The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

More ladylike than we have ever been?

But they moan about their aging more than we do,

In their fragile heels and long black dresses.

They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.They moan about their aging more than we do,A somber group–why don’t they brighten up?Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneityThey beg us to be dignified like them

If you are a nerdy, anagrammy, crossword puzzler sort of a person, as I tragically and irredeemably am, you will be especially drawn to the pantoum. The art, as with other lexically repetitive and patterned schemes, is to choose ‘open-ended’ repeating lines allowing ambiguity and room for manoeuvre. It is one thing, of course, to write them as a fun exercise, quite another to make a poem of readable qualities for others. Technically the ideal is to push the normative requirements of the mode hard, sometimes to breaking point. There in lies the knack–stretching the bubble until just before it bursts. Without hard pressure on the inner walls of its membrane the pantoum–and this holds true of the other complex forms–can seem a flaccid, futile exercise in wordsmanship.

THE BALLADEBALLADE is not an easy form to crackNo other rhymes, but only A or B;The paeon, dactyl and the amphibrach,The antispast, molossus and spondeeWill not assist us in the least degreeAs through the wilderness we grimly hackAnd sow our hopeful seeds of poetry.It’s always one step forward, two steps back.But let me be Marvell, not KerouacThe open road holds no allure for me.A garden path shall be my desert track,The song of birds my jukebox melody,The neighbour’s cat my Neil Cassidy.With just a mower for a CadillacI won’t get far, but nor will they. You see–It’s always one step forward, two steps back.A hammock is my beatnik bivouacMy moonshine bourbon is a cup of tea.No purple hearts, no acid trips, no smackMy only buzz the humble honeybee.So let them have their free-verse libertyAnd I shall have my handsome garden shackWe’ll see which one of us is truly free,It’s always one step forward, two steps back.EnvoiPrince and peasant, workers, peers or bourgeoisieMcGonagall, Lord Byron, PasternakOf mongrel stock or high born pedigree—It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

The BALLADE, not to be confused with the ballad (or with the musical ballade devised by Chopin), is a venerable French form of some fiendishness for English poets. The difficulty arises, not from any complexity of patterning or repetition such as is to be found in the sestina, but from the number of rhyme sounds needed. It ends with an envoi which, tradition dictates, must be addressed to a Prince. Indeed the very word ‘Prince’ is usually the envoi’s first word: this happy convention, maintained even by modern poets like Dorothy Parker, is a nod to the royal patronage enjoyed by early practitioners such as François Villon and Eustache Deschamps. Those who elected to write sacred ballades would begin their envois with the invocations ‘Prince Jesus!’, or ‘Prince and Saviour!’. Each stanza, the envoi included, ends with the same refrain or rentrement. Early ballades were often composed in three seven-line stanzas, but these days an eight-line stanza with an envoi of four lines seems to have been settled upon by English-language poets. The usual rhyme scheme is ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA, in other words ten a rhymes (and a refrain, A, to rhyme with them) and fourteen b rhymes. This is no doubt a doddle in French but the very bastard son of a mongrel bitch in English. G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Ballade of Suicide’ is one of the better-known examples:The gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall;I tie the noose on in a knowing wayAs one that knots his necktie for a ball;But just as all the neighbours–on the wall–Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘Hurray!’The strangest whim has seized me…. After allI think I will not hang myself to-day.To-morrow is the time I get my pay–My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall–I see a little cloud all pink and grey–Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call–I fancy that I heard from Mr GallThat mushrooms could be cooked another way–I never read the works of Juvenal–I think I will not hang myself to-day.The world will have another washing-day;The decadents decay; the pedants pall;And H. G. Wells has found that children play,And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,Rationalists are growing rational–And through thick woods one finds a stream astraySo secret that the very sky seems small–I think I will not hang myself to-day.EnvoiPrince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,The tumbrels toiling up the terrible way;Even to-day your royal head may fall,I think I will not hang myself to-day.

It reminds me of Fagin’s song ‘I’m Reviewing the Situation’ from Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver! the refrain to which, ‘I think I’d better think it out again’, forms a similarly memorable decasyllabic chorus. Bart’s number is not a ballade, of course, but the similarity demonstrates the form’s derivations from, and yearnings towards, music. One of the more successful and regular tillers of the ballade’s rhyme-rich soil was the Round Table with Dorothy Parker. Here is her ‘Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals’:Love is sharper than stones or sticks;Lone as the sea, and deeper blue;Loud in the night as a clock that ticks;Longer-lived than the Wandering Jew.Show me a love was done and through,Tell me a kiss escaped its debt!Son, to your death you’ll pay your due–Women and elephants never forget.Ever a man, alas, would mix,Ever a man, heigh-ho, must woo;So he’s left in the world-old fix,Thus is furthered the sale of rue.Son, your chances are thin and few–Won’t you ponder, before you’re set?Shoot if you must, but hold in viewWomen and elephants never forget.Down from Caesar past Joynson-HicksEchoes the warning, ever new:Though they’re trained to amusing tricks,Gentler, they, than the pigeon’s coo,Careful, son, of the cursèd two–Either one is a dangerous pet;Natural history proves it true–Women and elephants never forget.L’EnvoiPrince, a precept I’d leave for you,Coined in Eden, existing yet:Skirt the parlor, and shun the zoo–Women and elephants never forget.

VII

More Closed Forms

The rondeau–rondeau redoublé–the rondel–the roundel–the rondelet–the roundelay–the triolet and the kyrielle

Yeah, right. You really want to know about all these French Rs. Your life won’t be complete without them. Well, don’t be too put off by the confusing nomenclatorial similarities and Frenchy sound they seem to share. You are probably familiar with the concept of a musically sung ROUND (‘Frère Jacques’, ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, ‘London Bridge’ etc.) All these forms are based on the principle of a poetic round, a (mercifully) short poem as a rule, characterised by the nature of its refrain (rentrement). The avatar of these genres is the RONDEAU, pronounced like the musical rondo, but with typical French equal stress.

RONDEAUOF MY RONDEAU this much is true:Its virtues lie in open view,Unravelled is its tangled skein,Untapped the blood from every vein,Unthreaded every nut and screw.I strip it thus to show to youThe way I rhyme it, what I doTo mould its form, yet still retainThe proper shape and inward grainOF MY RONDEAU.As rhyming words in lines accrueA pleasing sense of déjà-vuWill infiltrate your teeming brain.Now…here it comes the old refrain,The beating drum and proud tattooOF MY RONDEAU.

Most scholars of the genre seem to agree that in its most common form, as I have tried to demonstrate, the rondeau should be a poem of between thirteen and fifteen lines, patterned by two rhymes and a refrain R, formed by the first half of the opening line. The scheme is represented by R-aabba aabR aabbaR. A notable example is the Canadian poet John McCrae’s rondeau, ‘In Flanders Fields’:IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row,That mark our place, and in the sky,The larks, still bravely singing, fly,Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the dead; short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe!To you from failing hands we throwThe torch; be yours to hold it high!If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

This very earnest poem subverts the usual characteristic of the form in French verse, where the rondeau is a light, graceful and merry thing that refuses to take life very seriously. Although the two examples you have seen are, so far as my very unscholarly researches can determine, the ‘correct’ form, the appellation rondeau has been used through the ages by English-language poets from Grimald to the present day to apply to a number of variations. Leigh Hunt’s ‘Rondeau: Jenny Kissed Me’ adheres to the principle of a refrain culled from the first hemistich of the opening line, but adds a rhyme for it in line 6. The Jenny in question, by the way, is said to have been Thomas Carlyle’s wife.¹³JENNY KISSED ME when we met,Jumping from the chair she sat in;Time, you thief, who love to getSweets into your list, put that in:Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,Say that health and wealth have missed me,Say I’m growing old, but add,

JENNY KISSED ME.

A variation exists (don’t they always) and here it is.

RONDEAU REDOUBLÉTHE FIRST FOUR LINES OF RONDEAU REDOUBLÉAre chosen with especial skill and careFor each one has a vital role to playIn turn they each a heavy burden share.Disaster comes to those who don’t prepareThe opening stanza in an artful waySo do, dear friends, I beg of you, bewareThe first four lines of rondeau redoublé.That warning made, it’s pretty safe to sayThis ancient form’s a simply wrought affair,So long as all your rhymes, both B and AAre chosen with especial skill and care;For you’ll need rhymes and plenty left to spare–A dozen words, arranged in neat arrayThat’s six, yes six in every rhyming pair,For each one has a vital role to play.So long as you these simple rules obeyYou’ll have no trouble with the form, I swear.The first four lines your efforts will repay,In turn they each a heavy burden share,

THE FIRST FOUR LINES.

