The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Why not indeed. Here’s a list of the most likely possibilities:1 Beat–MonometerHe bangsThe drum.2 Beats–DimeterHis drumming noiseA wakes the boys.3 Beats–TrimeterHis drumming makes a noise,And wakes the sleeping boys.4 Beats–TetrameterHe bangs the drum and makes a noise,It shakes the roof and wakes the boys.5 Beats–PentameterHe bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise,It shakes the roof and wakes the sleeping boys.6 Beats–HexameterHe bangs the drum and makes the most appalling noise,It shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.7 Beats–HeptameterHe bangs the wretched drum and makes the most appalling noise,Its racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.8 Beats–OctameterHe starts to bang the wretched drum and make the most appalling noise,Its dreadful racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

I have hardly given more information in the octameter, heptameter, hexameter or pentameter than there is in the tetrameter–of course the boys are sleeping, you can’t wake someone who isn’t, and a very roof is still a roof. I have made up my own nonsense specifically to show the variation in feel when the sense or narrative is broadly the same and the number of feet marks the only real difference. Generally speaking, and I do mean very generally, the pentameter is used for ‘serious’ poetry, for contemplative, epic, heroic and dramatic verse. That doesn’t mean that the other measures can’t be. We will come to how we choose a particular form or line of verse later. At the moment we are more interested in discovering and defining terms than ascribing value or function to them. The technical difference is what concerns us, the stylistic difference is for a later section of the book.

Six feet give us a hexameter, the line of choice in most classical verse:

As a single line it works fine. The experience of writing whole poems in hexameters, in six footers, is that they turn out to be a bit cumbersome in English. The pentameter seems to fit the human breath perfectly (which is why it was used, not just by Shakespeare, but by just about all English verse dramatists). French poets and playwrights like Racine did use the hexameter or alexandrine²⁰all the time, in English verse it is rare. What’s so different about French, then? I think the most important reason is, as I made clear earlier, that French words tend not to be so varied in their accentuation as English. Why is this relevant? Well, it means that French poetry, since so many words are equally stressed, relies more on what is known as ‘quantitative measure’–divisions based on the temporal duration of long and short vowels.²¹ This is how classical Greek and Latin poetry was constructed. Most English verse–as I hope we have discovered–is metred by syllabic accentuation, the rises and falls of stress.

You can certainly try to write whole English poems composed of iambic hexameter, but I suspect you’ll find, in common with English language poets who experimented with it on and off for the best part of a thousand years, that it yields rather clumsy results. Its best use is as a closing line to stanzas, as in Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)’:And consummation comes and jars two hemispheres.

Keats ends each stanza of ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ with an alexandrine in a style derived from the verse of Edmund Spenser.She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.

Alexander Pope in his (otherwise) pentametric An Essay on Criticism was harsh on these Spenserian mannerisms and included this self-descriptive hexameter:A needless Alexandrine ends the song,That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

There are very few examples of eight-beat lines in English verse. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ is a rare successful example of a trochaic octameter:

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the Robin’s breast;In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Another very familiar example is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.