The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

We feel a faint echo of Hopkins there, I think, for all that it is more controlled and syntactically conventional. I am not denying the individuality of Hughes or Thomas: the point is that Hopkins cleared a pathway that had long been overgrown, a pathway that in the twentieth century became something of a well-trodden thoroughfare, almost a thronging concourse. Hopkins himself said in a letter to Bridges in 1888 after he had just completed the ‘Heraclitean Fire’ sonnet, inspired as it was by the distillation ‘of a great deal of early philosophical thought’:…the liquor of the distillation did not taste very Greek, did it? The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.

I have taken a little time over the style, purpose and influence of Hopkins because his oppo, as you might say, Walt Whitman–very different man, but so alike too–was busy in America tearing up the prosodic manuals round about the time Hopkins was experimenting with his sprung rhythms.

Whitman is considered by many to be the father of English language free verse³⁶: verse without traditional patterning, stanza form, rhyme, metre, syllabic count or regular accentuation. Since such verse is beyond the reach and aim of this book, much of the pleasures of Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, the American ‘Open Field’ School and Whitman³⁷himself (and very real pleasures they are) will not be looked at here. As I have already said, I do not look down on free verse at all: I admire the poet who can master it.

There are two kingdoms of life: Flora and Fauna. In the natural history of poetry there are likewise two kingdoms: there is the kingdom of Accentual-Syllabic Verse and there is the kingdom of Accentual Verse.

Hang on a mo…

There are actually three kingdoms in the natural world–we have forgotten the kingdom of Fungi. And likewise there is a third kingdom of Poetry: the Kingdom of Syllabic verse.

VI

Syllabic Verse

These three then:

A accentual-syllabic verse—the number of syllables and stresses in a line is fixed.

B accentual verse—the number of stresses in a line is fixed, but the number of syllables varies (includes alliterative-accentual verse).

C syllabic verse—the number of syllables in a line is fixed, but the number of stresses varies.

A Meters and feet—iambs, pentameters, trochees, tetrameters and so on.

B Anglo-Saxon four-stress verse—Hopkins and much song, ballad, folk, hip-hop and nursery rhyme forms.

C ??

We have spent a fair amount of time looking at categories A and B but C remains unexplored.

Can there really be a form of verse where all that counts is the number of syllables in a line? No patterning of stress at all? What is the point?

Well, that is a fair and intelligent question and I congratulate myself for asking it. Much syllabic verse is from other linguistic cultures than our own. Perhaps the best known is the Japanese haiku which, as you may already know, is a three-line verse of five, seven and five syllables. In Japanese this syllable count is imperative and the form contains other rules which we can examine (as well as seeing whether it is feasible to write haikus in the strict Japanese manner in English) in the chapter on Verse Forms. The Tagalog tanaga is another such syllabic measured verse-form. Japanese and Tagalog³⁸ are syllable-timed languages³⁹as are Spanish and many others European and worldwide. English, however, is stress-timed. What this means is beyond the scope of this book (or my poor grasp of phono-linguistics) but the upshot is that while verse ordered by syllabic count is popular in many other cultures, and indeed is often the norm, it is a rarity in English, since the lack of equal spacing between syllables in our stress-timed utterance renders such elaborate schemes very different from the foreign mode. They will never carry the music that native speakers of syllable-timed languages find in their syllabic verse, the English type involves a mostly visual engagement with the reader, sometimes resulting in a kind of concrete or shaped poetry. The moment a poet writing in this manner tries to arrange the stress–voilà!–we arrive back where we started at accentual-syllabic verse and our good friend the metric foot.