Here, as I hope my abominable but at least accurately self-referential example makes clear, each line of Stanza 1 forms in turn an end-refrain to the next four stanzas. As in the standard rondeau, the opening hemistich is repeated to form a final coda or mini-envoi. Each stanza alternates in rhyme between abab and baba.

Wendy Cope included an excellent example in her collection Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and here is Dorothy Parker’s charming (and charmingly titled) example ‘Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That)’ which has an excellent coda:THE SAME TO ME are somber days and gay.Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright,Because my dearest love is gone awayWithin my heart is melancholy night.My heart beats low in loneliness, despiteThat riotous Summer holds the earth in sway.In cerements my spirit is bedight;The same to me are somber days and gay.Though breezes in the rippling grasses play,And waves dash high and far in glorious might,I thrill no longer to the sparkling day,Though joyous dawns the rosy morn, and bright.Ungraceful seems to me the swallow’s flight;As well might Heaven’s blue be sullen gray;My soul discerns no beauty in their sightBecause my dearest love is gone away.Let roses fling afar their crimson spray,And virgin daisies splash the fields with white,Let bloom the poppy hotly as it may,Within my heart is melancholy night.And this, oh love, my pitiable plightWhenever from my circling arms you stray;This little world of mine has lost its light…I hope to God, my dear, that you can say

The same to me.

So let us now meet some of the rondeau’s hopeful progeny.

RONDELThe RONDEL sends the senses reeling,And who are we to call it dead?Examples that I’ve seen and readHave given me the strongest feelingThat such a form is most appealingTo those whose Heart controls their Head.The rondel sends the senses reeling And who are we to call it dead?Its lines for ever roundly wheeling,Make manifest what can’t be said.From wall to wall and floor to ceilingThe rondel sends the senses reelingAnd who are we to call it dead?

The RONDEL’s first couplet, as you can see, is repeated as a final refrain. There appears to be no set length, but in the later thirteen-line or fourteen-line variants such as mine (known as RONDEL PRIME and now seemingly the standard strain in English verse) the rentrements are also repeated in the middle of the poem. Chaucer, Longfellow and others wrote poems they called rondels which appear to vary in all points except that crucial matter of the refrain. There again, Nicholas Grimald, the poet and scholar who just avoided burning under Mary Tudor and gave his name to Sirius Black’s family home in the Harry Potter books, wrote a ‘Rondel of Love’ in sixains only the first verse of which has a repeated line. Austin Dobson, who enjoyed experimenting with forms of this nature (indeed, he founded a school of poets in 1876 devoted to the rediscovery of the old French rondeau family), demonstrates what we might call the rondel’s ‘correct’ form, whose lineaments my effort also shares (the italics are mine to help point up the rentrements):Love comes back to his vacant dwelling,The old, old Love that we knew of yore!We see him stand by the open door,With his great eyes sad, and his bosom swelling.He makes as though in our arms repellingHe fain would lie as he lay beforeLove comes back to his vacant dwelling,The old, old Love that we knew of yore!Ah! who shall help us from over-spellingThat sweet, forgotten, forbidden lore?E’en as we doubt, in our hearts once more,With a rush of tears to our eyelids welling,Love comes back to his vacant dwelling,The old, old Love that we knew of yore!

It is a requirement of this ‘correct’ form (one that both Dobson and I met) that of the two rhymes, one should be masculine, the other feminine, contributing to the overall call-and-response character of the form.

ROUNDEL

Swinburne developed an English version of his own which he called the ROUNDEL, as you see it is closer to a rondeau than a rondel:A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere, With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear A roundel is wrought.Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught– Love, laughter, or mourning–remembrance of rapture or fear–That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.As a bird’s quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear, A roundel is wrought.

RONDELETI cannot singA RONDELET of love to theeI cannot singI try to let my voice take wing,It never seems to stay in keyAnd if you heard me, you’d agreeI cannot sing

Pretty clear, clear and pretty, the RONDELET goes AbAabbA as mine demonstrates. I don’t know of any spectacular examples (aside from my own) of the rondelet, pronounced as if it were a Welsh valley song (or indeed sexual experience) a Rhondda Lay. The good old English version of the word might promise a similar form, you would be entitled to think.

ROUNDELAY

Actually the ROUNDELAY is rather different:My hee-haw voice is like a brayNothing sounds so asinineLittle causes more dismayThan my dreadful donkey whine.Hear me sing a ROUNDELAYThere is no fouler voice than mine.Little causes more dismayThan my dreadful donkey whine.Hear me sing a roundelayThere is no fouler voice than mine.Stop your singing right away,Else we’ll break your fucking spine.Hear me sing a roundelayThere is no fouler voice than mine.

As you see, pairs of lines repeat in order. Here is ‘A Roundelay’ by the late seventeenth-century poet Thomas Scott:Man, that is for woman madeAnd the woman made for man.As the spur is for the jade.As the scabbard for the bladeAs for liquor is the can,So man is for the woman madeAnd the woman made for man.

And so on for two more stanzas: for Scott and his contemporaries a roundelay seemed to be any poem with the same two-line refrain at the beginning and end of each stanza, but Samuel Beckett did write a poem called ‘roundelay’ with full and fascinating internal line repetition. Your task is to find a copy of it and discover its beauties and excellence. Award yourself twenty points if you can get your hands on it within a week.

TRIOLETThis TRIOLET of my designIs sent with all my heart to you,Devotion dwells in every line.This triolet of my designIs not so swooningly divineAs you, my darling Valentine.This triolet of my designI send with all my heart to you.

The TRIOLET is pronounced in one of three ways: to rhyme with ‘violet’, or the halfway house tree-o-lett, or tree-o-lay in the full French manner: simply stated it is an eight-line poem whose first (A) and second (B) lines are repeated at the end: the first line also repeats as the fourth. ABaAbbAB in other words. It is, I suppose, the threefold repeat of that first line that give it the ‘trio’ name. Do you remember Frances Cornford’s ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’ which we looked at when thinking about rhymes for ‘love’? If we look at it again, we can see that it is in fact a triolet.O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,Missing so much and so much?O fat white woman whom nobody loves,Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,When the grass is soft as the breast of dovesAnd shivering sweet to the touch?O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,Missing so much and so much?

Here is another, written by the unfortunately named American poet Adelaide Crapsey:I make my shroud but no one knows,So shimmering fine it is and fair,With stitches set in even rows.I make my shroud but no one knows.In door-way where the lilac blows,Humming a little wandering air,I make my shroud and no one knows,So shimmering fine it is and fair.

W. E. Henley (on whom Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver) believed triolets were easy and was not afraid to say so. He also clearly thought, if his rhyming is anything to go by, that they were pronounced English-fashion, probably tree-o-let:EASY is the Triolet,If you really learn to make it!Once a neat refrain you get,Easy is the Triolet.As you see!–I pay my debtWith another rhyme. Deuce take it,Easy is the Triolet,If you really learn to make it!

They are certainly not easy to master but–as my maudlin attempt suggests, and as Wendy Cope’s ‘Valentine’ rather more stylishly proves–they seem absolutely tailor-made for light love poetry:My heart has made its mind upAnd I’m afraid it’s you.Whatever you’ve got lined up,My heart has made its mind upAnd if you can’t be signed upThis year, next year will do.My heart has made its mind upAnd I’m afraid it’s you.

One more repeating form to look at before we atrophy.

KYRIELLEThe chanting of a KYRIELLETolls like the summons of a bellTo bid us purge our black disgrace.Lord a-mercy, shut my face.Upon my knees, I kiss the rod,Repent and raise this cry to God–I am a sinner, foul and baseLord a-mercy, shut my face.And so I make this plaintive cry:‘From out my soul, the demons chaseProstrate before thy feet I lie.’Lord a-mercy, shut my face.There is no health or good in me,Nor in the wretched human race.Therefore my God I cry to thee.Lord a-mercy, shut my face.Let sins be gone without a traceLord have mercy, shut my face.You’ve heard my pleas, I rest my case.Lord have mercy! Shut my face.

The name and character of the KYRIELLE derive from the Mass, whose wail of Kyrie eleison!–‘Lord, have mercy upon us’–is a familiar element. For those of us not brought up in Romish ways it is to be heard in the great requiems and other masses of the classical repertoire.

The final line of every stanza is the same, indeed rime en kyrielle is an alternative name for repeated lines in any style of poetry. Most examples of the kyrielle to be found in English are written, as mine is, in iambic tetrameter. As I have tried to demonstrate, quatrains of aabB and abaB or couplets of aA, aA are all equally acceptable. There is no set length. The Elizabethan songwriter and poet Thomas (‘Cherry Ripe’) Campion wrote a ‘Lenten Hymn’ very much in the spirit, as well as the letter, of the kyrielle:With broken heart and contrite sigh,A trembling sinner, Lord, I cry:Thy pard’ning grace is rich and free:O God, be merciful to me.I smite upon my troubled breast,With deep and conscious guilt opprest,Christ and His cross my only plea:O God, be merciful to me.

