and morally contingent winds that buffet us today. One is to provide verse of like formlessness and uncertainty, another is (perhaps with conscious irony) to erect a structured shelter of form. Form is not necessarily a denial of the world’s loss of faith and structure, it is by no means of necessity a nostalgic evasion. It can be, as we shall see, a defiant, playful and wholly modern response.

Looking back over the last few paragraphs I am aware that you might think me a dreadful, hidebound old dinosaur. I assure you I am not. I am uncertain why I should feel the need to prove this, but I do want you to understand that I am far from contemptuous of Modernism and free verse, the experimental and the avant-garde or of the poetry of the streets. Whitman, Cummings, O’Hara, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Jandl, Olsen, Ginsberg, Pound and Zephaniah are poets that have given me, and continue to give me, immense pleasure. I do not despise free verse. Read this:

Post coitum omne animal triste

i see you

!

you come

closer

improvident

with your coming

then–

stretched to scratch

–is it a trick of the light?–

i see you

worlded with pain

but of

necessity not

weeping

cigaretted and drinked

loaded against yourself

you seem so yes bold

irreducible

but nuded and afterloved

you are not so strong

are you

?

after all

There’s the problem. The above is precisely the kind of worthless arse-dribble I am forced to read whenever I agree to judge a poetry competition.² It took me under a minute and a half to write and while I dare say you can see what utter wank it is, there are many who would accept it as poetry. All the clichés are there, pointless lineation, meaningless punctuation and presentation, fatuous creations of new verbs ‘cigaretted and drinked’, ‘worlded’, ‘nuded’, ‘afterloved’,³ a posy Latin title–every pathology is presented. Like so much of what passes for poetry today it is also listless, utterly drained of energy and drive–a common problem with much contemporary art but an especial problem with poetry that chooses to close itself off from all metrical pattern and form. It is like music without beat or shape or harmony: not music at all, in fact. ‘Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,’ Robert Frost wrote. Not much of a game at all, really.

My ‘poem’ is also pretentious, pretentious in exactly the way much hotel cooking is pretentious–aping the modes of seriously innovative culinary artists and trusting that the punters will be fooled. Ooh, it’s got a lavender reduction and a sorrel jus: it’s a pavane of mullet with an infusion of green tea and papaya. Bollocks, give me steak and kidney pudding. Real haute cuisine is created by those who know what they are doing. Learning metre and form and other such techniques is the equivalent of understanding culinary ingredients, how they are grown, how they are prepared, how they taste, how they combine: then and only then is one fit to experiment with new forms. It begins with love, an absolute love of eating and of the grain and particularity of food. It is first expressed in the drudgery of chopping onions and preparing the daily stockpots, in the commitment to work and concentration. They won’t let you loose on anything more creative until you have served this apprenticeship. I venerate great chefs like Heston Blumenthal, Richard Corrigan and Gordon Ramsay: they are the real thing, they have done the work–work of an intensity most of us would baulk at. Of course some people think that they, Blumenthal, Corrigan et al., are pretentious, but here such thinking derives from a fundamental ignorance and fear. So much easier to say that everything you fail to understand is pretentious than to learn to discriminate between the authentic and the fraudulent. Between lazy indiscipline and frozen traditionalism there lies a thrilling space where the living, the fresh and the new may be discovered.

Fortunately, practising metre and verse forms is not as laborious, repetitive and frightening as toiling in a kitchen under the eye of a tyrannical chef. But we should never forget that poetry, like cooking, derives from love, an absolute love for the particularity and grain of ingredients–in our case, words.

So, rant over: let us acquaint ourselves with some of the poetic forms that have developed and evolved over the centuries.

The most elemental way in which lineation can be taken forward is through the collection of lines into STANZA FORM: let us look at some options.

II

Stanzaic Variations

OPEN FORMS

Tercets, quatrains and other stanzas–terza rima–ottava rima–rhyme royal–ruba’iyat–the Spenserian stanza

A TERCET is a stanza of three lines, QUATRAINS come in fours, CINQUAINS in fives, SIXAINS in sixes. That much is obvious. There are however specific formal requirements for ‘proper’ cinquains or sixains written in the French manner. There is, for example, a sixain form more commonly called the sestina, which we will examine in a separate section. Forms which follow a set pattern are called closed forms: the haiku, limerick and sonnet would be examples of single-stanza closed forms. Forms which leave the overall length of a poem up to the poet are called open forms.

Terza Rima

Tercets, three-line stanzas, can be independent entities rhyming aba cdc and so on, or they might demand a special kind of interlocking scheme such as can be found in TERZA RIMA, the form in which Dante wrote Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.The TERZA RIMA mode is very fine,Great Dante used it for his famous text;It rhymes the words in every other lineWith each thought drawing you towards the next:A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C-D…This middle rhyme is sequently annexedTo form the outer rhymes of Stanza ThreeAnd thus we make an interlocking rhyme:This subtle trick explains, at least to me,Just why this form has stood the test of time.

As you can see, this linked rhyming can go on for ever, the middle line of each stanza forming the outer rhymes of the one that follows it. When you come to the end of a thought, thread or section, you add a fourth line to that stanza and use up the rhyme that would otherwise have gone with the next. I have done this with ‘rhyme’ and appended the (indented) stop-line ‘Just why this form has stood the test of time’. A young Hopkins used a stop-couplet to end his early terza rima poem, ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’:I see long reefs of violetsIn beryl-covered ferns so dim,A gold-water Pactolus fretsIts brindled wharves and yellow brim,The waxen colours weep and run,And slendering to his burning rimInto the flat blue mist the sunDrops out and the day is done.

Chaucer, under Dante’s influence, wrote the first English terza rima poem, ‘A Complaint to his Lady’, but the best-known example in English is probably Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;And, by the incantation of this verse,Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearthAshes and sparks, my words among mankind!Be through my lips to unawaken’d earthThe trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

It does not matter how you lay out your verse (Shelley used five fourteen-line stanzas) or in what metre (Hopkins wrote in iambic tetrameter and Shelley in pentameter): it is the rhyme-scheme that defines the form.

In order of ascending line length, the QUATRAIN comes next.

The QuatrainThe QUATRAIN is HEROIC and profoundAnd glories in the deeds of noble days:Pentameters of grave and mighty sound,Like rolling cadences of brass, give praise.Alas! its ELEGIAC counterpartBemoans with baleful woe this world of strife:In graveyards and in tears it plies its artLamenting how devoid of hope is life.In equal form the COMIC QUATRAIN’s made,But free to say exactly what it thinks;It’s brave enough to call a spade a spadeAnd dig for truth however much it stinks.

There is, of course, no formal difference between those three samples, they are merely produced to show you that quatrains in abab have been used for all kinds of purposes in English poetry. Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is probably the best-known elegiac use quatrains have been put to. Its lines have given the world classic book and film titles (Far from the Madding Crowd and Paths of Glory) as well as providing some memorably stirring phrases:Forbade to wade⁴ through slaughter to a throne,And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;

A cross-rhymed quatrain (perhaps obviously) allows for fuller development of an image or conceit than can be achieved with couplets:Full many a gem of purest ray sereneThe dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;Full many a flower is born to blush un seen,And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

(Gray’s repetition of ‘Full many’ is an example of a rhetorical trope called anaphora, in case you are interested, in case you care, in case you didn’t already know, in case of too much anaphora, break glass. Actually, that was epanaphora.)

The Rubai

From Persia comes a quatrain form called the RUBAI (plural ruba’iat or ruba’iyat), rhyming aaba, ccdc, eefe etc.In ancient Persia and Islamic lands,The price of heresy was both your hands:Indeed the cost could even be your head(Or burial up to it in the sands).The wiser heads would write a RUBAI downAnd pass it quietly round from town to town,Anonymous, subversive and direct–The best examples garnered great renown.Collections of these odes, or RUBA’IYATShowed sultans where progressive thought was at;Distributed by dissidents and wits,Like early forms of Russian samizdat.The Ruba’iyat of Omar, called Khayyam,Are quatrains of expansive, boozy charm.As found in Horace, Herrick and Marvell,The message is: ‘Drink! When did wine do harm?Too soon the sun will set upon our tents,Don’t waste your time with pious, false lamentsDrink deep the wine of life, then drink some more’I never heard a poet make more sense.

The translation of the Ruba’iat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald ranks alongside Burton’s Arabian Nights as one of the great achievements of English orientalism:A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread,–and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness–Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!…’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and DaysWhere Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,And one by one back in the Closet lays.The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;And he that toss’d Thee down into the Field,He knows about it all–He knows–HE knows!The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

If that kind of poetry doesn’t make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends. Open forms in sixain also exist in English verse. Wordsworth in his ‘Daffodils’ used the stanza form Shakespeare developed in ‘Venus and Adonis’, essentially a cross-rhymed quatrain closing with a couplet, abab cc:For oft when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude,And then my heart with pleasure fills,And dances with the Daffodils.

