The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Trochaic first and last lines ‘enveloping’ two central iambic lines; and the poem’s penultimate stanza runs:When the stars threw down their spears,And water’d heaven with their tears,Did He smile His work to see?Did He who made the lamb make thee?

In this case we alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters. The rest of the poem is trochaic. With a little casuistry one could, I suppose, make the argument that Blake’s shift between metres ‘stripes’ the verse as a tiger is striped. I think that is more than a little tenuous: there is no plan to the changes between metre, no apparent design at work: certainly, poets in the past and present have employed metre, rhyme and even the shape of the words on a page further to conjoin form with subject matter, but I do not believe this applies here.

Nonetheless, the variations can hardly be said to spoil the poem: the docking of the final trochaic foot matches the standard male endings of the iambic. After all, one could look at it this way: are the odd lines out really iambic, or are they trochees with an extra weak syllable at the beginning? Trochees are the opposite of iambs: if you can pop a weak syllable at the end of an iambic line, why not shove one on to the beginning of a trochaic one? If you read those stanzas above, missing out the unstressed syllables at the start of each iambic line you will see what I mean. It is finally a matter of nomenclature and one’s own ear. For many modern metrists there’s no such thing as the iamb or the trochee at all, there are only lines with a set number of beats or stresses to them. Where the weak syllables come is, for them, irrelevant. They would have us believe that English verse should be treated as if it is accentual, but not accentual-syllabic. I can’t go that far, myself: there is an obvious and to my ear absolute difference between the whole nature of Hiawatha and that of, say, ‘She walks in beauty’. There certainly was to Longfellow and Byron.

Here is a well-known couplet from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’:A Robin Red breast in a Cage²³Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

That is metrically identical to my made-up hybrid line: He bangs the drums and makes a noiseScaring girls and waking boys

Heartless to quibble with Blake’s sentiment, but to most ears, trained or otherwise, it is a bit of a dud, isn’t it? This is a naïvety one expects, forgives and indeed celebrates with Blake (‘look at his paintings: couldn’t draw, couldn’t colour in’ as Professor Mackenny of Edinburgh University once excellently remarked) and from any poetic sensibility but his one might wrinkle one’s nose at such childlike versifying. If the poem went on alternating in regular fashion as I suggested with the drum-banging boy one could understand. In fact the next lines are:A dove house filled with doves and PigeonsShudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

That couplet does conform with the plan, the second line is completely trochaic, with weak ending and all, but now Blake continues with:A dog starv’d at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.

Those are both iambic lines. And the next couplet?A Horse misus’d upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human blood

Well, I mean I’m sorry, but that’s just plain bad. Isn’t it? The syntax (grammatical construction) for a start: bit wobbly isn’t it? Does he really mean that the horse is calling to heaven: the other animals don’t, surely he means the misuse of horses calls to heaven? But Blake’s sentence structure invites us to picture a calling horse. And, my dear, the scansion! Presumably Blake means to elide Heaven into the monosyllable Heav’n (a perfectly common elision and one we might remember having to sing in school hymns), but it is odd that he bothers in earlier lines to put apostrophes in ‘starv’d’ and ‘misus’d’ and even shortens through to thro’²⁴yet fails to give us an apostrophe here where it really would count: he has already used the word Heaven once without elision, as a disyllabic word, six lines earlier: perhaps, one might argue, he felt that as a holy word it shouldn’t be altered in any way. I think this unlikely, he tends not to use capitals for God, although he uses them for ‘Me’ and ‘My’ and just about every word he can (incidentally, why does Horse deserve majuscules here, but not dog, I wonder? Why Pigeon and not dove?). Well, perhaps the unelided ‘Heaven’ is a misprint: if so, it is one that all the copies²⁵of Blake I have seen repeat. It is fairly obvious that this is how he wrote it in his manuscript.