Incidentally, many kyrielles were written in 1666. Not just to apologise to God for being so sinful and tasteless as to perish in plague and fire, but because numbers were considered important and the Roman numerals in ‘LorD haVe MerCIe Vpon Vs’ add up to 1666: this is called a CHRONOGRAM.

The kyrielle need not exhibit agonised apology and tortured pleas for mercy, however. The late Victorian John Payne managed to be a little less breast-beating in his ‘Kyrielle’ as well as demonstrating the scope for slight variation in the repeat:A lark in the mesh of the tangled vine,A bee that drowns in the flower-cup’s wine,A fly in sunshine,–such is the man.All things must end, as all began.A little pain, a little pleasure,A little heaping up of treasure;Then no more gazing upon the sun.All things must end that have begun.Where is the time for hope or doubt?A puff of the wind, and life is out;A turn of the wheel, and rest is won.All things must end that have begun.Golden morning and purple night,Life that fails with the failing light;Death is the only deathless one.All things must end that have begun

Well, haven’t we learned a lot! Bags of French forms beginning with ‘r’ that repeat their lines en kyrielle. To be honest, you could call them all rondeaux and only a pedant would pull you up on it. It is not too complicated a matter to invent your own form, a regular pattern of refrains is all it takes. You could call it a rondolina or rondismo or a boundelay or whatever you fancied. Destiny and a place in poetic history beckon.

Poetry Exercise 16

Your FIRST task is to write a less emetic triolet than mine for your true love, as sweet without being sickly as you can make it, your SECOND to compose a RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ on any subject you please.

VIII

Comic Verse

The cento–the limerick and the clerihew–reflections on comic verse, light verse and parody

CENTOWordsworth Comes OutMy heart leaps up when I beholdThe pansy at my feet;Ingenuous, innocent and boldBeside a mossy seat.For oft when on my couch I lieUpon the growing boy,A little Cyclops with one eyeWill dwell with me–to heighten joy.

CENTOS are cannibalised verse, collage poems whose individual lines are made up of fragments of other poetry. Often each line will be from the same poet. The result is a kind of enforced self-parody. In mine above, all the lines are culled from different poems by Wordsworth. Ian Patterson has produced some corkers. Here are two, one from A. E. Housman, the other a cento stitched from Shakespeare sonnets. Just to emphasise the point: all the lines are genuine lines from the poet in question, panels torn from their own work to make a new quilt. First, his Housman Cento:The happy highways where I wentWarm with the blood of lads I knowHave willed more mischief than they durstA hundred years ago.Clay lies still, but blood’s a roverSafe through jostling markets borne;The nettle nods, the wind blows over,With hurts not mine to mourn.When you and I are spilt on air,What’s to show for all my pain?Duty, friendship, bravery o’er,And Ludlow fair again.

Extraordinary how much sense it seems to make. This is Patterson’s Shakespeare Cento:When in the chronicles of wasted timeThat thy unkindness lays upon my heart,Bearing the wanton burthen of the primeTo guard the lawful reasons on thy part,My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lieThe perfect ceremony of love’s rite,And scarcely greet me with that sun thine eyeTo change your day of youth to sullen night,Then in the number let me pass untoldSo that myself bring water for my stain,That poor retention could not so much holdKnowing thy heart torment me in disdain:O cunning love, with tears thou keep’st me blind,

Since I left you my eye is in my mind.

They are, I suppose, no more than a game, but one which can be surprisingly revealing. If nothing else, they provide a harmlessly productive way of getting to know a particular poet’s way with phrase and form. Centos that mix completely dissimilar poets’ lines are another harmless kind of comic invention.

THE CLERIHEWELIZABETH BARRETTWas kept in a garret.Her father resented it bitterlyWhen Robert Browning took her to Italy.ALFRED, LORD TENNYSONPreferred Victoria Sponge to venison.His motto was ‘Regina semper floreat’And that’s how he became Poet Laureate.OSCAR WILDEHad his reputation defiled.When he was led from the dock in tearsHe said ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking

at two years.’D. H. LAWRENCEHeld flies in abhorrence.He once wrote a verse graffitoDeploring the humble mosquito.TED HUGHESHad a very short fuse.What prompted his wrathWas being asked about Sylvia Plath.

The CLERIHEW is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, father of Nicolas, that peerless illustrator who always signed his work ‘Nicolas Bentley Drew the pictures’. The rules state that clerihews be non-metrically written in two couplets, the first of which is to be a proper name and nothing else. The best-known originals include:Christopher WrenSaid ‘I am going to dine with some men,‘If anyone callsSay I am designing St Paul’s.’Sir Humphrey DavyAbominated gravy.He lived in the odiumOf having discovered sodium.John Stuart Mill,By a mighty effort of will,Overcame his natural bonhomieAnd wrote ‘Principles of Economy’.

Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum; indeed, it is considered extremely bad form for a clerihew to scan. Properly done, they should tell some biographical truth, obvious or otherwise, about their subject, rather than be sheer nonsense. Sir Humphrey’s dislike of gravy, for example, may well be whimsical tosh, but he did discover sodium: I have tried to cleave to this requirement in my clerihews on the poets. Clerihews have therefore some utility as biographical mnemonics.

THE LIMERICKThere was a middle-aged writer called FryWhose book on verse was a lie.For The Ode Less TravelledSoon unravelledTo reveal some serious errors in its scansion and rhy…

Unlike clerihews, LIMERICKS, as we discovered when considering their true metrical nature (we decided they were anapaestic, if you recall), do and must scan. I am sure you need to be told little else about them. The name is said to come from a boozy tavern chorus ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’. Although they are popularly associated with Edward Lear, anonymous verses in the ‘There was an old woman of…’ formulation pre-dated him by many years:A merry old man of Oporto,Had long had the gout in his fore-toe;And oft when he spokeTo relate a good joke,A terrible twinge cut it short-O.Said a very proud Farmer at Reigate,When the Squire rode up to his high gate

‘With your horse and your hound,You had better go round,For, I say, you shan’t jump over my gate.’

That pair was accompanied by Cruikshank illustrations in a children’s ‘chap-book’ of around 1820 when Lear was just eight or nine years old. Oddly, these examples accord more closely to the modern sense of what a limerick should be than Lear’s own effusions, in which the last line often lamely repeats the first.There was an Old Man of the West,Who wore a pale plum-coloured vest;When they said, ‘Does it fit?’He replied, ‘Not a bit!’That uneasy Old Man of the West.

Rather flat to the modern ear, I find. We prefer a punchline:Girls who frequent picture palacesSet no store by psychoanalysis.And although Sigmund FreudWould be greatly annoyed,They cling to their long-standing fallacies.

Or phalluses, ho-ho-ho. It was W. S. Baring-Gould’s collection The Lure of the Limerick that really understood the base (in both senses) nature of the form. I remember owning a Panther Books edition (an imprint known for publishing risqué but classy works, Genet and the like) and finding their scabrous and cloacal nature hilarious, as any unhealthy ten-year-old would. This anonymous (so far as I can tell) limerick puts it well:The limerick packs laughs anatomicalInto space that is quite economical.But the good ones I’ve seenSo seldom are cleanAnd the clean ones so seldom are comical.

When I began collecting the works of Norman Douglas I was delighted to find a copy of his 1928 anthology, Some Limericks, which remains deeply shocking to this day. Most of them are simply disgusting. Hard to believe that an antiquarian belle-lettriste like Douglas (you may remember his ‘Wagtail’ anacreontics) would dare risk attaching his name to them at a time when Ulysses was being impounded by customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic. Please do not read these four examples of Douglas’s literary excavations. Skip to the next paragraph instead.There was an old fellow of Brest,Who sucked off his wife with a zest.Despite her great yowlsHe sucked out her bowelsAnd spat them all over her chest.There was a young man of NantucketWhose prick was so long he could suck itHe said, with a grinAs he wiped off his chin:‘If my ear were a cunt, I could fuck it.’There was an old man of Corfu,Who fed upon cunt-juice and spew.When he couldn’t get this,He fed upon piss–And a bloody good substitute too.There was an old man of Brienz,The length of whose cock was immense.With one swerve he could plugA boy’s bottom in ZugAnd a kitchen-maid’s cunt in Koblenz.

