The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

You may have guessed that if a double iamb or ionic minor goes titty-tum-tum, then an ionic major might well do the opposite: tum-tum-titty, tum-tum-titty:: ‘make much of it’, that sort of rhythm:Lee Harvey the lone gunman, did cold heartedlyShoot fatally John Kennedy: poor Jacqueline.

You’d be right to think it ought to be called a double trochee too, but so far as I am aware this term isn’t used for such a foot, just ionic major.

For the record, you’ll find the other quaternary feet in the table at the end of this chapter: they include the antispast, the choriamb and the epitrite and paeon families. Again, good for name-dropping at parties, but like the other measures of four, vestiges of Greek poetry that really don’t have a useful place in the garden of English verse. Rupert Brooke experimented with accentual versions of choriambs, which go tum-titty-tum: Billy the Kid. True classical choriambic verse lines should start with a spondee followed by choriambs and a pyrrhic:

Brooke came up with lines like:Light-foot dance in the woods, whisper of life, woo me to wayfaring

To make the last two syllables a pyrrhic foot you have to read the word as ‘wafering’, which is not quite what Brooke means. He, of course, was classically educated to a degree unimaginable today and would from his early teens have written Greek and Latin poems scanned according to quantitative vowel length, not stress. The vast bulk of successful English verse is, as we know, accentual-syllabic. Nonetheless, he shows that all the metres lie in readiness, waiting for someone to experiment with them. The problem comes when a form is so specific as to cause you to cast about for what fits the metre rather than what fits the true sense of what you want to say. How far the meaning and feeling drives you and how far, as a poet, you allow form and metre to guide you where you never expected to go is for a later section of the book.

There is another kind of native metre, however, the accentual, at which we will take a look when you have completed one more drill.

Poetry Exercise 6

Write some anapaestic hexameters describing how to get to your house.

Just as far as the motorway takes you then straight past theLakenheath bend.Take a left on the Narborough Road then a right when youcome to the end.It’s the house with the shutters all closed and a garden that’s frankly a slum.When you’re there, why not park round the back or justhoot on your horn till I come?

And some dactylic pentameter on the subject of cows. For fun these should be in the classical manner: four dactyls and a spondee: try to make the spondee as spondaic as the English tongue will allow–two solid bovine stressed syllables.

Standing in randomly curious huddles in long grassPatient as statues, but twitching and steaming like stoppedtrainsPensively waiting for something to happen that just won’tProbably thinking we’re nervous and skittish as new calves.

Your turn now. You have forty minutes for your two verses.

V

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Accentual verse–alliteration and the two-beat hemistich

English verse sprang, like the English language, from two principal sources, Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon. From the Greeks and Romans we took ordered syllabic measures, from the Old English we took accent. We put them together to make the native accentual-syllabic verse that we have been looking at thus far. It is the classical stream that had the most obvious influence on our poetry and certainly on the technical language we use to describe it, but the Anglo-Saxon tributary has carved its way through our literary landscape too. For hundreds of years it lay isolated, like an old oxbow lake, cut off from the flow, but over the last century or more it has snaked its way back into the mainstream. It is worth dipping our toes in to see if we find it congenial. I suspect that after the syllable counting and footwatching of the foregoing pages, you will find its comparative freedom a great delight.

ANGLO-SAXON and OLD ENGLISH are (more or less) interchangeable terms used for verse written in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. MIDDLE ENGLISH or MEDIEVAL applies to a later, post-Norman revival of the Old English style. These are loose ascriptions but will do for our purposes.