The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

But Browning has given us clipped opening feet:Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumDa-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum.

instead of the fullTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

If you tap out the rhythms of each of the above with your fingers on the table, or just mouth them to yourself (quietly if you’re on a train or in a café, you don’t want to be stared at) I think you will agree that Browning knew what he was about. The straight anapaests are rather dull and predictable. The opening iamb or acephalous foot, Da-dum! makes the whole ride so much more dramatic and realistic, mimicking the way horses hooves fall. Which is not to say that, when well done, pure anapaests can’t work too. Byron’s poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacharib’ shows them at their best.

TAKE OUT YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THE ANAPAESTS HERE (Assyrian is three syllables, by the way, not four):The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea,And the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Byron doesn’t keep this up all the way through, however: For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

He could have written the anapaest ‘And he breathed…’ but I think his instinct to use the clipped ‘And breathed’ instead is exactly right for the conceit. It is a very subtle difference. What do you think? Try saying each alternative aloud. I think the clipping causes us to linger a tiny bit longer on the word ‘breathed’ than we would in strict anapaestic rhythm and this brings the image to life. Now, back to those standard anapaests beating:Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

Imagine that, instead of doing what Browning and Byron did and clipping off the head like so:Da-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumDa-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

you started with anapaests and ended with a spondee which, as I mentioned earlier, is a double-stressed foot: Hard cheese. HumdrumAnapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!Anapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!

That might remind you of the gallop from Rossini’s overture to William Tell, famously used for the TV series The Lone Ranger and the three-way orgy in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

The spondee (inasmuch as it truly exists in English) makes a great full stop, either serious like a tolling bell or comic, as in the famous knocking rhythm that Americans express as:Shave and a hair cut, two bits!

Tum-titty tum tum. Tum tum!

If you wanted to scan that line, you would say ‘haircut’ and ‘two bits’ were both spondaic. But what is ‘shave-and-a’? When you think about it, it is an anapaest in reverse. Instead of titty-tum (), it is tum-titty. (). A new ternary foot for us to meet and its name is dactyl.

THE DACTYL

As a matter of fact the earliest and greatest epics in our culture, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were written in dactylic hexameters. Remember, though, classical poetry was written in quantitative measure, where those feet were better described as ‘long short short’,—––‘wait for it’, ‘cool, not hot’, ‘smooth black pig’ rather than our sprightly tum-titty. The word dactyl comes from the Greek for ‘finger’: fingers have one long joint and two short ones. In reality, Greek metrical units are closer to musical notes in that they tell you their duration: a long syllable takes exactly twice as long to utter as a short one, hence you could say a dactyl for Greek-style quantitative verse should be written thus:

Homer’s verse didn’t swing along in a bouncy rhythmic way, it pulsed in gentle lo-o-o-ng short-short, lo-o-o-ng short-short waves, each line usually ending with a spondee. As I hope I have made pretty clear by now, that sort of metrical arrangement isn’t suited to the English tongue. We go, not by duration, but by syllabic accentuation.

Tennyson’s dialect poem ‘Northern Farmer’ shows that, as with Browning’s anapaests, a dactyl in English verse, using stressed-weak-weak syllables instead of lo-o-o-ng-short-short, has its place, also here imitating the trot of a horse’s hooves as it sounds out the word ‘property’. (I have stripped it of Tennyson’s attempts at phonetic northern brogue–‘paäins’, for example.)Proputty, proputty, proputty–that’s what I ’ears ’em sayProputty, proputty, proputty–Sam, thou’s an ass for thy pains

The poem ends with the line:

Five dactyls and a single full stop stress on the ‘way’ of ‘away’. As with anapaests, lines of pure dactyls are rather predictable and uninteresting:Tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty, tum-titty