Reflections on Comic and Impolite Verse

Comic forms such as the limerick and the clerihew are the pocket cartoons of poetry. Often they fail dismally to provoke the slightest smile–although those collected by Norman Douglas can certainly provoke cries of outrage and s(t)imulated disgust. It seems to me that the City of Poesy, with its associations of delicacy, refined emotion and exquisite literacy is all the richer for having these moral slums within its walls. No metropolis worth visiting is without its red-light district, its cruising areas and a bohemian village where absinthe flows, reefers glow and love is free. W. H. Auden wrote obscene comic verse which you will not find anthologised by Faber and Faber,¹⁴ and even the retiring Robert Frost had the occasional reluctant (and unconvincing) stab at being saucy. Obscenity is a fit manner for comic verse; without it the twin horrors of whimsy and cuteness threaten. There is surely no word in the language that causes the heart to sink like a stone so much as ‘humorous’. Wit is one thing, bawdy another, but humorousness…Humorousness is to wit what a suburban lawn is to either Sissinghurst or a rubbish-heap, what an executive saloon is to an Aston Martin or a cheerful old banger. Wit is either a steel rapier or a lead cosh, rarely a cutely fashioned paper dart. Wit is not nice, wit is not affirmative or consoling. Jonathan Swift describing how ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Goes to Bed’ is unafraid of being disgusting in his disgust:CORINNA, Pride of Drury-Lane,…Returning at the Midnight Hour;Four Stories climbing to her Bow’r;Then, seated on a three-legg’d Chair,Takes off her artificial Hair:Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse’s Hide,Stuck on with Art on either Side,Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em,Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays ’em.Now dexterously her Plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow Jaws.Untwists a Wire; and from her GumsA Set of Teeth completely comes.Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to propHer flabby Dugs and down they drop.Proceeding on, the lovely GoddessUnlaces next her Steel-Rib’d Bodice;Which by the Operator’s Skill,Press down the Lumps, the Hollows fill,Up hoes her Hand, and off she slipsThe Bolsters that supply her Hips.With gentlest Touch, she next exploresHer Shankers, Issues, running Sores,Effects of many a sad Disaster;And then to each applies a Plaster.But must, before she goes to Bed,Rub off the Daubs of White and Red;And smooth the Furrows in her Front,With greasy Paper stuck upon’t.She takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps;And then between two Blankets creeps.…CORINNA wakes. A dreadful Sight!Behold the Ruins of the Night!A wicked Rat her Plaster stole,Half eat, and dragged it to his Hole.The Crystal Eye, alas, was miss’d;And Puss had on her Plumpers piss’d.A Pigeon pick’d her Issue-Peas;And Shock her Tresses fill’d with Fleas.The Nymph, tho’ in this mangled Plight,Must ev’ry Morn her Limbs unite.But how shall I describe her ArtsTo recollect the scatter’d Parts?Or show the Anguish, Toil, and Pain,Of gath’ring up herself again?The bashful Muse will never bearIn such a Scene to interfere.Corinna in the Morning dizen’d,Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison’d.

Heroic verse indeed. Even more scabrous, scatological and downright disgraceful was the seventeenth-century’s one-man Derek & Clive, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:She was so exquisite a whoreThat in the belly of her motherShe turned her cunt so right beforeHer father fucked them both together.

Mm, nice.

Light Verse

It is revealing that in polls to find the most popular poets, names like Shel Silverstein, Wendy Cope, Spike Milligan, Roald Dahl, Roger McGough, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Betjeman, Glyn Maxwell and Langston Hughes consistently appear high in the charts (not that all their work is comic, of course). Certainly Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda feature too (not that all their work is serious, of course). There seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for verse whose major rhetorical instrument is wit or lightness of touch. It is notable also that long poems seem a great deal less appealing to the public. Perhaps this is something to do with our culture of immediacy: fast food verse for fast food people. Whatever the reason, it seems to me self-evident that if you wish your poetry to make a noise outside the world of academia, poetry magazines and private Gesellschaften, your chances are greatly increased by their possession of an element of esprit. Perhaps the description that best fits the work of the more popular poets is not comic, but light. ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly,’ said Chesterton.

LIGHT VERSE does not need to be comic in intent or witty in nature: it encourages readers to believe that they and the poet share the same discourse, intelligence and standing, inhabit the same universe of feeling and cultural reference, it does not howl in misunderstood loneliness, wallow in romantic agony or bombard the reader with learning and allusion from a Parnassian or abstrusely academic height. This kind of poetry, Auden argues in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, was mainstream until the arrival of the romantics. With the exception of sacred verse, Miltonic epics, drama and the more complex metaphysical poems of the seventeenth century, almost all poetry was, more or less, light. It was adult, it could be moving, angry, erotic and even religious, but it was digestible, it was not embarrassed by the idea of likeability and accessibility. A poem could be admired because it was prettily made and charming to read, Mozartian qualities if you like. Modernism appeared to drive lightness out of poetry for ever. These popularity polls, irksome as they be, seem to indicate that it is far from dead, however. In the knowledge that Gravity will destroy us in the end, perhaps Levity is not so trivial a response.

Parody

Neither are parody and pastiche an unfit manner for the poet. Chaucer began the trend in English with a scintillating parody of badly versified epical romance called Sir Thopas. Shakespeare parodied Marlowe, as did Donne (in praise of angling in the style of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’); Byron parodied and was parodied, Dryden, Johnson, and Swift parodied and were parodied and so it went on. Trends in the actual nuts and bolts of versification were ruthlessly guyed by Pope in the Dunciad: George Canning and John Hookham Frere (the former of Castlereagh, the latter of Whistlecraft fame and the pair of them high Tory ‘Anti-Jacobins’) made great sport of the democrat Southey’s experiments in dactylics:Wearisome Sonnetteer, feeble and querulous,Painfully dragging out thy democratic lays–Moon-stricken sonneteer, ‘ah! for thy heavenly chance!’Sorely thy Dactylics lag on uneven feet:Slow is the syllable which thou would’st urge to speed,Lame and o’erburden’d, and ‘screaming its wretchedness’.

They had a go at his Sapphic verse too:Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order–Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in ’t,

So have your breeches.

Byron was always savage at the expense of the ‘Lakers’. It is fair to observe that he, silver-spoon nobleman as was, remained a true radical all his life, while both Southey and Wordsworth accepted the King’s shilling and butt of malmsey as Poets Laureate, ending their lives as comfortable establishment grandees. Byron seemed to detect an air of fraudulence early on. Here is his parody of Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’.There’s something in a stupid ass:And something in a heavy dunce;But never since I went to schoolI saw or heard so damned a foolAs William Wordsworth is for once.

They say the modern literary world is full of squabbling hatred and simmering resentments, but it is as nothing to the past.

The individuality and restless stressed energy of Hopkins makes him ripe for pastiche. Anthony Brode was inspired to write a perfect Hopkins parody after reading this on his cereal packet one morning: ‘Delicious heart-of-the-corn, fresh-from-the-oven flakes are sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can’t-be-resisted-flavour.’Parenthesis proud, bracket-bold, happiest with hyphensThe writers stagger intoxicated by terms, adjective-unsteadied–Describing in graceless phrases fizzling like soda siphonsAll things crisp, crunchy, malted, tangy, sugared and shredded.

Parodies are rife in popular culture, a staple of television comedy, but literary and verse parodies seem to have fallen from fashion, Wendy Cope being one of the few practising poets who plays happily and fruitfully with the style of other poets. Now it’s your turn.

Poetry Exercise 17

I am sure you have a favourite poet. Write a parody of their style and prosodic manner. Try and make it comically inappropriate: if you like Ted Hughes, try writing a fearsome, physically tough description of a Barbie doll or something else very un-Hughesy. I know this is a bit of a Spectator Competition sort of exercise, but it is a good way of noticing all the metrical, rhyming and formal mannerisms of a poet. If you are really feeling bold, try writing a cento. You will need the collected works of the poet you choose, otherwise a cento mixing different verses from an anthology might be worth trying. Surprise yourself.

IX

Exotic Forms¹⁵

Haiku—senryu–tanka–ghazal–luc bat–tanaga

HAIKU

Five seven and five:

Seventeen essential oils

For warm winter nights.

The HAIKU, as you may already know, is a three-line poem of Japanese origin whose lines are composed of five, seven and five syllables. There is much debate as to whether there is any purpose to be served in English-language versions of the form. Those who understand Japanese are strong in their insistence that haikus in our tongue are less than a pale shadow of the home-grown original. English, as a stress-timed language, cannot hope to reproduce the effects of syllable-timed Japanese. I define these terms (rather vaguely) in the section on Syllabic Verse in Chapter One.

Just so that you are aware, there is a great deal more to the haiku than mere syllable count. For one thing, it is considered de rigueur to include the season of the year, if not as crassly as mine does, then at least by some other reference to weather or atmosphere, what is known as a kigo word. A reverence for life and the natural world is another apparent sine qua non of the form, the aim being to provide a kind of aural, imagistic snapshot (a shasei or ‘sketch of nature’). The senses should be engaged and verbs be kept to a minimum, if not expunged entirely. The general tenor and thrust of the form (believe me, I am no expert) seems to be for the poet (haijin) to await a ‘haiku moment’, an epiphany or imaginative inspiration of some kind. The haiku is a distillation of such a moment. In their native land haikus are written in one line, which renders the idea of a 5–7–5 syllable count all the more questionable. They also contain many puns (kakekotoba), this not being considered a groan-worthy practice in Japanese. A caesura, or kireji, should be felt at the end of either the first or second ‘line’.

Haiku descends from haikai no renga, a (playful) linked verse development of a shorter form called waka. The haikai’s first stanza was called a hokku and when poets like Masaoka Shiki developed their new, stand-alone form in the nineteenth century, they yoked together the words haikai and hokku to make haiku. We now tend to backdate the term and call the short poems of seventeenth-century masters such as Matsuo Basho haikus, although they ought really to be called hokkus. Clear?

A haiku which does not include a kigo word and is more about human than physical nature is called a SENRYU which, confusingly, means ‘river willow’.

Those who have studied the form properly and write them in English are now very unlikely to stick to the 5–7–5 framework. The Japanese on (sound unit) is very different from our syllable and most original examples contain far fewer words than their English equivalents. For some the whole enterprise is a doomed and fatuous mismatch, as misguided as eating the Sunday roast with chopsticks and calling it sushi. Nonetheless non-Japanese speakers of some renown have tried them. They seemed to have been especially appealing to the American beat poets, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso and Kerouac, as well as to Spanish-language poets like Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges. Here are a couple of Borges examples (it is possible that haikus in Spanish, which like Japanese is syllabically timed, work better than in English)–my literal translations do not obey the syllabic imperatives.La vasta nocheno es ahora otra cosaque una fragancia.(The enormous night

is now nothing more

than a fragrance.)Callan las cuerdas.La música sabíalo que yo siento.(The strings are silent.The music knewWhat I was feeling.)

Borges also experimented with another waka-descended Japanese form, the TANKA (also known as yamato uta). I shall refrain from entering into the nuances of the form, which appear to be complex and unsettled–certainly as far as their use in English goes. The general view appears to be that they are five-line poems with a syllable count of 5,7,5,7,7. In Spanish, in the hands of Borges, they look like this:La ajena copa,La espada que fue espadaEn otra mano,La luna de la calle,Dime, ¿acaso no bastan?(Another’s cup,The sword which was a swordIn another’s hand,The moon in the street,Say to me, ‘Perhaps they are not enough.’)

The form has recently grown in popularity, thanks in large part to the publication American Tanka and a proliferation of tanka sites on the Internet.

GHAZALThe lines in GHAZAL always need to run, IN PAIRS.They come, like mother-daughter, father-son, IN PAIRSI’ll change the subject, as this ancient form requiresIt offers hours of simple, harmless fun, IN PAIRS.Apparently a Persian form, from far-off daysIt needs composing just as I have done, IN PAIRSAnd when I think the poem’s finished and completeI STEPHEN FRY, pronounce my work is un-IMPAIRED.

My version is rather a bastardly abortion I fear, but the key principles are mostly adhered to. The lines of a GHAZAL (pronounced a bit like guzzle, but the ‘g’ should hiccup slightly, Arab-stylie) come in metrical couplets. The rhymes are unusual in that the last phrase of the opening two lines (and second lines of each subsequent couplet) is a refrain (rhadif ), it is the word before the refrain that is rhymed, in the manner shown above. I have cheated with the last rhyme-refrain pairing as you can see. Each couplet should be a discrete (but not necessarily discreet) entity unto itself, no enjambment being permitted or overall theme being necessary. It is usual, but not obligatory, for the poet to ‘sign his name’ in the last line as I have done.

The growth in the form’s popularity in English is largely due to its rediscovery by a generation of Pakistani and Indian poets keen to reclaim an ancient form with which they feel a natural kinship. As with the haiku, it may seem to some impertinent and inappropriate to try to wrench the form out of its natural context: like taking a Lancashire hotpot out of a tandoori oven and serving it as Asian food. I see nothing intrinsically wrong with such attempts at cultural cross-breeding, but I am no authority.

LUC BATLUC BAT is rather cuteIt keeps the mind astute and pertIt doesn’t really hurtTo keep the mind alertly keenYou’ll know just what I meanWhen you have gone and been and doneYour own completed oneIt’s really rather fun to doFull of subtlety too,I hope that yours earn you repute.

This is a Vietnamese form much easier to do than to describe. LUC BAT is based on a syllable count that alternates 6, 8, 6, 8, 6, 8 and so on until the poet comes to his final pair of 6, 8 lines (the overall length is not fixed). The sixth syllables rhyme in couplets like my cute/astute but the eight-syllable lines have a second rhyme ( pert in my example), which rhymes with the sixth syllable of the next line, hurt. When you come to the final eight-syllable line, its eighth syllable rhymes with the first line of the poem (re pute back to cute). I don’t expect you to understand it from that garbled explanation. Here is a scheme: maybe that will be easier to follow.

Luc bat is the Vietnamese for ‘six eight’. The form is commonly found as a medium for two-line riddles, rhyming as above.Completely round and whiteAfter baths they’re tight together.Milk inside, not a yakHairy too, this snack is fleshy

Plates and coconuts, in case you hadn’t cracked them.¹⁶ Proper poems in Vietnamese use a stress system divided into the two pleasingly named elements bang and trac, which I cannot begin to explain, since I cannot begin to understand them. Once more the Internet seems to have been responsible for raising this form, obscure outside its country of origin, to something like cult status. It has variations. SONG THAT LUC BAT (which literally means two sevens, six-eight, although it begs in English to have the word ‘sang’ after it, as in ‘The Song That Luc Bat Sang’) consists of a seven-syllable rhyming couplet, followed by sixes and eights that rhyme according to another scheme that I won’t bother you with. I am sure you can search Vietnamese literature (or van chuong bac hoc) resources if you wish to know more.

TANAGAThe TANAGA owes its genesTo forms from the Philippines.To count all your words like beansYou may need adding machines.

The TANAGA is a short non-metric Filipino form, consisting of four seven-syllable lines rhyming aaaa, although modern English language tanagas allow abab, aabb and abba.¹⁷ I am not aware of any masterpieces having yet been composed in our language. But there it is for your pleasure.

Poetry Exercise 18

Four haikus in the usual mongrel English form: one for each season, so do not forget your kigo word.

X

The Sonnet

PETRARCHAN AND SHAKESPEAREANI wrote a bad PETRARCHAN SONNET once,In two laborious weeks. A throttled streamOf words–sure following the proper schemeOf Abba Abba–oh, but what a dunceI was to think those yells and tortured gruntsCould help me find an apt poetic theme.The more we try to think, the more we dream,The more we whet our wit, the more it blunts.But give that dreaming part of you release,Allow your thrashing conscious brain a break,Let howling tom become a purring kittenAnd civil war dissolves to inward peace;A thousand possibilities awake,And suddenly your precious sonnet’s written.

The sonnet’s fourteen lines have called to poets for almost a thousand years. It is the Goldilocks form: when others seem too long, too short, too intricate, too shapeless, too heavy, too light, too simple or too demanding the sonnet is always just right. It has the compactness to contain a single thought and feeling, but space enough for narrative, development and change.

The sonnet was, they say, invented in the thirteenth century by Giacomo da Lentini in the Sicilian court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Dante and d’Arezzo and others experimented with it, but it was Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch, who shaped it into the form which was to have so tremendous an impact on European and English poetry. In the papal court of Avignon he composed his cycle of sonnets to Laura, a girl he always claimed was flesh and blood, but whom many believed to be a conjured ideal. His sonnets made their way over to god-fearing medieval England and lay there like gleaming alien technology: dazzling in their sophistication, knowledge, mastery and promise, frightening in their freedom, daring and originality.

Chaucer knew of them and admired them but their humanism, their promotion of personal feeling and open enquiry, the vigour and self-assertion of their individual voice would have made any attempt on his part to write such works, if indeed he had that desire, a kind of heresy or treason. We had to wait two hundred years for the warm winds of the Renaissance truly to cross the channel and thaw us out of our monkish and feudal inertia. In the hundred and twenty or so years between the Reformation and the Restoration the sonnet had, like some exotic plant, been grafted, grown, hothoused and hybridised into a flourishing new native stock, crossbred to suit the particular winds and weather of our emotional and intellectual climate. This breeding began under Wyatt and Surrey, great pioneers in many areas of English verse, and was carried on by Sidney, Shakespeare, Drummond, Drayton, Donne, Herbert and Milton. The next century saw an equally rapid decline: it is hard to think of a single sonnet being written between the death of Milton in the 1670s and the publication of Wordsworth’s first sonnets a hundred and thirty years later. Just as Wren and the Great Fire between them redesigned half-timbered, higgledy-piggledy Tudor London into a metropolis of elegant neoclassical squares and streets, so Dryden, Johnson and Pope preferred to address the world from a Palladian balcony, the dignified, harmonious grandeur of the heroic couplet replacing what they saw as the vulgar egoism of the lowly sonnet and its unedifying emotional wrestling matches. Those very personal qualities of the sonnet were precisely what attracted Wordsworth and the romantic poets of course, and from their day to ours it has remained a popular verse forum for a poet’s debate with himself.