Rhyme RoyalRHYME ROYAL has a noble historyFrom Geoffrey Chaucer to the present dayIts secret is no hidden mystery:Iambic feet, the classic English wayWith b and b to follow a b a.This closing couplet, like a funeral hearse,Drives to its end the body of the verse.

RHYME ROYAL (or Rime Royal as it is sometimes rendered) is most associated with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde marks the form’s first appearance in English. It was once thought that the name derived from its later use by Henry IV, but this is now, like all pleasing stories (from King Alfred’s Cakes to Mr Gere’s way with gerbils), disputed by scholars. I suppose by rights a seven-line stanza should be called a heptain or septain, but I have never seen either word used. Auden used the ababbcc of rhyme royal in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. You would think that he would choose ottava rima, the form in which the addressee so conspicuously excelled. Auden apologises to his Lordship for not doing so:Ottava Rima would, I know, be properThe proper instrument on which to payMy compliments, but I should come a cropper;Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,At least my modern pieces shall be cheeryLike English bishops on the Quantum Theory.

Auden’s reluctance to use ottava rima stemmed, one suspects, from its demand for an extra rhyme. I have always loved this form, however, as my sample verse makes clear.

Ottava RimaOTTAVA RIMA is a poet’s dream,The most congenial of forms by far.It’s quite my favourite prosodic schemeAnd Byron’s too, which lends it some éclat.Much more adaptable than it may seem,It plays both classical and rock guitar;It suits romantic lyric inspiration,But I prefer Byronic-style deflation.

As you can see, OTTAVA RIMA rhymes abababcc and thus presents in eight lines, hence the ottava, as in octave. It is in effect rhyme royal with an extra line, but just as one or more gene in the strand of life can make all the difference, so one or more line in a stanza can quite alter the identity of a form. The origins of ottava rima are to be found in Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso and it entered English in translations of this and other Italian epics. John Hookham Frere saw its potential for mock-heroic use and it was through his 1817 work Whistlecraft that Byron came to use the form, first in Beppo and then in his masterpiece of subverted epic and scattergun satire, Don Juan.

As Auden remarks, ‘Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough…’. Two pairs of three rhymes and a couplet per verse. Perverse indeed.

Some of W. B. Yeats’s best loved later poems take the form away from scabrous mock-heroics by mixing true rhyme with the sonorous twentieth-century possibilities opened up by the use of slant-rhyme, finding an unexpected lyricism. This is the celebrated last stanza of ‘Among School Children’:Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I trust you are still reading out loud…

Spenserian StanzaNine lines of verse did EDMUND SPENSER takeTo forge the style that bears his name divine,A form that weaves and wanders like a snakeWith art all supple, subtle, serpentine,Constructing verse of intricate designWhose coils, caressing with sublime conceit,Engirdle and embrace each separate line:But Spenser, with an extra final beat,Unsnakelike ends his verse on hexametric feet.

An open form whose qualities have appealed to few in recent times is the SPENSERIAN STANZA, which Edmund Spenser developed from the ottava rima of Tasso and Ariosto for his epic, The Faerie Queen. But you never know, it might be the very structure you have been looking for all these years. The rhyme-scheme is seen to be ababbcbcc, and is cast in eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by an iambic alexandrine. Byron used the form in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, and Keats in ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:Saint Agnes’ Eve–Ah, bitter chill it was!The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,And silent was the flock in woolly fold:Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he toldHis rosary, and while his frosted breath,Like pious incense from a censer old,Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Clive James is one of the few poets I know to have made something new and comic of the Spenserian Stanza: his epistolary verse to friends published in his collection Other Passports contains some virtuoso examples, well worth looking at if you are thinking of trying the form: it includes the excellent admonitory alexandrine, ‘You can’t just arse around for ever having fun.’ Martin Amis, to whom the verse was written, certainly took the advice, as we know. I am aware of few modern serious poems in the form, the last significant work appearing to be Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, although Cambridge University offers an annual⁵Spenserian Stanza Competition open to all comers of any age or fighting weight, which ‘fosters and recognizes student excellence in the writing of Spenserian stanzas’ and is sponsored by the International Spenser Society, no less. The past winners appear to have written theirs very much in the style of Spenser himself, complete with phalanxes of recondite archaic Spenserian words and syntax, rather than to have exhibited any interest in demonstrating the form’s fitness for modern use, which seems a pity.

ADOPTING AND ADAPTING

Other stanzaic forms are mentioned in the Glossary, the VENUS AND ADONIS STANZA, for example. Of course it remains your decision as to how you divide your verse: into general quatrains or tercets and so on, or into more formal stanzaic arrangements such as ottava rima or ruba’iat, or any self-invented form you choose. Ted Hughes wrote his poem ‘Thistles’ in four stanzas of three-line verse. Tercets, if one wishes to call them that, but very much his own form for his own poem.Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of menThistles spike the summer airOr crackle open under a blue-black pressure.Every one a revengeful burstOf resurrection, a grasped fistfulOf splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust upFrom the underground stain of a decaying Viking.They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.Every one manages a plume of blood.Then they grow grey, like men.Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

You may think that this is arbitrary–enjambment between stanzas two and three shows that each does not wholly contain its own thought. Hughes is following no closed or open form, why then should he bother to set his verse in stanzas at all? Why not one continuous clump of lines? All kinds of neat arguments could be made about the poem itself needing, as the ground does, to fight the random aggression of its thistling, bristling words, to be farmed; then again, maybe four stanzas reflect the four seasons of the thistles’ birth, flourishing, death and rebirth; or one might think the stanzas in their short definitive shape chime with the plainly laid down statements Hughes makes, but I do not think such sophistry, even when it convinces, is necessary. We see, we feel, we know that the layout is just plain right. Imagine the same lines in one group: something is lost. Perhaps Hughes wrote it as a single stream of lines and then realised that they needed arrangement into four groups of three much as an artist might realise that he needs to regroup his landscape, rubbing out a tree in the background, foregrounding that clump of bushes, moving the church spire to the right and so on. The artist does not consult a book on composition or apply absolutely set rules learned at art school, he just feels, he just knows. Experience and openness, instinct and a feel for order, these are not taught, but they are not entirely inborn either. Reading, preparation, concentration and a poetic eye that is every bit as attuned as a poetic ear all contribute to the craftsmanship, the poetic skill that might, in time, make such judgements second nature.

If, then, you wish to use your own stanzas, rhyming or not, organised in traditional or personal ways, allow yourself to feel that same sense of composition and rightness, just as you might when arranging knick-knacks and invitations on a mantelpiece or designing a birthday card. It is not a question of right and wrong, but nor is it a question of anything goes. Incidentally, do allow yourself to enjoy Hughes’s use of the word ‘fistful’–a fabulous consonantal and assonantal play on ‘thistle’, rhyming back to the first word of the second line. Is it not divine?

An open quatrain form whose qualities are sui generis enough to deserve a whole section on its own is the ballad. It is our next stop–once the following exercise is done.

Poetry Exercise 11

As you can see I have headed each section above with my own attempts to describe each stanza form under discussion in its own dress. Your exercise is to do the same but better. I look forward to bumping into you one day in the street or on a train and hearing you recite to me in triumphal tones your self-referential rhymes royal and auto-descriptive Ruba’iyat.

III

The Ballad

In fours and threes and threes and fours

The BALLAD beats its drum:

‘The Ancient Mariner’ of course

Remains the exemplum.

With manly eights (or female nines)

You are allowed if ’tis your pleasure,

To stretch the length to equal lines

And make a ballad of LONG MEASURE.

Well, what more need a poet know?

In technical prosodic parlance we could say that most ballads present in quatrains of alternate cross-rhymed iambic tetrameter and trimeter. However, since the ballad is a swinging, popular form derived from song and folk traditions it is much better described as a form that comes in four-line verses, usually alternating between four and three beats to line. The word comes from ballare, the Italian for ‘to dance’ (same root as ballet, ballerina and ball).

The ballad’s irresistible lilt is familiar to us in everything from nursery rhymes to rugby songs. We know it as soon as we hear it, the shape and the rhythm seem inborn:There’s nothing like a ballad songFor lightening the load–I’ll chant the buggers all day longUntil my tits explode.A sweetly warbled ballad verseWill never flag or tireI sing ’em loud for best or worseThough both my balls catch fire.I’ll roar my ballads loud and gruff,Like a lion in the zooAnd if I sing ’em loud enough’Twill tear my arse in two.

