The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

It is very possible that you will see nothing remarkable in this line at all. I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary consonantal symmetry. Moving inwards from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D-L-N-SL-P-N-L-P-L-N-D-S-L-D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable. It has none of the embarrassing obviousness of over-alliterated lines, but its music is as perfectly achieved as any line of verse I know. It was not, however, the sonorous splendours of the words that had first captivated me, but the image evoked by them. I found the line as completely visual as anything I had ever read. I suppose that subconsciously diction had been as responsible as description, which is to say the nature and physical attributions of the words chosen had made the image vivid in my mind quite as much as their literal meanings. ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it,’ the song goes. It is both of course. And what had Keats said? That a girl was asleep in the lap of…not a person, but some old legends. It had never occurred to me before that you were allowed to do this. It was like a nonsense joke or a category mistake. You can sleep in a person’s lap, but not a legend’s. Legends don’t have laps any more than whales have shoulders. Yet straight into my head came a suffused and dreamy picture of a long-haired maiden, eyes closed, with armoured knights and dragons rising up from her sleeping head. An image, I was later to discover, that greatly influenced the works of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters. Music and painting in one twelve-syllable line, but something more than either and this ‘something more than either’ is what we mean, I suppose, by poetry.

I know this is all very fey and mockable. Very sensitive cardigan-wearing reading-glasses on a thin gold chain old poof who runs an antique business and yearns for beauty. Ah, my beloved Keats, such a solace to me in this world of reality television and chicken nuggets. They don’t understand, you know. Well, perhaps. I am not sure that it is in truth any more mockable than bloodless mirror-shaded cool in black jackets or disengaged postmodern quotation marks or sneery journalism or any style of cheap social grading one wishes to indulge in. I am not going to waste time trying to claim that a line of sensuous romantic poetry is cool and hard and powerful and relevant and intellectually muscled: it is quite enough for me that it astonishes with its beauty. Christopher Ricks wrote a book called Keats and Embarrassment and while his thesis went far beyond the usual implications of the word, a sense of embarrassment will always cling to poetry that isn’t hip like Bukowski.

‘Oh, play that thing!’ says Larkin in his poem to the jazz saxophonist and clarinettist, Sidney Bechet:On me your voice falls as they say love should,Like an enormous yes.

I reckon an enormous yes beats seven kinds of crap out of an enormous no.

DICTION

How does the foregoing, illuminating as it may or may not have been, help with the writing of our poetry? I suppose I was trying with those examples to promote a high doctrine of poetic diction. I am not for a minute suggesting that some high poetic al language be reserved for poetry. The language of the everyday, the vulgar, the demotic and the technical have as much place in poetry as any other diction or discourse. I am suggesting that language be worked, as a painter works paint, as a sculptor works marble. If what you are writing has no quality that prose cannot transmit, then why should you call it a poem? We cannot all play the game of ‘it is art because I say it is, it is art because it hangs in a gallery, so there’. David Hockney once said that his working definition of a piece of art was a made object that if left in the street, leaning against a bus shelter, would cause passers-by to stop and stare. Like all brave stabs at defining the indefinable it has its limitations, I suppose–it is not, as Aristotle would say, necessary and sufficient¹–but we might agree that it is not so bad. Perhaps poetry is the same: insert some poetry inside a body of prose and surely people should notice?