The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

You will notice Poe chooses to end the even-numbered lines strongly, docking the final weak syllable, as Tennyson does for every line of ‘Locksley Hall’. You might also notice how in reading, one tends to break up these line lengths into two manageable four-stress half-lines: Poe’s lines have very clear and unmistakable caesuras, while Tennyson’s are less forceful. The four-stress impulse in English verse is very strong, as we shall see. Nabokov, in his Notes on Prosody, suggests that the hexameter is a limit ‘beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks in two’.

Heptameters, seven-stress lines, are possible, and certainly do tend to ‘break in two’. They are known in the trade as ‘fourteeners’, referring to the usual syllable count. Here’s a line from Hardy’s ‘The Lacking Sense’.Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may

As you can see, it is perfectly iambic (though one could suggest demoting the fourth foot to a pyrrhic):

Actually, fourteeners were very popular in the sixteenth century, although Shakespeare disdained their use, a fact which has been adduced by some to damn the claims of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the Shakespearean canon, for Oxford loved them:My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways,My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days.

This preposterously over-alliterated couplet hardly seems Shakespearean–in fact, Shakespeare mocked precisely such bombastic nonsense in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the other unlettered ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, having great fun at the expense of Oxfordian fourteeners and their vulgar alliterations:But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here?Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear.

You may notice that Hardy’s example is a ‘true’ heptameter, whereas Oxford’s lines (and Shakespeare’s parody of them) are in effect so broken by the caesuras after the fourth foot that they could be written thus:My life through lingering long is lodged,In lair of loathsome ways,My death delayed to keep from life,The harm of hapless days.But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight,What dreadful dole is here?Eyes, do you see? How can it be?O dainty duck, O dear.

We can do the same thing with Kipling’s popular ‘Tommy’, which he laid out in fourteeners:Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleepIs cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bitIs five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniformsThat guard you while you sleepIs cheaper than them uniforms,An’ they’re starvation cheap;An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiersWhen they’re goin’ large a bitIs five times better businessThan paradin’ in full kit.

What we have there are verses in lines footed in alternating fours and threes: tetrameters and trimeters, a metrical scheme you will see again and again in English poetry. Such four and three beat lines are also common in verse designed for singing which, after all, uses up more breath than speech. It would be rather difficult to sing a whole heptametric line without turning purple. The long and winding road

andYou are the sunshine of my life

could be called (by an ass) iambic trimeters and tetrameters respectively, whileThat’s the way I like it

andI can’t get no satisfaction

are trochaic trimeter and tetrameter. Of course, it is fundamentally daffy to scan lyrics (a word derived from the Greek lyre, the harp-like instrument used to accompany song) since it is the musical beat that determines emphasis, not the metrical stress. You could never guess the very particular emphasis on ‘get no’ just by reading the lyrics of ‘Satisfaction’ unless you knew the tune and rhythm it was written to fit.

FOUR BEATS TO THE LINE

Wordsworth wrote ‘Daffodils’ in straight four-beat tetrameters.I wander’d lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hillsWhen all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;

Tetrameter, the four-stress line, is immensely popular in English verse. If iambic pentameter, the Heroic Line, may be described as the great joint of beef, then tetrameters are the sandwiches–the everyday form if you like, and no less capable of greatness. If you ask someone to write a poetic ditty on a Valentine’s card or something similar, nine times out of ten they will write tetrameters, whether they do so consciously or not: the four-beat instinct is deep within us, much as in music the four/four time signature is so standard as to be the default: you don’t have to write it in the score, just a letter C for Common Time.