Or whatever. Old-fashioned inversions, expletives (both the rude kind and the kind that fill out the metre) and other such archaic tricks considered inadmissible or old-fashioned in serious poetry suit the folksy nature of ballad. The ballad is pub poetry, it is naughty and nautical, crude and carefree. Its elbows are always on the table, it never lowers the seat for ladies after it’s been or covers its mouth when it burps. It can be macabre, brutal, sinister, preachy, ghostly, doom-laden, lurid, erotic, mock-solemn, facetious, pious or obscene–sometimes it exhibits all of those qualities at once. Its voice is often that of the club bore, the drunken rogue, the music hall entertainer or the campfire strummer. It has little interest in descriptions of landscape or the psychology of the individual. Chief among its virtues is a keen passion to tell you a story: it will grab you by the lapels, stare you in the eyes and plunge right in:Now gather round and let me tellThe tale of Danny Wise:And how his sweet wife AnnabelleDid suck out both his eyes.And if I tell the story trueAnd if I tell it clear,There’s not a mortal one of youWon’t shriek in mortal fear.

How could we not want to know more? Did she really suck them out? Was Danny Wise asleep? Was Annabelle a witch? How did it all turn out? Did he get his revenge? Is the teller of the tale poor Danny himself? Sadly, I have no idea because the rest of it hasn’t come to me yet.

While the second and fourth lines should rhyme, the first and third do not need to, it is up to the balladeer to choose, abab or abcb: nor is any regularity or consistency in your rhyme-scheme required throughout, as this popular old ballad demonstrates:In Scarlet Town, where I was born,There was a fair maid dwellin’Made every lad cry wellaway,And her name was Barbara Allen.All in the merry month of May,When green buds they were swellin’,Young Jemmy Grove on his deathbed lay,For love of Barbara Allen.

A quatrain is by no means compulsory, a six-line stanza is commonly found, rhyming xbxbxb, as in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol.The Walrus and the CarpenterWere walking close at hand:They wept like anything to seeSuch quantities of sand:‘If this were only cleared away,’They said, ‘it would be grand.’And all men kill the thing they love,By all let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering word,The coward does it with a kiss,The brave man with a sword!

Although more ‘literary’ examples may favour a regular accentual-syllabic measure, ballads are perfect examples of accentual verse: it doesn’t matter how many syllables there are, it is the beats that matter. Here is Marriot Edgar’s ‘Albert and the Lion’, which was written as a comic monologue to be recited to a background piano that plunks down its chords on the beats of each four-or three-stress line. Part of the pleasure of this style of ballad is the mad scudding rush of unaccented syllables, the pausing, the accelerations and decelerations: when Stanley Holloway performed this piece, the audience started to laugh simply at his timing of the rhythm. I have marked with underlines the syllables that might receive a little extra push if required: it is usually up to the performer. Recite it as you read.There’s a famous seaside place called Blackpool,That’s noted for fresh-air and fun,And Mr and Mrs RamsbottomWent there with young Albert, their son.A grand little lad was their AlbertAll dressed in his best; quite a swell’E’d a stick with an ’orse’s ’ead ’andleThe finest that Woolworths could sell.

Or there’s Wallace Casalingua’s ‘The Day My Trousers Fell’, which has even more syllables to contend with:Now I trust that your ears you’ll be lending,To this tale of our decadent times;There’s a be ginning, a middle and an endingAnd for the most part there’s rhythms and verses and

rhymes.My name, you must know, is John Weston,Though to my friends I’m Jackie or Jack;I’ve a place on the outskirts of Preston,The tiniest scrap of a garden with a shed and a hammock

round’t back.I was giving the fish girl her payment,The cod were ninety a pound–When, with a snap and a rustle of raimentMy trousers, they dropped to the ground. Con-ster-nation.

Border ballads, like ‘Barbara Allen’ and those of Walter Scott, became a popular genre in their own right, often like broadsheet ballads expressing political grievances, spreading news and celebrating the exploits of highwaymen and other popular rebels, rogues and heroes: subgenres like the murder ballad still exist,⁶ often told from the murderer’s point of view, full of grim detail and a sardonic acknowledgement of the inevitability of tragedy.Frankie and Johnny were lovers,O Lordy, how they could love;They swore to be true to each other,Just as true as the stars above.He was her man but he done her wrong.

Robert Service, the English-born Canadian poet, wrote very popular rough’n’tough ballads mostly set around the Klondike Gold Rush; you will really enjoy reading this out, don’t be afraid (if alone) to try a North American accent–and it should be fast:A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and glare,There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

To observe the regularity of the caesuras in this ballad would be like complimenting an eagle on its intellectual grasp of the principles of aerodynamics, but I am sure you can see that ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’ could as easily be laid out with line breaks after ‘up’ and ‘box’ in the first two lines, ‘drink’ in the last and as the commas indicate elsewhere, to give it a standard four-three structure. We remember this layout from our examination of Kipling’s ballad in fourteeners, ‘Tommy’. A. E. Housman’s ‘The Colour of his Hair’,⁷ a bitter tirade against the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, is also cast in fourteeners. I can’t resist quoting it in full.Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists?And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fairFor the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paidTo hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,And the quarry-gang on portland in the cold and in the heat,And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spareHe can curse the god that made him for the colour of his hair.

There is also a strong tradition of rural ballad, one of the best-known examples being the strangely macabre ‘John Barleycorn’:There were three men come out of the WestTheir fortunes for to try,And these three men made a solemn vow:John Barleycorn should die!They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,Threw clods upon his head,And these three men made a solemn vow:John Barleycorn was dead!They let him lie for a very long time’Til the rain from Heaven did fall,Then Little Sir John sprung up his head,And so amazed them all.

After being scythed, threshed, pounded, malted and mashed, John Barleycorn (not a man of course, but a crop) ends his cycle in alcoholic form:Here’s Little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,And brandy in a glass!And Little Sir John in the nut-brown bowlProved the stronger man at last!For the huntsman he can't hunt the foxNor loudly blow his horn,And the tinker can’t mend kettles nor potsWithout John Barleycorn!

There are ballad operas (John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera being the best known), jazz ballads and pop ballads culminating in that revolting genre, the power ballad–but here we are leaking into popular music where the word has come to mean nothing much more than a slow love song, often (in the case of the American diva’s power ballad) repulsively vain and self-regarding, all the authentic guts, vibrancy, self-deprecation and lively good humour bleached out and replaced by the fraudulent intensity of grossly artificial climaxing. I acquit country music of these vices. American ballads, cowboy ballads, frontier ballads and so on, were extensively collected by the Lomax family, much in the same way that Cecil Sharpe had done for rural and border ballads and other native British genres of folk and community music. Shel Silverstein came up with the ever-popular ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for Johnny Cash, who also wrote and performed his own superb examples, I would especially recommend the ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ if you don’t already know it.

One of the great strengths of the ballad in its more literary incarnations is that its rousing folk and comic associations can be subverted or ironically countered. Its sense of being somehow traditional, communal and authorless contrasts with that individuality and strong authorial presence we expect from the modern poet, often so alone, angst-ridden and disconnected. Both John Betjeman and W. H. Auden used this contrast to their advantage. The strong ballad structure of Betjeman’s ‘Death in Leamington’ counters the grim, grey hopelessness of suburban lives with a characteristically mournful irony:She died in the upstairs bedroomBy the light of the evening starThat shone through the plate glass windowFrom over Leamington Spa.

[…]Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,At the grey, decaying face,As the calm of a Leamington eveningDrifted into the place.She moved the table of bottlesAway from the bed to the wall;And tiptoeing gently over the stairsTurned down the gas in the hall.

While Auden does much the same with the less genteel ‘Miss Gee’:Let me tell you a little storyAbout Miss Edith Gee;She lived in Clevedon TerraceAt Number 83.…She bicycled down to the doctor,And rang the surgery bell;‘O doctor, I’ve a pain inside me,And I don’t feel very well.’Doctor Thomas looked her over,And then he looked some more;Walked over to his wash-basin,Said, ‘Why didn’t you come before?’Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,Though his wife was waiting to ring,Rolling his bread into pellets;Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.’…They laid her on the table,The students began to laugh;And Mr Rose the surgeonHe cut Miss Gee in half.

Casting such lost lives as ballad heroes certainly provides an ironic contrast with which to mock the arid futility of much twentieth-century life. To use the rhythms of the greenwood and the yardarm for the cloying refinement of Leamington or the grimness of Miss Gee’s forlorn little world can indeed point up the chasm between the sterile present and the rich past, but such a mismatch also works in the opposite direction, it raises the lonely spinsters out of their ordinariness and connects them to the tradition and richness of history, it mythologises them, if you like. When an artist paints a prostitute in the manner of a Renaissance Madonna he is simultaneously marking an ironic distinction and forging an affirmative connection. The artists Gilbert and George have done much the same with their skinheads in stained-glass. These are strategies that only work because of the nature of form and genre.

