The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Four stresses also mark the base length of a form we will meet later called the ballad, where they usually alternate with three-stress lines, as in the anonymous seventeenth-century ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’:And many was the feather-bedThat fluttered on the foam;And many was the good lord’s sonThat never more came home.

Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,The furrow followed free:We were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.

and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’:I never saw a man who lookedWith such a wistful eyeUpon that little tent of blueWhich prisoners call the sky.

In each of these ballad verses the first and third lines have four stresses (eight syllables) and the second and fourth lines have three (six syllables):

It might have struck you that all three extracts could have come from the same poem, despite their each being separated by roughly a hundred years. We will hold that thought until we come to look at the ballad later. You will remember, I hope, that the Earl of Oxford’s duff heptameters and Kipling’s rather better managed ones seemed to beg to be split into a similar arrangement:My life through lingering long is lodged,In lair of loathsome ways,Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniformsThat guard you while you sleep

Tetrameters, even if they follow ballad form and alternate with trimeters, don’t need to have the swing and narrative drive of a ballad: they can be used in more lyrical and contemplative poetry too, as we have already seen with Wordsworth’s use of them for his daffodils. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is perhaps the poet who most completely mastered the reflective aspect of the four-beat/three-beat measure. Almost none of her poetry is in lines of longer than four feet, yet its atmosphere of depth, privacy and (often sad) thoughtfulness is a world away from lusty narrative ballads.712²²Because I could not stop for deathHe kindly stopped for meThe carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality.1612The Auctioneer of PartingHis ‘Going, going, gone’Shouts even from the Crucifix,And brings his Hammer down–He only sells the Wilderness,The prices of DespairRange from a single human HeartTo Two–not any more–

Lord Byron shows that pure four-beat tetrameters can be blissfully lyrical: note the initial trochaic substitution in the last line.She walks in beauty like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skiesAnd all that’s best of dark and brightMeets in her aspect and her eyes.

While Humbert Wolfe demonstrates here their appropriateness for comic satire:You cannot hope to bribe or twist,Thank God, the British journalist.But seeing what the man will doUnbribed, there’s no occasion to.

The above examples are of course in iambic four-beats.

Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke’s metrical version of Psalm 71 is written in trochaic tetrameters:

Lord, on thee my trust is grounded:Leave me not with shame confounded

As is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha:

Often stopped and gazed imploringAt the trembling Star of Evening,At the tender Star of Woman;And they heard him murmur softly

Now look at the following two four-stress lines, which reiterate the point I made earlier about question and answer: the obvious but crucial difference in the way each foot as it were distributes its weight.Trochees end their lines in weaknessIambic lines resolve with strength

But as we know, iambic lines don’t have to end with a stressed syllable: you can add an extra weak syllable (hypermetric addition). Similarly, trochaic lines can have their weak ending dropped (catalectic subtraction). In both cases you’re either adding or subtracting a weak syllable: the number of stresses stays the same.Tyger, tyger burning brightIn the forests of the night

Blake’s famous opening lines drop the natural weak ending of the fourth trochees, giving a seven syllable count and a strong resolution.Dum-di, dum-di, dum-di dum

orTrochee, trochee, trochee troke

The full trochaic line ‘Tiger, tiger burning brightly’ would be rather fatuous, don’t we feel? The conclusiveness of a strong ending frames the image so much more pleasingly. Here is the opening to Keats’s poem ‘Fancy’:Ever let the Fancy roam,Pleasure never is at home:At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Both lines of the first couplet (a couplet is a pair of rhyming lines) have their final weak endings docked. The second couplet is of four full trochees. Why?

Well, at the risk of taking us back to English classes, it is worth considering this, for the sake, if not of appreciation, then at least of one’s own poetry. The strong endings of the opening give a sense of the epigrammatic and purposeful: they offer a firm opening statement:Ever let the Fancy roam,Pleasure never is at home: