The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Consider line-end A: it moves down one line for the second stanza and then down two lines for the third stanza, down one line again for the fourth stanza and so on. The algorithm can therefore be considered as the sequence of displacements from the starting position, namely, +1; +2; +1,–2; +3;–5. The last displacement returns the first line-end (A) from the last line of the last stanza to the starting position.

Defining the sequence of translations as a we see that:

How do the other line-ends behave after six iterations? Well, consider the situation after the first iteration; line-end A now occupies the position previously occupied by line-end B. Now carry out six iterations, namely +2; +1;–2; +3;–5 and finally the first of the next cycle: +1. This sequence also sums to zero, meaning that the line-end returns to where it was. In general therefore we can say for all line ends in the first stanza corresponding to the position of line-end A after interation m;

which proves that the entire set of line-ends returns to the original position and order after a full cycle of six iterations, or in other words a seventh stanza would be identical (in respect of line-ends) to the first.

Acknowledgements

My thanks, as always, go to JO CROCKER for running my life with such efficiency, understanding and good humour while I have been engaged upon this book. My publisher SUE FREESTONE has shown her usual blend of patience, kindness, enthusiasm and accommodation, as have ANTHONY GOFF and LORRAINE HAMILTON, my literary and dramatic agents. Thanks to JO LAURIE for her game guinea-piggery in reading early sections on metre and trying out some of the exercises, and to my father for his baffling but beautiful sestina algorithm. Especial gratitude must go to IAN PATTERSON, poet, Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, for casting his learned and benevolent eye over the manuscript–all errors are mine, not his. I thank him also for allowing me to include his excellent centos and sestina. My thanks to his predecessors at Queens’, Professors A. C. SPEARING and IAN WRIGHT, and to PETER HOLLAND of Trinity Hall, who between them did their doomed best to make a scholar of me during my time there. Aside from my mother, the person who most awoke me to poetry was RORY STUART, a remarkable teacher who has now retired to Italy. I send him my eternal thanks. If every schoolchild had been lucky enough to have a teacher like him, the world would be a better and happier place.

The author and publisher acknowledge use of lines from the following works:

Simon Armitage, ‘Poem’, Kid, Faber, 1999 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron, II’, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, ‘Meiosis’, ‘Precious Five’, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, ‘Miss Gee’, ‘Lullaby’, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber 1976, rev. 1991

Carolyn Beard Whitlow, ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’, Wild Meat, Lost Roads Publishers, USA, 1986

John Betjeman, ‘Death in Leamington’, Collected Poems, John Murray, 2003

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Sestina’, Complete Poems, ed. Tom Paulin, Chatto & Windus, 2004

Jorge Luis Borges, Haikus and Tanaka from Obras Completas (4 vols), Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, 2005

Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. Kingsley Amis, OUP, 1978

Anne Carson, ‘Eros The Bittersweet’, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998

G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Ballade of Suicide’, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, Dodd Mead, 1980

Wendy Cope, ‘Valentine’, Serious Concerns, Faber, 1992

–––‘Engineer’s Corner’, Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, Faber, 1986

Frances Cornford, ‘Fat Lady Seen From A Train’, Collected Poems, Enitharmon Press, 1996

Cummings, E. E., ‘1 (a’, ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’, Selected Poems, Liveright Books, 1994

Elizabeth Daryush, ‘Still Life’, Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1972

Hilda Doolittle, ‘Sea Poppies’, Selected Poems, Carcanet, 1997

Norman Douglas, ‘Wagtail’ and Anacreontics from Norman Douglas: A Portrait, Edizioni La Conchiglia, Capri, Italy, 2004 Marriott Edgar, The Lion and Albert, Methuen, 1978

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’, Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, Faber, 1969

Robert Frost, ‘Spring Pools’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Mending Wall’, The Poetry of Robert

Frost, Vintage, 2001

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)’, ‘The Lacking Sense’, Collected Poems, Wordsworth Editions, 1994

Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry Picking’, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–96, Faber, 1998