Poetry Exercise 12

A poet can be rough and flexible with the ballad, it is the beat and the narrative drive that sustains. Your exercise is to finish the one that I started a few pages ago.Now gather round and let me tellThe tale of Danny Wise:And how his sweet wife AnnabelleDid suck out both his eyes.And if I tell the story trueAnd if I tell it clearThere’s not a mortal one of youWon’t shriek in mortal fear.

Don’t worry about metre or syllable-count–this is a ballad. I have used an a rhyme, by all means drop it from time to time, but do stick to the four-line structure. Enjoy yourself. One thing I can guarantee you: after you have written just one or two stanzas, you’ll be chanting ballad lines to yourself as you make coffee, nip to the loo, walk to the shops and brush your teeth. The ballad has a certain flow, a rhythmic swing and a beat; it makes no difference where you go, you’re sure to tap your feet–well, hush my mouth…

IV

Heroic VerseHEROIC VERSE has passed the test of time: Iambic feet in couplets linked by rhyme,Its non-stanzaic structure simply screamsFor well-developed tales and epic themes.The five-stress line can also neatly fitSardonic barbs and aphoristic wit.Augustan poets marshalled their iambsTo culminate in pithy epigrams.Pope, Alexander, with pontific skillCould bend the verse to his satiric will.

The mode continued in this lofty styleUntil–with manic laugh and mocking smile New modes emerged, a kind of fractured, mad Enjambment turned up. Pauses. Something had Gone wrong…or right? The stops and starts of human Speech burst through. Now, once formal lines assume an Unforced, casual air, but nonethelessObey the rigid rules of metre, stressAnd rhyming. Gradually another changeTakes place. New poets start to rearrangeThe form, unpick the close-knit weave, make room For looser threads of consonantal rhyme.The modern age with all its angst and doubt Arrives, picks up the tab and pays its debtTo history, precedent and every voiceThat did its bit to mould heroic verse.And still today we grudgingly affirmThere’s life in the old dog; our mangy formStill bites, still barks, still chases cats and birds,Still wags its tail, still pens and shepherds words,And, taken off her leash, this bitch on heatWill walk you off your pentametric feet.

HEROIC VERSE is far from dead. Since its Chaucerian beginnings it has been endlessly revivified: after a playful Elizabethan reshaping it acquired marmoreal elegance in the eighteenth century, only to undergo a complex reworking under John Keats, Robert Browning and Wilfred Owen until it emerged blinking into the light of modern day. At first glance it seems remarkably simple, too simple, perhaps, even to deserve the appellation ‘form’: it is as open as they come, neither laid out in regular stanzas, nor fixed by any scheme beyond the simple aabbccdd of the rhyming couplet. New paragraph presentation is possible either with line breaks or indentation as I have offered above, but in general the verse is presented in one unbroken block. Only the occasional braced triplet will relieve the procession of couplets. To the modern eye this can be forbidding; we like everything in our world to come in handy bite-sized chunks. Yet you might say that handy bite-sized chunks is what heroic verse is best remembered for: Pope’s Essays on Man and on Criticism are veritable vending machines of aphorism.A little learning is dangerous thing;Not to go back, is somehow to advance,And men must walk at least before they dance.Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is man.Hope springs eternal in the human breast.All are but parts of one stupendous whole.One truth is clear. Whatever is, is right.True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

That last apothegm might be the motto of this book. John Dryden, in my estimation, was the absolute master of the heroic couplet; his use of it seems more natural, more assured, more fluid even than Pope’s:Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.For those whom God to ruin hath design’d,He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.Errors, like straw, upon the surface flow;He who would search for pearls must dive below.Beware the fury of a patient manBy education most have been misled;So they believe, because they so were bred.The priest continues what the nurse began,And thus the child imposes on the man.

But these were poets from a time when poems, like architecture and garden design, were formal, elegant and assured: this was the Age of Reason, of Certitude, Sense, Wit, Discernment, Judgement, Taste, Harmony–of ‘Capital Letter Moralists’ as T. E. Hulme called them. The voice and manner of these Augustans can sound altogether too de haut en bas for our ears, from lofty to lowly, as if delivered from Olympus.

Their taste and proportion is akin to that of the architecture of the period; by the time of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads their course seemed run, the profusion of nature and the agony of self seemed to become a more proper study of poets, just as the Gothic and picturesque began to entice the architects. Run your eye down the Index of First Lines in an edition of Pope and then of any Romantic poet and compare the number of entries in each which begin with the word ‘I’. The ‘egotistical sublime’ had landed. It would be a pity if, in our instinctive veneration for all things post-classical, Romantic, post-Romantic, Decadent, Modernist and Postmodernist we overlooked the virtues of late-seventeenth-and eighteenth-century verse. After all, most of us aspire to live in houses of that period, fill them with eclectic fittings and furniture from later eras as we may. The neoclassical harmony and elegance of construction remains our ideal for housing. I think it can be so with verse too. Naturally the discourse and diction, the detail and decor as it were, are of our age, but the rationality and harmony of the Augustans is not to be despised.

Keats did not abandon the form, but contributed to its development with a new freedom of run-ons and syntactical complexity. This extract from ‘Lamia’ shows how close to dramatic blank verse it becomes, the enjambments almost disguising the rhymes.Pale grew her immortality, for woeOf all these lovers, and she grieved soI took compassion on her, bade her steepHer hair in weïrd syrops that would keepHer loveliness invisible, yet freeTo wander as she loves, in liberty.

Robert Browning wrestled with the form even more violently. His much anthologised ‘My Last Duchess’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in heroic verse. It is ‘spoken’ by the Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, who is showing around his palace an ambassador who has come to make the arrangements for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn, as the monologue proceeds, that the Duke had his first wife killed on account of her displeasing over-friendliness. Pointing at her portrait on the wall, the Duke explains how polite, compliant and smiling she was, but to everyone:

She hadA heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad,Too easily impressed; she liked whate’erShe looked on, and her looks went everywhere.Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,The dropping of the daylight in the West,The bough of cherries some officious foolBroke in the orchard for her, the white muleShe rode with round the terrace–all and eachWould draw from her alike the approving speech,

In the Duke’s view it was ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift’.

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,Whene’er I passed her; but who passed withoutMuch the same smile? This grew: I gave commands;Then all smiles stopped together. There she standsAs if alive.

In other words, he had her killed. You can see how different this heavily run-on and paused verse is from the restrained fluency of Augustan heroic couplets. But why has Browning not chosen to write in blank verse, in the Shakespearean or Jacobean manner, we might wonder? I cannot, of course, second-guess Browning’s motives, but the effect is to counter the fluency of everyday speech with the formality of a rhymed structure, creating an ironic contrast between the urbane conversational manner, the psychotic darkness of the story and the elegant solidity of a noble form. The heroic verse is the frame out of which character can leap; it is itself the nobly proportioned, exquisitely tasteful palace in which ignobly misproportioned, foully tasteless deeds are done.

Wilfred Owen’s use of rhyming couplets in the hell of war provides another kind of ironic contrast. In the same way that the employment of ballad form for the dreary and mundane makes both a distinction and a connection, so the use of heroic couplets both contrasts and unites in Owen’s verse: the august and decorous form in such ghastly conditions is a sick joke, but the death agonies, mutilations and horrors of the soldiers’ lives are raised to heroic status by their incarnation in heroic couplets. Owen’s ‘A Terre: (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)’ uses Browning-style dramatic monologue in slant-rhymed couplets, casting Owen himself as the visitor to a field hospital where a ruined soldier lies and addresses him.Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.Both arms have mutinied against me,–brutes.My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.I tried to peg out soldierly,–no use!One dies of war like any old disease.This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.I have my medals?–Discs to make eyes close.My glorious ribbons?–Ripped from my own backIn scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)

Laurence Lerner, Thom Gunn and Tony Harrison have all written with distinction in heroic couplets, as did Seamus Heaney in ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ and his superb poem ‘The Outlaw’, which might be regarded as a kind of darkly ironic play on an eclogue or georgic–Virgilian verse celebrating and philosophically discoursing upon the virtues of agricultural life.

You may find yourself drawn to heroic verse, you may not. Whatever your views, I would recommend practising it: the form has compelling and enduring qualities. Move in: the structure is still sound and spacious enough to accommodate all your contemporary furniture and modern gadgets.

Poetry Exercise 13

Try a short dramatic monologue, à la Browning, in which a young man in police custody, clearly stoned off his head, tries to explain away the half-ounce of cannabis found on his person. Use the natural rhythms of speech, running-on through lines, pausing and running on again, but within rhymed iambic pentameter. You will be amazed what fun you can have with such a simple form. If you don’t like my scenario, choose another one, but do try and make it contemporary in tone.

V

The Ode

Sapphic–Pindaric–Horatian–lyric–anacreontic

Deriving from odein, the Greek for to chant, the ode is an open form of lyric verse made Public Monument. In English poetry it was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for ‘poem’.

Partly this is the due to the popularity of John Keats’s four great odes ‘To Autumn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which, together with the odes of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and the rest, turned the form in on itself. Poets today may choose to call their works odes, but rather than suggesting any formal implications this is likely to promise, in the shadow of Keats, a romantic reflection on such themes as nature, beauty, art, the soul and their relationship to the very making of a poem itself.

There are three main genres of classical ode which do have more formal natures or specific functions however–the Sapphic, Pindaric and Horatian, named after the Greeks Sappho and Pindar, and the Latin poet Horace. Of these, the most formally fixed and the most popular today by a dodecametric mile is the SAPPHIC:

SAPPHICLet’s hear it for the SAPPHIC ODEAn oyster bed of gleaming pearlsA finely wrought poetic mode

Not just for girls.Lesbian Sappho made this formWith neat Adonic final lineHer sex life wasn’t quite the norm

And nor is mine.Three opening lines of just four feetCreate a style I rather like:It’s closely cropped and strong yet sweet–

In fact, pure dike.

Actually, the above displays the lineaments of the English stress-based imitation as adapted from the classical original, which was made up of four eleven-syllable lines in this metre:

The symbol stands for an anceps, a metrical unit (or semeion) which in classical verse can be long or short, but for our purposes means can be either stressed or unstressed, according to the poet’s wishes. An anceps offers a free choice of trochee or spondee in other words. So, doggerel that makes a classical Sapphic Ode might go:Noble SAPPHO fashioned her odes of high-flownVerse in four lines, marked by their classic profile.Though she’s now best remembered for her full-blown

Lesbian lifestyle.

Not that Ancient Greek Sapphics would be rhymed, of course. English verse in this semi-quantitative classical manner does exist, although practitioners (out of Poe-like disbelief in the spondee) usually render the first three lines as trochee-trochee dactyl trochee-trochee. Ezra Pound managed a superb true spondaic line-end in his Sapphic Ode, ‘Apparuit’:Green the ways, the breath of the fields is thine there

Dear Algie Swinburne wrote Sapphics too:All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron

Stood and beheld me.…Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singingSongs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,

Hearing, to hear them.

The more characteristically English way to adapt the form has been to write in good old iambic tetrameter, as in my first sampler above and Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’:Happy the man, whose wish and careA few paternal acres bound,Content to breathe his native air

In his own groundWhose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,Whose flocks supply him with attire,Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

In winter fire.

The contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson has used the form (and translated Sappho’s own odes). These two stanzas are from her ‘Eros the Bittersweet’:no: tongue breaks and thinfire is racing under skinand in eyes no sight and drummingfills earsand cold sweat holds me and shakinggrips me all, greener than grassI am and dead–or almostI seem to me

The Sapphic Ode has generally been used for more personal and contemplative uses. I do recommend you try writing a few: the Adonic ending can serve as conclusion, envoi, sting in the tail, question, denial…the form, despite its simplicity, remains surprisingly potent. There is no prescribed number of stanzas. If this kind of verse appeals, you might like to look into another Lesbian form, ALCAICS.

PINDARIC ODE

Strophe/The TurnWe hail thee mighty PINDAR’ S ODEThou noble and majestic mode!You trace your roots to far-off ancient times, Yet still survive in modern English rhymes.With firm but steady beat,You march in rhythmic feetOf varied but symmetric length.This lends your verse a joyful strengthThat suits it well to themes of solemn weight–Disasters, joys and great affairs of state.

Antistrophe/The Counter-TurnYet some suggest that modern life,Enmeshed in doubt and mired in strife,Has little use for grandeur, pomp and show, Preferring inward grief and private woeTo be a poet’s theme. ‘So, sad as it may seem,Thy style of verse has had its dayFarewell, God speed!’ these doubters say, ‘We have no need of thee, Pindaric Ode,Our future lies along another road.’

Epode/The StandPerhaps they speak too soon, such men,Perhaps the form will rise again.A nation needs a human public voiceIts griefs to mourn, its triumphs to rejoice.When life gets mean and hard,Call out the national bard!So Pindar, tune thy golden lyre,Thou hast a people to inspire.When glory comes, or crisis darkly bodesWe may have need of thine immortal odes!

Yes, well. Quite. But you get the idea. Sappho’s fellow Aeolian, Pindar is associated with a form much more suited to ceremonial occasions and public addresses: the PINDARIC ODE. He developed it from choral dance for the purpose of making encomiums or praise songs that congratulate athletes or generals on their victories, actors on their performances, philosophers and statesmen on their wisdom and so on. They are written in groups of three stanzas called triads, each triad being divided into strophe (rhymes with ‘trophy’), antistrophe (rhymes with ‘am pissed today’) and epode (‘ee-pode’). Ben Jonson, who wrote a splendid example, gave them the jolly English names Turn, Counter-Turn and Stand. The choice of stanza length and metre is variable, so long as the poem is in triads and each stanza is identical in scheme: this consistency is called a HOMOSTROPHIC structure. I have followed the scheme Jonson invents for his ‘Pindaric Ode to the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’. He begins with a pair of tetrameters, then a pair of pentameters, then trimeters, tetrameters again and finally pentameters, all as rhyming couplets: each stanza must be identically structured, however, that is the key. As I have tried to indicate with mine, the strophe states a theme, addresses a hero, king, Muse, athlete, God or other such thing and praises them, celebrating their virtues and importance (Pindaric Odes themselves in my case); the antistrophe can express doubt, another point of view or some countervailing theme. The epode then tries to unite the two ideas, or comes down in favour of one view or the other. It is thesis, antithesis and synthesis to some extent, a dialectical structure. It derives actually from a Greek choric form in which the dancers would literally turn one way and then the other.

Horatian Ode

There are no real formal requirements to observe in a HORATIAN ODE, so I shan’t bother to write a sampler for you: they should be, like their Pindaric cousins, homostrophic. The Latin poet Horace adapted Pindar’s style to suit Roman requirements. English imitations were popular between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a most notable example being Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (written in rhyming couplets in fours and threes: ‘He nothing common did or mean/Upon that memorable scene’). Perhaps the last great two in this manner in our language are Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of Wellington’ and Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. It is common in the Horatian ode, as in the Pindaric, to include a direct address (APOSTROPHE) as Auden does:Earth, receive an honoured guest:William Yeats is laid to rest.

The Lyric Ode

Wordsworth apostrophises Nature in his Ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’:And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves!

But here we are looking at a wholly different kind of ode. Although Horace did write public celebratory odes in the Pindaric manner to suit the Roman temper (and especially the short one of his interfering patron, the Emperor Augustus) his real voice is heard in quieter, more contemplative and gently philosophical lyrics. These are the odes with which we associate the great romantics.

These poets created their own forms, varying their stanzaic structure and length, rhyme-scheme and measure for each poem. To call them ‘odes’ in the classical sense is perhaps inappropriate, but since they used the word we can include them in this section. The great Keats foursome emerged more from his development of sonnet structure than out of any debt to Horace or Pindar, yet the meditative-romantic or lyric ode that he and his fellow poets between them created does still bear the traces of a general tripartite structure. They do not follow the stricter triadic design of the Pindaric form, but usually move from physical description to meditation and finally to some kind of insight, resolution or stasis. An object, phenomenon or image is invoked, addressed or observed by an (often troubled) ode writer; the observation provokes thought which in turn results in some kind of conclusion, decision or realisation. We will meet this structure again when we look at the sonnet. Whether the lyric ode truly descends from the classical ode or from the medieval sonnet is a historical and academic matter which, while of no doubt frantic interest, we shall leave unexplored.

Often the poet, as in grand public odes, opens with direct address: Shelley does so in ‘Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’:Hail to thee, blithe spirit!Bird thou never wert.O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being–

Or they apostrophise their hero later in the poem as Keats does the Nightingale and Autumn:Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

But it is so usual to open a poem with an invocation, ‘O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers’ (‘To Psyche’), ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ (‘On a Grecian Urn’), that you might almost define the romantic ode as being a meditative poem that commences with a direct address, an address which puts the O! in Ode, as it were.

If you are planning to write an ode yourself, it is unlikely, I suspect, to be Pindaric or Horatian in any classical, ceremonial sense; you may choose to call anything you write an ode, but it is as well to bear in mind the history and associations that go with the appellation.