The structure of the PETRARCHAN SONNET, preferred and adapted by Donne, Milton and many others, is easily expressed. The first eight lines abba-abba are called the OCTAVE, the following six lines cdecde (or cddccd or cdccdc) the SESTET.

The ninth line, the beginning of the sestet, marks what is called the VOLTA, the turn. This is the moment when a contrary point of view, a doubt or a denial, is often expressed. It is the sonnet’s pivot or fulcrum. In mine at the top of this section the ninth line begins with ‘But’, a rather obvious way of marking that moment (although you may recall Donne uses the same word in his ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ cited in Chapter Two). In Wordsworth’s ‘The world is too much with us’ below, the volta comes in the middle of the ninth line, at the ‘en dash’: it is precisely here, after ‘It moves us not’ that, overlooking the sea, having pondered the rush of the modern Christian world in its commerce and crassness and its blindness to nature, Wordsworth as it were draws breath and makes his point: he would rather be a pagan for whom at least nature had life and energy and meaning. A volta can be called a crisis, in its literal Greek sense of ‘turning point’ as well as sometimes bearing all the connotations we now place upon the word.The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Within the Petrarchan form’s basic octave–sestet structure there are other sub-divisions possible. Two groups of four and two of three are natural, two quatrains and two tercets if you prefer.

Here now is Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth Sonnet.When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,I all alone beweep my outcast state,And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,And look upon myself and curse my fate,Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,With what I most enjoy contented least;Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,Haply I think on thee, and then my state,Like to the lark at break of day arisingFrom sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

This contains one of the strongest voltas imaginable: it arrives in the breath between Haply and I think of thee in line 10, pivoting from the very first word of the sonnet, When. The whole first part of the poem is a vast conditional clause awaiting the critical turn. But the difference in rhyme-scheme and lack of octave and sestet structure will already have shown you that, volta or no volta, this is far from a Petrarchan sonnet.

For the Tudor poets one of the disadvantages of the Petrarchan form was that abba abba requires two sets of four rhyming words. While this is a breeze in Italian where every other word seems to end -ino or -ella, it can be the very deuce in English. Drayton, Daniel and Sidney radically reshaped the rhyme-scheme, using a new structure of abab cdcd efef gg. This arrangement reached unimaginable heights in the hands of Shakespeare, after whom it is named. His great sonnets stand with Beethoven’s piano sonatas as supreme expressions of the individual human voice using and fighting the benign tyranny of form, employing form itself as a metaphor for fate and the external world. Sonata and sonnet share the same etymology, as it happens–‘little sound’. Little sounds that make a great noise.

The SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET offers, aside from less troublesome rhyming searches, twelve lines in its main body, three quatrains or two sestets and a couplet and other permutations thereof–twelve is a very factorable number. The cross-rhyming removes the characteristic nested sequence of envelope rhyming found in the Petrarchan form (bb inside aa and the following aa inside bb) but the reward is a new freedom and the creation of a more natural debating chamber.

For this is primarily what the Shakespearean sonnet suits so well, interior debate. I have mentioned before the three-part structure that seems so primal a part of human thinking. From the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of the earliest logicians, the propositions, suppositions and proofs of Euclid and the strophe, antistrophe and epode of Greek performance and poetic ode to our own parliaments and senate chambers, boardrooms, courtrooms and committee rooms, this structure of proposal, counterproposal and vote, prosecution, defence and verdict is deep within us. It is how we seem best to frame the contrary flows of thought and feeling that would otherwise freeze us into inaction or propel us into civil war or schizophrenic uncertainty. The sonnet shares with the musical sonata a rhetorical fitness for presentation, exploration and return. While the Petrarchan sonnet’s two divisions separated by a strong volta suit a proposition and a conclusion, the nature of the Shakespearean form allows of three quatrains with a final judgemental summing up in the trademark final couplet. Do bear in mind when I talk of a ‘dialectical structure’ that the sonnet is, of course, a poetic form, not a philosophical–I oversimplify to draw attention to the internal movement it offers. Clearly a closing couplet can often seem glib and trite. The romantics preferred the Petrarchan sonnet’s more unified scheme, finding the Shakespearean structure of seven rhyme pairs harsh and infelicitously fractured compared to the Petrarchan’s three.

In modern times the sonnet has undergone a remarkable second English-language renaissance. After its notable health under Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese) and Hopkins (‘The Windhover’, ‘All Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’), Daryush wrote some syllabic sonnets (‘I saw the daughter of the sun’ is very fine) and the form was ‘rediscovered’ by Auden, Berryman, Cummings, Edna St Vincent Millais, Elizabeth Bishop, Carol Ann Duffy and many others, including Seamus Heaney whose superb sonnets in The Haw Lantern are well worth exploring. In this century it is more popular than ever: you will find one written every minute on the profusion of websites devoted to it.

SONNET VARIATIONS AND ROMANTIC DUELS

There are as many arguments about what constitutes a sonnet as there are arguments about any field of human activity. There are those who will claim that well-known examples like Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ are anamorphic, not true sonnets but types of quatorzain, which is just another way of saying ‘fourteen-line poem’. This is an argument we need not enter. There are those who recognise poems of less than fourteen lines as being CURTAL SONNETS (Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ reproduced in full in Chapter One being an example and perhaps Yeats’s ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ is another).

There is also a seventeen-line variant. These are called

CAUDATE SONNETS (from the Latin for ‘tail’, same root as ‘coda’) which feature a three-line envoi or cauda. The convention here is for the first line of the cauda to be trimetric and to rhyme with the last line of the main body of the sonnet, and for the next two lines to be in the form of a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. Milton’s sonnet ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’ is an example: here are its final couplet and cauda, with line numbers, just so that you are clear:

May with their wholesome and preventative shears

13

Clip your phylacteries,¹⁸ though baulk your ears,

14

And succor our just fears,

15

When they shall read this clearly in your charge:

16

New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.

17

Those last two words, of course, writ large, have entered the language.

In the nineteenth century the poet and novelist George Meredith developed a form of sixteen line sonnet with four sets of envelope rhymes abba cddc effe ghhg.

There are traditions in the writing of SONNET SEQUENCES, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese and Meredith’s sequence ‘Modern Love’ (in his own Meredithian sixteen-line form). Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata, being a sequence of fourteen sonnets, is known as a SONNET OF SONNETS. More complex sequences exist, such as one of indeterminate length in which each new sonnet opens with the last line of the previous until you reach the final sonnet which terminates with the opening line of the first. This is called a

CORONA SEQUENCE. John Donne wrote such a sequence in seven sonnets, called ‘La Corona’. More complex variations on that include the SONNET REDOUBLÉ, a corona sequence of fourteen sonnets terminating with a fifteenth which is wholly composed of each linking line of the corona in sequence. If there is no good reason for such complexity it will look like showing off, I feel. Donne’s corona had a purposeful religious structure, to make a crown of poetry to match Christ’s crown of thorns.

There are two very well-known examples of SONNET COMPETITIONS which reveal, among other things, the form’s special place in poetry. The ability to write them fluently was, and to some extent still is, considered the true mark of the poet.

On the evening of 30 December 1816, John Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’. Legend has it that they each took just fifteen minutes to write the following. I shall not tell you straight away who wrote which. All I ask is that you decide which you prefer:1Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,Catching your heart up at the feel of June,Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;And you, warm little housekeeper, who classWith those who think the candles come too soon,Loving the fire, and with your trick some tuneNick the glad silent moments as they pass;Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belongOne to the fields, the other to the hearth,Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strongAt your clear hearts; and both were sent on earthTo sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:Indoors and out, summer and winter,–Mirth.2The poetry of earth is never dead:When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,And hide in cooling trees, a voice will runFrom hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;That is the Grasshopper’s–he takes the leadIn summer luxury,–he has never doneWith his delights; for when tired out with funHe rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.The poetry of earth is ceasing never:On a lone winter evening, when the frostHas wrought a silence, from the stove there shrillsThe Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Our second two sonnets share the subject of an inscription on the great statue of Rameses II (Greek name Ozymandias): one is by Percy Byssche Shelley and the other by his friend Horace Smith. Shelley’s is more than a little well known, but which ‘Ozymandias’ do you like best?1I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said–‘two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert…near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.’2In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throwsThe only shadow that the Desert knows:–‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,‘The King of Kings; this mighty City showsThe wonders of my hand.’–The City’s gone,–Naught but the Leg remaining to discloseThe site of this forgotten Babylon.We wonder,–and some Hunter may expressWonder like ours, when thro’ the wildernessWhere London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guessWhat powerful but unrecorded raceOnce dwelt in that annihilated place.

