The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Nonetheless English-language poets have tried to write syllabic verse. The history of it may be stated briefly: with the exception of a few Elizabethan examples the mode did not come into prominence until Hopkins’s friend Robert Bridges wrote extensively on the subject and in the manner–including his unreadable ‘The Testament of Beauty’, five thousand lines of twelve-syllable tedium.⁴⁰His daughter Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1977) took up the standard and wrote many syllabic poems, usually in lines of equal syllabic count, managing artfully to avoid iambic or any other regular stress patterns, as in the decasyllabic ‘Still Life’, a poem published in 1936:Through the open French window the warm sun lights up the polished breakfast table, laidround a bowl of crimson roses, for one–a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayednear it a melon, peaches, figs, small hotrolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,and, heaped, on a salver, the morning’s post.

Note that ‘porcelain’ in true upper-class British would have to be pronounced ‘porslin’ to make the count work. Some kind of form is offered by the rhyming–one feels otherwise that the heavily run-on lines would be in danger of dissolving the work into prose. It was Daryush’s exact contemporary the American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1969) who fully developed the manner. Her style of scrupulous, visually arresting syllabic verse has been highly influential. Here is an extract from her poem ‘The Fish’ with its syllable count of 1,3,9,6,8 per stanza.

As you can see, the count is important enough to sever words in something much fiercer than a usual enjambment. The apparent randomness is held in check by delicate rhyming: this/edifice, and/stand.

‘I repudiate syllabic verse’ Moore herself sniffed to her editor and went further in interview:

I do not know what syllabic verse is, can find no appropriate application for it. To be more precise, to raise to the status of science a mere counting of syllables seems to me frivolous.

As Dr Peter Wilson of London Metropolitan University has pointed out, ‘…since it is clear that many of her finest poems could not have been written in the form they were without the counting of syllables, this comment is somewhat disingenuous.’ Other poets who have used syllabics include Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn and Donald Justice, this from the latter’s ‘The Tourist from Syracuse’:You would not recognize me.Mine is the face which blooms inThe dank mirrors of washroomsAs you grope for the light switch.

Between the Daryush and the Moore I hope you can see that there are possibilities in this verse mode. There is form, there is shape. If you like the looser, almost prose-poem approach, then writing in syllabics allows you the best of both worlds: structure to help organise thoughts and feelings into verse, and freedom from what some poets regard as the jackboot march of metrical feet. The beauty of such structures is that they are self-imposed, they are not handed down by our poetic forebears. That is their beauty but also their terror. When writing syllabics you are on your own.

It must be time for another exercise.

Poetry Exercise 8

Two stanzas of alternating seven-and five-line syllabic verse: subject Rain.

Two stanzas of verse running 3, 6, 1, 4, 8, 4, 1, 6, 3: subject Hygiene.

Here are my attempts, vague rhymes in the first, some in the second: you don’t have to:Rainthey say there’s a taste before it comes; a tin tanglike tonguing a batteryor a cola canI know that I can’t smell itbut the animalsglumly lowering their headscan foretell its fall:they can remember rains pastas I come closertheir eyewhites flash in fear ofanother NoahHygieneI’m filthOn the outside I stink.But,There are peopleSo cleansed of dirt it makes you thinkUnhygienicThoughtsOf them. I’d much ratherStay filthy.Their latherCan’t reach where they reek,SudsCan’t soap inside.All hosed, scrubbed and oilily sleekThey’re still deep dyedTheyCan stand all day and drenchThey still stench.

We have come to the end of our chapter on metrical modes. It is by no means complete. If you were (heaven forbid) to go no further with my book, I believe you would already be a much stronger and more confident poet for having read thus far. But please don’t leave yet, there is much to discover in the next chapters on rhyming and on verse forms: that is where the fun really begins. Firstly, a final little exercise awaits.

Poetry Exercise 9