We will finish with the most pleasant member of the ode family in my estimation. It combines a wholly agreeable nature with a delightfully crunchy name and ought by rights to be far more popular and better known than it is: simple to write, simple to read and easy to agree with, meet–

ANACREONTICSSyllabically it’s seven.Thematically it’s heaven,Little lines to celebrateWine and love and all that’s great.Life is fleeting, death can wait,Trochees bounce along with zestTelling us that Pleasure’s best.Dithyrambic⁸ measures traipse,Pressing flesh and pressing grapes.Fill my glass and squeeze my thighs,Hedonism takes the prize.Broach the bottle, time to pour!Cupid’s darts and Bacchus’ juiceUse your magic to produceSomething humans can enjoy.Grab a girl, embrace a boy,Strum your lyre and hum this tune–Life’s too quick and death’s too soon.

Anacreon (pronounced: Anácreon) was a sixth-century Greek poet whose name lives on in the style of verse that bears his name ANACREONTICS (anacreóntics). Actually, we barely know anything he wrote, his reputation rests on a haul of work called the Anacreontea, published in France in the sixteenth century. It was later discovered that these were actually not works by him, but later imitations written in his honour. No matter, Anacreon had been venerated by Horace, who shared his sybaritic, Epicurean philosophy, and by many English-language poets from Herrick and Cowley to the present day.

There was an Anacreontic Society in the eighteenth century dedicated to ‘wit, harmony and the god of wine,’ though its real purpose became the convivial celebration of music, hosting evenings for Haydn and other leading musicians of the day, as well as devising their own club song: ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’. A society member, John Stafford Smith, wrote the music for it, a tune which somehow got pinched by those damn Yankees who use it to this day for their national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’–‘Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light’ and so on. Strange to think that the music now fitting

…yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

was actually written to fit

…entwineThe myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s wine!

And this in a country where they prohibited alcohol for the best part of a quarter of a century, a country where they look at you with pitying eyes if you order a weak spritzer at lunchtime. Tsch!

The poet most associated with English anacreontics is the seventeenth-century Abraham Cowley: here he is extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism in ‘The Epicure’:Crown me with roses while I live,Now your wines and ointments give:After death I nothing crave,Let me alive my pleasures have:All are Stoics in the grave.

And a snatch of another, simply called ‘Drinking’:Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,Fill all the glasses there, for whyShould every creature drink but I,Why, man of morals, tell me why?

Three hundred years later one of my early literary heroes, Norman Douglas, observing a wagtail drinking from a birdbath, came to this conclusion:Hark’ee, wagtail: Mend your ways;Life is brief, Anacreon says,Brief its joys, its ventures toilsome;Wine befriends them–water spoils ’em.Who’s for water? Wagtail, you?Give me wine! I’ll drink for two.

One of the enduring functions of all art from Anacreon to Francis Bacon, from Horace to Damien Hirst has been, is and always will be to remind us of the transience of existence, to stand as a memento mori that will never let us forget Gloria Monday’s sick transit. We do, of course, know that we are going to die, and all too soon, but we need art to remind us not to spend too much time in the office caring about things that on our deathbeds will mean less than nothing. The particularity of anacreontics (simply writing in seven-syllable trochaic tetrameter as above does not make your verse anacreontic: the verse must concern itself with pleasure, wine, erotic love and the fleeting nature of existence) is echoed in the contemplative odes and love poetry of Horace; we find it in Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell and all poetry between them and the present day. It is also a theme of Middle-Eastern poetry, Hafiz (sometimes called the Anacreon of Persia) and Omar Khayyam most notably.

What of Dylan Thomas’s ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’?In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.

Wonderful as the poem is, dedicated to lovers as it is, presented in short sweet lines as it is, it would be bloody-minded to call it anacreontic: a hint of Eros, but no sense of Dionysus or of the need to love or drink as time’s winged chariot approaches. However, I would call one of the most beautiful poems in all twentieth-century English verse, Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ (1937), anacreontic, although I have never seen it discussed as such. Here are a few lines from the beginning:Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;Time and fevers burn awayIndividual beauty fromThoughtful children, and the graveProves the child ephemeral:But in my arms till break of dayLet the living creature lie,Mortal, guilty, but to meThe entirely beautiful.

The references to flesh, love and the transience of youth make me feel this does qualify. I have no evidence that Auden thought of it as anacreontic and I may be wrong. Certainly one feels that not since Shakespeare’s earlier sonnets has any youth had such gorgeous verse lavished upon him. I dare say both the subjects proved unworthy (the poets knew that, naturally) and both boys are certainly dead–the grave has proved the child ephemeral. Ars longa, vita brevis:⁹ life is short, but art is long.

VI

Closed Forms

Villanelle–sestina–ballade, ballade redoublé

Certain closed forms, such as those we are going to have fun with now, seem demanding enough in their structures and patterning to require some of the qualities needed for so-doku and crosswords. It takes a very special kind of poetic skill to master the form and produce verse of a quality that raises the end result above the level of mere cunningly wrought curiosity. They are the poetic equivalent of those intricately carved Chinese étuis that have an inexplicable ivory ball inside them.

THE VILLANELLEKitchen VillanelleHow rare it is when things go rightWhen days go by without a slipAnd don’t go wrong, as well they might.The smallest triumphs cause delight–The kitchen’s clean, the taps don’t drip,How rare it is when things go right.Your ice cream freezes overnight,Your jellies set, your pancakes flipAnd don’t go wrong, as well they mightWhen life’s against you, and you fightTo keep a stiffer upper lip.How rare it is when things go right,The oven works, the gas rings light,Gravies thicken, potatoes chipAnd don’t go wrong as well they might.Such pleasures don’t endure, so biteThe grapes of fortune to the pip.How rare it is when things go rightAnd don’t go wrong as well they might.

The villanelle is the reason I am writing this book. Not that lame example, but the existence of the form itself.

Let me tell you how it happened. I was in conversation with a friend of mine about six months ago and the talk turned to poetry. I commented on the extraordinary resilience and power of ancient forms, citing the villanelle.¹⁰

‘What’s a villanelle?’

‘Well, it’s a pastoral Italian form from the sixteenth century written in six three-line stanzas where the first line of the first stanza is used as a refrain to end the second and fourth stanzas and the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third, fifth and sixth,’ I replied with fluent ease.

You have never heard such a snort of derision in your life.

‘What? You have got to be kidding!’

I retreated into a resentful silence, wrapped in my own thoughts, while this friend ranted on about the constraint and absurdity of writing modern poetry in a form dictated by some medieval Italian shepherd. Inspiration suddenly hit me. I vaguely remembered that I had once heard this friend express great admiration for a certain poet.

‘Who’s your favourite twentieth-century poet?’ I asked nonchalantly.

Many were mentioned. Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Dylan Thomas.

‘And your favourite Dylan Thomas poem?’

‘It’s called “Do not go gentle into that good night”.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Does it have any, er, what you might call form particularly? Does it rhyme, for instance?’

He scratched his head. ‘Well, yeah it does rhyme I think. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and all that. But it’s like–modern. You know, Dylan Thomas. Modern. No crap about it.’

‘Would you be surprised to know’, I said, trying to keep a note of ringing triumph from my voice, ‘that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a straight-down-the-line, solid gold, one hundred per cent perfect, unadulterated villanelle?’

‘Bollocks!’ he said. ‘It’s modern. It’s free.’

The argument was not settled until we had found a copy of the poem and my friend had been forced to concede that I was right. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is indeed a perfect villanelle, following all the rules of this venerable form with the greatest precision. That my friend could recall it only as a ‘modern’ poem with a couple of memorable rhyming refrains is a testament both to Thomas’s unforced artistry and to the resilience and adaptability of the form itself: six three-line stanzas or tercets,¹¹ each alternating the refrains introduced in the first stanza and concluding with them in couplet form:Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The conventional way to render the villanelle’s plan is to call the first refrain (‘Do not go gentle’) A1 and the second refrain (‘Rage, rage…’)A2. These two rhyme with each other (which is why they share the letter): the second line (‘Old age should burn’) establishes the b rhyme which is kept up in the middle line of every stanza.

Much easier to grasp in action than in code. I have boxed and shaded the refrains here in Derek Mahon’s villanelle ‘Antarctica’. (I have also numbered the line and stanzas, which of course Mahon did not do):

3

I hope you can see from this layout that the form is actually not as convoluted as it sounds. Describing how a villanelle works is a great deal more linguistically challenging than writing one. Mahon, by the way, as is permissible, has slightly altered the refrain line, in his case turning the direct speech of the first refrain. There are no rules as to metre or length of measure, but the rhyming is important. Slant-rhyme versions exist but for my money the shape, the revolving gavotte of the refrains and their final coupling, is compromised by partial rhyming. The form is thought to have evolved from Sicilian round songs, of the ‘London Bridge is falling down’ variety. In the anthologies you will find villanelles culled from the era of their invention, the sixteenth century, especially translations of the work of the man who really got the form going, the French poet Jean Passerat: after these examples there seems to be a notable lacuna until the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde wrote ‘Theocritus’, a rather mannered neo-classical venture–‘O singer of Persephone!/Dost thou remember Sicily?’ (I think it best to refer to villanelles by their refrain lines), while Ernest Dowson, Wilde’s friend and fellow Yellow Book contributor, came up with the ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ which is a much bouncier attempt, very Tudor in flavour: ‘I took her dainty eyes as well/And so I made a Villanelle.’