Of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’ pair, the first is by Leigh Hunt and the second by Keats. In a recent Internet poll (for what it is worth) seventy-five per cent preferred the Leigh Hunt and only a quarter went for the Keats. As a matter of fact Keats would have agreed with them; he thought Leigh Hunt’s clearly the superior poem. One the other hand, ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’ is one of the finest opening lines imaginable. If you have read Keats before, ‘one in drowsiness half lost’ would be a dead giveaway as to authorship. Leigh Hunt’s sonnet scores, we feel, as a whole poem; even if it doesn’t contain such moments of perfect music, the progression of ideas (which is so much of what a sonnet is there to exhibit) seems clearer and more satisfactory. They are both Petrarchan, and both have clear voltas at the beginning of their ninth lines. The Leigh Hunt sestet rhymes cdcdcd, while Keats sticks to the more traditional cdecde.

Of the next pair, Shelley’s is the first, Smith’s second, as I’m sure you guessed even if you didn’t already know. They were both published in The Examiner in 1818 and are both entitled ‘Ozymandias’. They each, as you can see, tell the same story–the opening descriptions being, in their basic outlines, identical. There all similarity ends. There is something dreadfully comic about ‘In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,/Stands a gigantic Leg…’. If Shelley’s sonnet outlasts even the ancient monument it commemorates, Smith’s will be fortunate to endure as a curiosity. His is not a terrible poem, but immensely ordinary by comparison. Perhaps you disagree? Shelley and Smith, as you may have noticed if you have been a good and attentive girl or a boy, have both dreamt up their own rhyme schemes.

Whether you choose to write Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets in blank, full or slant-rhyme, or adapt or reinvent as many poets have, the form is there for you to explore. I find it hard to imagine anyone calling themselves a poet who has not at least experimented with the sonnet and, like Wordsworth, found–In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be boundWithin the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

So now it is your turn.

Poetry Exercise 19

Write a Petrarchan Sonnet on Electoral Apathy. Use the octave to complain about how lazy and uninterested voters are and then, at the volta, decide that apathy is probably the best response.

Now write a Shakespearean Sonnet on exactly the same subject. Use the first four lines for a description of apathy, the second four for a complaint against it, the third for an admission of your own apathy and then, in the final couplet express the concluding thought that, what the hell, it makes no difference anyway.

If you don’t like this subject, do write your own sonnet anyway. I think it would be a big mistake to leave this chapter without having tried to write at least one of each major form.

XI

Shaped Verse

Pattern poems–concrete poetry: a few words concerning Imagism–gamesome forms–rictameter, rhopalics, lipograms–silly syllabic forms–tetractys and nonet–acrostics and more

PATTERN POEMS

the

QUEEN

can do

almost

what

ever

she

wishes

up down

side to side

the world is hers

but

a

small

PAWN

gets

the

chance

to be a king

The idea of shaping your poem on the page to make a picture, symbol or pattern is a very old one. The best-known example in English verse is George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ which, rotated ninety degrees, takes on the shape of two angels’ wings:

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more

Till he became

Most poore:

With Thee

O let me rise

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;

And still with wickedness and shame

Thou didst so punish sinne,

That I became

Most thin.

With Thee

Let me combine

And feel this day thy victorie;

For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Another of Herbert’s pattern poems, ‘The Altar’, reveals the shape of its title, an altar table.

When I was small I remember endlessly looking through my parents’ copy of the collected poems of e e cummings and being fascinated and appalled by the things he did with punctuation, his blithe disregard for majuscules and spaces and the general appearance of childish illiteracy his work presented. My teachers, I felt, would never allow me to get away with such liberties and yet there he was, sharing shelf-space with Robert Browning and John Keats. The collection included this poem; I found the slippage of the ‘l’ from ‘loneliness’ unbearably sad.

1(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

It is, incidentally, the only poem I know of whose title contains all the words of the poem: 1(a…(a leaf falls on loneliness), yet of course the poem is not the words, it is the sum of the words and their layout, a truth in all poetry but one most obviously declared in this kind of patterned or shaped verse. cummings was a Cubist painter as well as a poet: ‘The symbol of all art is the Prism,’ he wrote. ‘The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains.’ I am not sure how one would categorise such a work as the famous ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’:

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

PPEGORHRASS

eringint(o-

aThe):l

eA

!p:

S a

(r

rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)

to

rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

, grasshopper;

Unscrambled, the words reveal ‘the grasshopper, who, as we look now upgathering into [himself], leaps, arriving to become, rearrangingly, a grasshopper’. Those may be the words, but the poem attempts to embody the movement, complexity, camouflage, wind-up and release, the whole whatness of a grasshopper’s leap. It is not meant visually to imitate the appearance of a grasshopper on the page, rather to force the reader to slow down and look and feel and think and unpick all the dynamics of a grasshopper’s launch and spring. A conventional poem can use words and all their qualities descriptively and sonorously, a painting can freeze a moment in time, a sculpture can imitate texture, density and mass, music can reproduce sound and shape, but what cummings has done is to create a mechanism whose moving parts are operated by the reader in the act of reading. A verbal sculpture, if you like, containing a potential energy which releases its kinetic force only at the moment of the reader’s engagement. Some of you may find this either a pretentious game or a stultifying dead end. I am sorry if this is so. I would agree, however, that as with much modern conceptual art the very specificity of the work’s originality allows little opportunity for development by others. cummings has had that idea, it is now ticked off in the box of high concepts and anything else in that line would look like cheap imitation. This is what separates such works from forms. The sonnet and the villanelle are certainly not played out, such poetic self-release mechanisms probably are.

I suppose ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’ qualifies as CONCRETE POETRY, a term that came out of a movement in São Paolo in the 1950s. Its manifesto states thatthe old formal syllogistic-discursive foundation, strongly shaken at the beginning of the century, has served again as a prop for the ruins of a compromised poetic, an anachronistic hybrid with an atomic heart and a medieval cuirass.¹⁹

So there. Ezra Pound and the Imagists were concrete poets avant la lettre: Pound was influenced by the writings of T. E. Hulme and by Ernest Fenollosa’s pioneering work, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Pound (Fenollosa’s literary executor) found himself inspired by the idea that the Chinese ideogram, rather than displaying its meaning syntagmatically (rolling it out phonetically and phonemically in sequence as this sentence does) actually contained meaning, held it in one visual unit. This tallied with Hulme’s idea of reality being process. ‘There are no nouns in the universe,’ he had declared, ‘only verbs.’ The upshot of this–and academics will forgive my blithe generalities–was to attempt poems that were kinds of ideogram. The best-known example is ‘In a Station of the Metro’ written in 1911:

The apparition

of these faces

in the crowd

:

Petals

on a wet, black

bough

.

Pound went into some detail concerning the composition of this poem in an influential article called ‘Vorticism’. He had been overwhelmingly moved by the sight of a succession of beautiful women and children on the Paris Metro, ‘and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion,’ he wrote, until…that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation…not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that–a ‘pattern’, or hardly a pattern, if by ‘pattern’ you mean something with a ‘repeat’ in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour…. I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

The new poetics suggested by Pound’s thoughts on colour, image, quiddity and ideogram engendered a new kind of ‘iconographic’ poetry which culminated in his cantos, most especially The Pisan Cantos, notable for their use of hieroglyphs and ideograms and, so far as most of us are concerned, their almost total unreadability. There is huge gusto and bravado in their best moments, but much to make the reader feel foolish and unlettered.

I am not here to attempt a history lesson, nor am I qualified to do so, but I mention all of this as a background to the concepts that have propelled much modern poetry, most of these ideas being osmotically absorbed by succeeding generations of course, not acquired intellectually: but that holds true of our grasp of, for example, gravity, evolution, the subconscious mind and genetics. Our understanding of much in the world is more poetic than noetic. We let others do the work and take their half-understood ideas for a ride, all unaware of the cognitive principles that gave birth to them. That those principles and their corollaries would have shocked and perplexed us had we lived in other times is interesting but irrelevant for our purposes. You do not have to understand Faraday’s and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories of light to operate a light switch, or even to become a professional lighting designer.

