The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Owen’s next line repeats the pyrrhic substitution in the same, fourth, foot.Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

A stressed of would be a horrid example of what’s called a wrenched accent, an unnatural stress forced in order to make the metre work: scudding over the ‘of’ and making the foot pyrrhic does not sacrifice the metre.

Owen was a poet who, like Shakespeare, really knew what he was doing. These effects are not accidental, the substitutions do not come about by chance or through some carefree inability to adhere to the form and hoping for the best. Owen studied metre and form constantly and obsessively, as did Keats, his hero, as indeed did all the great poets. They would no more be unaware of what they were doing than Rubens could be unaware of what he was doing when he applied an impasto dot of white to give shine to an eye, or than Beethoven could be unaware of what happened when he diminished a seventh or syncopated a beat. The freedom and the ease with which a master can do these things belies immense skill derived from practice.

Incidentally, when Rubens was a young man he went round Rome feverishly drawing and sketching antique statues and Old Master paintings, lying on his back, standing on ladders, endlessly varying his viewpoint so as to give himself differing angles and perspectives. He wanted to be able to paint or draw any aspect of the human form from any angle, to master foreshortening and moulding and all the other techniques, spending months on rendering hands alone. All the great poets did the equivalent in their notebooks: busying themselves endlessly with different metres, substitutions, line lengths, poetic forms and techniques. They wanted to master their art as Rubens mastered his. They say that the poet Tennyson knew the quantity of every word in the English language except ‘scissors’. A word’s quantity is essentially the sum of the duration of its vowels. We shall come to that later. The point is this: poetry is all about concentration, the concentration of mind and the concentration of thought, feeling and language into words within a rhythmic structure. In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated.

It may seem strange for us to focus in such detail on something as apparently piffling as a pyrrhic substitution, but I am convinced that a sense, an awareness, a familiarity and finally a mastery of this and all the other techniques we have seen and will see allow us a confidence and touch that the uninformed reading and writing of verse could never bestow. It is a little like changing gear in a car: it can seem cumbersome and tricky at first, but it soon becomes second nature. It is all about developing the poetic equivalent of ‘muscle memory’. With that in mind, here are some more lines featuring these stress demotions or pyrrhic substitutions. I have boxed the first two examples and explained my thinking. Here is one from the Merchant’s Tale:

You would not say ‘a roaring AND a cry’ unless the sense demanded it. Chaucer, like Owen, shows that a demotion of the fourth beat throws more weight on to the fifth: CRY. Owen demonstrates that it is possible with the second beat too.

‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’ seems a bit wrenched. The demotion allows the push here on ‘garg’ and ‘froth’ to assume greater power: ‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’.

Look at these lines from a poem that every American schoolchild knows: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, by Robert Frost. It is the literary equivalent of ‘The Night Before Christmas’, quoted and misquoted every holiday season in the States:The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go be fore I sleep,

To read the phrase ‘promisés to keep’ would be an absurd wrench, wouldn’t it? Clearly that’s a pyrrhic substitution too.

The opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III has a demoted third beat: note that the first line begins with a trochaic substitution:Now is the winter of our discontent

So here is a summary of the six new techniques we’ve learned to enrich the iambic pentameter.

1. End-stopping: how the sense, the thought, can end with the line.

2. Enjambment: how it can run through the end of a line.

3. Caesura: how a line can have a break, a breath, a pause, a gear change.

4. Weak endings: how you can end the line with an extra, weak syllable.

5. Trochaic substitution: how you can invert the iamb to make a trochee.

6. Pyrrhic substitution: how you can downgrade the beat of an interior (second, third or fourth) foot to turn it into a doubly weak or pyrrhic foot.

Poetry Exercise 4