But it is, perhaps surprisingly, during the twentieth century that the villanelle grows in popularity; besides those we have seen by Mahon and Dylan Thomas, there are memorable examples you may like to try to get hold of by Roethke, Auden, Empson, Heaney, Donald Justice, Wendy Cope and a delightful comic one candidly wrestling with the fiendish nature of the form itself entitled ‘Villanelle of Ye Young Poet's First Villanelle to his Ladye and Ye Difficulties Thereof’ by the playwright Eugene O’Neill: ‘To sing the charms of Rosabelle,/I tried to write this villanelle.’ But for a reason I cannot quite fathom it is female poets who seem to have made the most of the form in the last fifty years or so. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ is especially poignant, given what we know about the poet’s unhappy end: ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead./(I think I made you up inside my head)’. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ is as fine a modern villanelle as I know and Marilyn Hacker has also written two superbly ambiguous love villanelles. Carolyn Beard Whitlow’s ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’ shows how a medieval Mediterranean pastoral form can adapt to the twentieth-century African American experience. I like the Porgy and Bess-style rhythms:Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line,Night wind blowin’ against sweet, yellow thighs,Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.Man smell of honey, dark like coffee grind;Countin’ on his fingers since last July.Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.Mister Jacobs say he be colorblind,But got to tighten belts and loosen ties.Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.Winter becoming angry, rent behind.Strapping spring sun needed to make mud pies.Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.Looked in the mirror, Bessie's face I find.I be so down low, my man be so high.Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.Policeman’s found him; damn near lost my mind.Can’t afford no flowers; can’t even cry.Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

A form that seemed so dead in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought back to rude and glistening health in the twentieth and twenty-first. Why? The villanelle has been called ‘an acoustic chamber for words’ and a structure that lends itself to ‘duality, dichotomy, and debate’, this last assertion from ‘Modern Versions of the Villanelle’ by Philip Jason, who goes on to suggest:there is even the potential for the two repeating lines to form a paradigm for schizophrenia…the mind may not fully know itself or its subject, may not be in full control, and yet it still tries, still festers and broods in a closed room towards a resolution that is at least pretended by the final couplet linking of the refrain lines.

Hm. It is a form that certainly seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves such. Among the poets we have looked at as authors of villanelles we find an African American lesbian, a Jewish lesbian, a lesbian whose father died when she was four and whose mother was committed into a mental institution four years later, two gay men, two alcoholics who drank themselves to death and a deeply unstable and unhappy neurotic who committed suicide. Perhaps this is coincidence, perhaps not. Once again I am forced to wonder if it is ironic interplay that might make the most convincing explanation. As I suggested earlier, sometimes the rules of form can be as powerfully modern a response to chaos, moral uncertainty and relativism as open freedom can be. The more marginalised, chaotic, alienated and psychically damaged a life, the greater the impulse to find structure and certainty, surely? The playful artifice of a villanelle, preposterous as it may appear at first glance, can embody defiant gestures and attitudes of vengeful endurance. It suits a rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or of fatalism. We mustn’t exaggerate that characteristic of the form, however: Heaney’s ‘Anniversary Villanelle’ and some very funny examples by Wendy Cope demonstrate that it need not be always down in the dumps.

Technically the trick of it seems to be to find a refrain pair that is capable of run-ons, ambiguity and ironic reversal. I think you should try one yourself.

Poetry Exercise 14

Any subject, naturally. The skill is to find refrain lines that are open ended enough to create opportunities for enjambment between both lines and stanzas. This is not essential, of course, your refrain line can be closed and contained if you prefer, but you will gain variety, contrast and surprise if run-ons are possible.

Don’t hurry the process of chewing over suitable refrains. Naturally the middle lines have to furnish six b rhymes, so words like ‘plinth’ and ‘orange’ are not going to be very useful…enjoy.

The SestinaLet fair SESTINA start with this first LINE,So far from pretty, perfect or inSPIRED.Its six-fold unrhymed structure marks the FORM. The art is carefully to choose your WORDSEspecially those you use at each line’s END, If not you’ll find your effort’s all in VAIN.Look up: that final hero word was ‘VAIN’And so it ends this stanza’s opening LINE.We use up all our heroes till the ENDAnd trust that somehow we will be inSPIRED To find a fitting place for all our WORDSAnd satisfy the dictates of the FORM.It’s simple, once you get the hang, to FORMYour verse in sections like a weather-VANE: The secret lies in finding six good WORDSThat seem to suit the ending of a LINE.Your pattern of ideas should be inSPIREDBy heroes who will see you to the END.Their cyclic repetition to that ENDEnsures your poem will at least conFORMTo all the rules. From time to time inSPIRED Solutions will occur. Write in this VEIN,Just interweaving neatly line by LINEUntil you’ve used your stock of six good WORDS.Composing in this form is knitting WORDS:You cast off, purl and knit and purl to ENDEach row, then cast off for another LINEUntil a woolly poem starts to FORM.You may believe sestinas are a VAIN,Indulgent, showy, frankly uninSPIREDIdea. Yet many modern poets have conSPIRED,To weave away and knit their scarf of WORDS.I’ll not feel my attempt has been in VAINIf by the time this chapter’s reached its ENDJust one of you has learned to love this FORMAnd taught your hero words to toe the LINE.EnvoiINSPIRED by fair SESTINA now I ENDThis run of WORDS. I hope that you will FORM–And not in VAIN–a poem in this LINE.

This is a bitch to explain but a joy to make. There is no set metre to the modern English sestina, but traditionally it has been cast in iambics. The form comprises six sixains followed by a three line envoi, a kind of summation or coda. So, thirty-nine lines in all. We can best see how it works by concocting a new one together. Let’s begin:

Stanza 1

So take the prize. You’re Number ONE.

1

First place is yours, the glory TOO.

2

No charge for smugness, gloating’s FREE.

3

It’s all you’ve worked and striven FOR,

4

The losers wilt, the victors THRIVE,

5

So wear the wreath, I hope it STICKS.

6

A silly slab of verse, but never mind. It is just a lash-up, a cardboard prototype, but it has its uses. You will notice that I have capitalised and numbered my end-words. They are ONE, TOO, FREE, FOR, THRIVE and STICKS cunningly chosen to sound as much like the numbers 1–6 as I can contrive. These end-words are the heroes of a sestina. Instead of being rhymed, they are reused in a set pattern: this technique is known as lexical repetition. So let us compose Stanza 2. The method is to shuttle up and down the previous stanza starting at the bottom. The end word there is STICKS. I’ll write a line that ends with STICKS, then:But you should know that triumph STICKS

Then we go up to the top: ONE.Like post-it notes and every ONE

Now we go back to the bottom: we’ve used up STICKS, so the next free end-word is THRIVE:Will soon forget. The kind who THRIVE

The next unused end-word at the top is TOO:Are those who show compassion TO

Back down now and the next spare is FOR:The slow, who claim their victory FOR

Only one unused end-word left, FREE:The weak. I’ll tell you this for FREE

So we shuttled from bottom to top, bottom to top, bottom to top taking STICKS, ONE, THRIVE, TO, FOR and FREE. In real digits that would be 6,1,5,2,4,3. This string of numbers is our formula. Stanza 2 now looks like this:But you should know that triumph STICKSLike post-it notes and every ONEWill soon forget. The kind who THRIVEAre those who show compassion TOThe slow, who claim their victory FORThe weak. I’ll tell you this for FREE,

Now Stanza 3 will take the sixth line from Stanza 2, then the first, then the fifth and so on, according to that formula, and build itself accordingly. The sixth line of Stanza 3 is now FREE:You think that winning sets you FREE?

The topmost free end-line is STICKS:No, it’s a poison pill that STICKS

Then FOR, WON, TO and THRIVE: The homophone WON is perfectly acceptable for ONE.In victory’s throat. Worth striving FOR?The golden plaudits you have WONAre valueless and hollow TOOThe victor’s laurels never THRIVE,

Now we do the same to Stanzas 4, 5 and 6, shuttling between lines 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, in formula order.The weeds of self-delusion THRIVEOn pride: they flourish, thick and FREE,To choke your glory. Thickly TOOThe burr of disappointment STICKSTo tarnish all the gold you’ve WON.Is victory worth the fighting FORWhen friendship’s hand is only FORThe weak, whose ventures never THRIVE?I’d so much rather be the ONEWho’s always second. I am FREETo lose. I know how much it STICKSInside your craw to come in TWOBut you should learn that Number TWOCan have no real meaning, FORWe all must cross the River STYXAnd go where victors never THRIVE,No winner’s rostrum there, so FREEYour mind from numbers: Death has WON.