The upshot of Imagism, Vorticism, Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, Constructivism, Acmeism, Futurism, Dadaism and all the other -isms that flooded art in the twentieth century was to allow a new kind of poetry, of which concrete poetry is one, the work of cummings another. Such practices now inform the works of thousands of poets around the globe. Since, unlike traditional metrical poetry, they descend from conscious ideas rather than techniques evolved (by way of music and dance) out of the collective unconscious of three millennia, their genesis did seem worth a small excursion.

The point that seems to me most relevant is the notion of quiddity or whatness. I mentioned this when we were looking at Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had been deeply influenced by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus and his concept of haecceity, or thisness. Novels can develop stories and character and much else besides, but poetry uniquely gives itself the opportunity to enter the absolute truth of a phenomenon (whether it be a feeling, an object, a person, a process, an idea or a moment) through language itself. How many times will you, as poet, look at a fly, watch a tap dripping, examine an inner feeling, listen to the wind and grow immensely frustrated at the inability of language exactly to capture it, to become it? All the stock phrases and clichés enter your frantic mind, all the footling onomatopoeia, rhymes and rhythmic patterns that we have heard before and none of them will do. Painters, too, look from their subject to the tip of their paintbrush and their palette of paints and despair.That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all.

So poor J. Alfred Prufrock whines, and so do we.

Aside from Pound, the works of H. D. (Hilda) Doolittle are perhaps the purest conscious attempt to adhere to the imagist project: here is her ‘Sea Poppies’:your stalk has caught rootamong wet pebblesand drift flung by the seaand grated shellsand split conch-shells.Beautiful, wide-spread,fire upon leaf,what meadow yieldsso fragrant a leaf

It fascinates me that a medievalist like Hopkins and a modernist like Doolittle could both arrive at so similar a poetic destination from such utterly opposing points of origin. Doolittle’s technique and effect are wildly different from those of Hopkins, of course, but I am sure you can feel the same striving to enter the identity of experience.

SILLY, SILLY FORMS

Enough, already. There are ludic and ludicrous forms, a world away from ideology and ideogram, which play on syllable length, shape and pattern, some of them bafflingly specific. What is the point of RICTAMETERS, one is forced to wonder? They are poems in the shape of a diamond.

In stricter versions (as if there is any reason to be strict about so childish a form. I mean ferrankly…) the diamond is structured by a syllable count of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2. A variation is the DIAMANTE where the purpose, as in some absurd weekend puzzle magazine, is to go from one object or phenomenon to an opposite or complementary one, by way of a succession of related words.

wolf

grey shaggy

slavering howling ripping

violent hunter innocent quarry

frisking grazing bleating

white woolly

lamb

The ‘rule’ is that the second line is composed of related adjectives and the third of related participles; the first two words of the middle line are nouns or nominal phrases connected to the top of the diamond, the next pair connect to the bottom. You then repeat the process symmetrically down to your end-word. The whole thing is daffy and hardly qualifies as a form for poetry, but I include it anyway. Something to do on long train journeys.

Another bizarre form, bizarrely popular if the Internet is anything to go by, is to be found in RHOPALICS. A rhopalic line is one in which each successive word has one more syllable than its predecessor. This sentence cleverly exemplifies rhopalicism. There are variations, like increasing each word in a line letter by letter (I am not sure about trying variant rhopalics) and decreasing rather than increasing the count (stultifying staggering tediously complete bloody waste, fuck off… ). Or there is this kind of thing:My feelings and emotionsIn their restless motionsSeethe and swell like oceansOf the kind a Stoic shuns,Better find some calmer ’uns

The dwindling but aurally congruent rhyme-returns yielded from emotions, motions, oceans, shuns and ’uns constitute DIMINISHING RHYME, which may seem arid and futile, but George Herbert, the deeply religious and verbally playful poet whose ‘Easter Wings’ we have seen, used them with great seriousness in his poem ‘Paradise’:I bless Thee, Lord, because I growAmong the trees, which in a rowTo Thee both fruit and order ow.

Certain other pointless forms demand a prescribed diminishing or ascending syllable count. The TETRACTYS asks the poet to produce five lines of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 10 syllables. Where’s the tetra in that, for heaven’s sake, you may be wondering. I believe it may be to do with a ‘mystic tetrad’ in Pythagoreanism and kabbalism and some arse-dribble or other connected to Tarot card layout and the four elements. 1+2+3+4=10 is the sum on which Ray Stebbing, the form’s inventor, based the poetic tetractys. No doubt he meant well by it. Tetractys, appropriately enough, is pronounced to rhyme with wet practice.

who choose

to compose

tetractyses

are welcome to them, far as I’m concerned

and I really cannot see the virtue

in flipping them:

too heavy

on top

no?

Mr Stebbing is a serious and accomplished poet, and if he believes his form to be the new native haiku then I wish him well. An even arsier form is the NONET:deathto thosewho composesuch wastes of breaththey have no gracesat least in my poor eyesthey suggest useless tracesof ancient forms more pure and wisewhen people start to count, true verse dies.

The syllabic count starts at one and increases until it reaches nine. Mine, in desperation, rhymes. Syllabics? Silly bollocks, more like.

ACROSTICS

ACROSTICS have been popular for years; nineteenth-century children produced them instead of watching television–those who were lucky enough not to be sent down chimneys or kidnapped by gangs of pickpockets did, anyway.So you want a dedication then?For you I’ll do my very bestRead the letters downwards, darling, thenYou’ll see I’ve passed your little test.

What is going on below, you might wonder?age is areal buggerso few yearsending up whitewrinkled weak as strawincontinence comes and ipiss myself in every way–stopeternity’s too short too short a time

That is a DOUBLE ACROSTIC, both the first and last letters of each line spell out the same defiance and physical disgust. I haven’t highlighted the letters; you can trace them down yourself. In case you are wondering, I have not reached that stage yet–it is an imaginative leap, we are allowed those from time to time: all functions working smoothly last time I checked. You could in theory spell words down from the middle of a line–this is called a mesostich and is just plain silly.

The French seem to be the people most interested in acrostics and other poetic wordplay. Salomon Certon wrote a whole sonnet omitting the letter ‘e’: this is known as a LIPOGRAM. Not the same root as liposuction, as it happens, despite the apparent similarity of meaning. These days, you might feel, a poem that never uses an ‘I’ would be a real achievement…

PARONOMASIA is a grand word for ‘pun’: Thomas Hood, whose rich rhyme effusion you have read, was famous for these: ‘He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell,’ that kind of thing.

Keats slips most of the name of his hero into a line in the poem Endymion: this is known as a PARAGRAM:

…IWill trace the story of Endymion.The very music of the name has gone

There are those who loathe puns, anagrams and wordplay of any description. They regard practitioners as trivial, posey, feeble, nerdy and facetious. As one such practitioner, I do understand the objections. Archness, cuteness, pedantry and showoffiness do constitute dangers. However, as a non-singing, non-games-playing, -dancing, -painting, -diving, -running, -catching, -kicking, -riding, -skating, -skiing, -sailing, -climbing, -caving, -swimming, -free-falling, -cycling, -canoeing, -jumping, -bouncing, -boxing sort of person, words are all I have. As the old cliché has it, they are my friends. I like to say them, weigh them, poke them, tease them, chant their sound, gaze at their shape and savour their juiciness, and, yes, play with them. Some words are made up of the same letters as others, some can fit inside others, some can be said the same backwards as frontwards, some rhyme outrageously, some seem unique and peculiar like yacht and quirk and frump and canoodle. I take pleasure in their oddities and pleasures and contradictions. It amuses me that a cowboy is a boy who rounds up cows, but a carboy is a flagon of acid, that conifer is an anagram of fir cone and esoteric of coteries, that gold has a hundred rhymes but silver has none.²⁰ It saddens me that the French talk of the jouissance of language, its joyousness, juiciness, ecstasy and bliss, but that we of all peoples, with English as our mother tongue, do not. Such frolicsome larkiness may put you off, but if you wish to make poems it seems to me necessary that some part of your verse, however small, will register the sensuousness, oddity and pleasure of words themselves, as words, regardless of their semantic and communicatory duties. Not all paintings draw attention to their brushwork–art can, of course, as validly make transparent its process as exhibit its presence–but each tradition has value and none represents the only true aesthetic.

In fact, I shall start the final chapter with an exploration of the idea that there are no limits to the depth of commitment to language that a poet can have. Not before you have completed…

Poetry Exercise 20

Write one PATTERN POEM in the shape of a cross, and another in the shape of a big capital ‘I’ (for ego) (obviously it should be a Roman I with serifs, otherwise it would just be a block of verse). Make the words relevant to their shape. When you have finished that, write a rhyming ACROSTIC VERSE spelling either your surname or forename.