The sixth is the last, after that the whole pattern would repeat. All we have to do now is construct the envoi, which contains all the hero words¹² in a strict order: the second and fifth word in the top line, the fourth and third in the middle line, the sixth and first in the bottom line.EnvoiIn order TO improve and THRIVEStop yearning FOR success, be FREEIf this rule STICKS then all have WON.

It may have seemed a fiendishly complicated structure and it both is and isn’t. The key is to number the lines and follow the 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3 formula with (2–5, 4–3, 6–1 for the envoi). If you don’t like numbers you might prefer to letter the lines alphabetically and make a note of this scheme:

ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA

(BE/DC/FA)

If you want to understand the sestina’s shape, you might like to think of it as a spiral. Go back and put the tip of your forefinger on STICKS in Stanza 1, without taking it off the page move it in an anticlockwise circle passing through 1, 5, 2, 4 and 3. Do it a couple of times so you get the idea. I have made a table which you might find useful. It contains the end-lines of the sestina we built together, as well as ABC equivalents.

Sestina Table

I was rather fascinated by why a sestina works the way it does and whether it could be proved mathematically that you only need six stanzas for the pattern to repeat. Being a maths dunce, I approached my genius of a father who can find formulas for anything and he offered an elegant mathematical description of the sestina, showing its spirals and naming his algorithm in honour of Arnaud Daniel, the form’s inventor, who was something of a mathematician himself, so legend has it. This mathematical proof can be found in the Appendix. If like me, formulae with big Greek letters in them mean next to nothing, you will be as baffled by it as I am, but you might like, as I do, the idea that even something as ethereal, soulful and personal as a poem can be described by numbers…

Sestinas are still being written by contemporary poets. After their invention by the twelfth-century mathematician and troubadour Arnaud Daniel, examples in English have been written by poets as varied in manner as Sir Philip Sidney, Rossetti, Swinburne, Kipling, Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Justice, Howard Nemerov and Kona Macphee (see if you can find her excellent sestina ‘IVF’). Swinburne’s ‘A Complaint to Lisa’ is a double sestina, twelve stanzas of twelve lines each, a terrifying feat first achieved by Sir Philip Sidney. I mean surely that’s just showing off…. I shall present two examples to show the possibilities of a form which my sample verse has made appear very false and stagy. The first is by Elizabeth Bishop, entitled simply ‘Sestina’, flowing between ten-, nine-and eight-syllable lines, ending with a final line of twelve:September rain falls on the house.In the failing light, the old grandmothersits in the kitchen with the childbeside the Little Marvel Stove,reading the jokes from the almanac,laughing and talking to hide her tears.She thinks that her equinoctial tearsand the rain that beats on the roof of the housewere both foretold by the almanac,but only known to a grandmother.The iron kettle sings on the stove.She cuts some bread and says to the child,It's time for tea now; but the childis watching the teakettle's small hard tearsdance like mad on the hot black stove,the way the rain must dance on the house.Tidying up, the old grandmotherhangs up the clever almanacon its string. Birdlike, the almanachovers half open above the child,hovers above the old grandmotherand her teacup full of dark brown tears.She shivers and says she thinks the housefeels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.I know what I know, says the almanac.With crayons the child draws a rigid houseand a winding pathway. Then the childputs in a man with buttons like tearsand shows it proudly to the grandmother.But secretly, while the grandmotherbusies herself about the stove,the little moons fall down like tearsfrom between the pages of the almanacinto the flower bed the childhas carefully placed in the front of the house.Time to plant tears, says the almanac.The grandmother sings to the marvelous stoveand the child draws another inscrutable house.

It is not considered de rigueur these days to enforce the end-word order of the envoi. This next (also called ‘Sestina’) is by the poet Ian Patterson–wonderful how his end-words slowly cycle their multiple meanings:Autumn as chill as rising water lapsand files us away under former stuffthinly disguised and thrown up on a screen;one turn of the key lifts a brass tumbler–another disaster probably averted, just,while the cadence drifts in dark and old.Voices of authority are burning an oldcar on the cobbles, hands on their laps,as if there was a life where justmen slept and didn’t strut their stuffon stage. I reach out for the tumblerand pour half a pint behind the screen.The whole body is in pieces. Screenmemories are not always as sharp as oldnoir phenomena. The child is like a tumblerdoing back-flips out of mothers’ lapsinto all that dark sexual stuffpermanently hurt that nothing is just.I’m telling you this justbecause I dream of watching you behind a screentaking your clothes off for me: the stuffof dreams, of course. Tell me the old, oldstory, real and forgetful. Time simply lapsus up, like milk from a broken tumbler.A silent figure on the stage, the tumblerstands, leaps and twists. He’s justa figure of speech that won’t collapselike the march of time and the silver screen;like Max Wall finally revealing he was oldand then starting again in that Beckett stuff.I’d like to take my sense of the real and stuffit. There’s a kind of pigeon called a tumblerthat turns over backwards as it flies, oldand having fun; sometimes I think that’s justwhat I want to do, but I can’t cut or screenout the lucid drift of memory that lapsmy brittle attention just off-screenaway from the comfortable laps and the velvety stuffI spilled a tumbler of milk over before I was old.

What seems like a silly word game yields poetry of compelling mystery and rhythmic flow. What appear to be the difficulties of the form reveal themselves, as of course they should, as its strengths–the repetition and recycling of elusive patterns that cannot be quite held in the mind all at once. Much in experience and thought deserves a poetic form that can bring such elements to life.

Poetry Exercise 15

Well, all you have to do now is write your own. It will take some time: do not expect it to be easy. If you get frustrated, walk away and come back later. Let ideas form in your mind, vanish, reform, change, adapt. The repetition of end-words in the right hands works in favour of the poem: it is a defining feature of the form, not to be disguised but welcomed. You might harness this as a means of repeating patterns of speech, as we all do in life, or in reflecting on the same things from different angles.

You can do it, believe me you can. And you will be so proud of yourself!

THE PANTOUM

How to explain the rules of this strict fifteenth-century form? A PANTOUM (pronounced pan-tomb) must be composed in full cross-rhymed quatrains: abab, cdcd and so on. It must begin and end with the same line, and this is how the scheme unfolds–draw breath. The second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third lines of the second stanza, the second and fourth lines of the second stanza become the first and third of stanza three and so on until you reach the end. Where the end comes is up to you: unlike the sestina or the sonnet there is no prescribed length to the form, but when you do end you must use the two lines you will not yet have repeated, the first and third of the opening stanza, they are reversed in order and become the second and fourth of the final quatrain. It sounds loopy, but if you look up and see what I have done it really isn’t that hard to follow. I have numbered and lettered the lines to make it clearer.

The effect, as my example suggests, can be quite hypnotic or doom-laden. It can seem like wading in treacle if not adroitly handled. Such a form seems to suit dreamy evocations of time past, the echoes of memory and desire, but it need not be limited to such themes.

How the pantoum arrived in France from the Malayan peninsula in about 1830 I am not entirely sure–its importation is attributed to Victor Hugo. I believe the original form, still alive and well in the Far East, uses an abba rhyme-scheme and insists upon eight syllables a line and thematic changes in each quatrain. I have managed the syllable count but stuck to the more usual cross-rhymes and consistency of subject matter. Since its first European use by Hugo, Baudelaire and other French practitioners it became moderately well-known and popular in England and especially America, the best-known examples being by Anne Waldman, Carolyn Kizer, John Ashbery, Donald Justice and David Trinidad. The playwright Peter Shaffer, who clearly relishes the challenge of old forms (he has experimented with villanelles, and sestinas too) composed an excellent pantoum entitled ‘Juggler, Magician, Fool’.

Here is the opening of Carolyn Kizer’s ‘Parents’ Pantoum’. She eschews rhyme which, given the lexical repetition demanded by the form, seems perfectly permissible. Note that enjambment and some flexibility with the repeated lines is helpful in refreshing the mood of the piece: the line ‘How do they appear in their long dresses’ reappears as ‘In their fragile heels and long black dresses’ for example, and there are additional buts and thoughs that vary the iterations. All this is usual in the modern, Western strain of pantoum.Where did these enormous children come from,More ladylike than we have ever been?Some of ours look older than we feel.How did they appear in their long dresses