The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The archaic expletives (metrical fillers) and inversions: ‘did say’ and ‘do build’ for ‘said’ and ‘build’ and ‘their hearts for to quail’ are not pleasant; ‘the wind it blew’ is a common enough formulation in ballads trying to get round the problem of the lack of a weak syllable between ‘wind’ and ‘blew’(‘the rain it raineth every day’ and so on), but cannot be considered a satisfactory phrase in a serious poem. Nor do such archaisms as ‘hove’ (for ‘came’) and ‘lay’ (for ‘song’) please the reader. It is, of course, the sheer banality that lives longest in the mind and most contributes to our sense of this being such a tour de farce. This banality mostly derives from McGonagall’s word choice (what is known as poetic diction) and word choice is shown here to be most pitifully at the mercy of rhyme. It is not only the rhyming words themselves that are at fault, but the phrases and syntax used in order to reach those rhyme words. Not to mention the accidental and gruesome internal rhyme Sabbath day in line 4 of stanza 1. With his rhyming alone McGonagall has already sabotaged his poem. A perfectly fine piece might in other hands have been worked up from the full rhyme pairs he found, night/might et cetera, and from the perfectly laudable sentiments he expresses, but a committee comprising Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Frost, Auden and Larkin could do little with those unfortunate para-rhymes.

As it happens Gerard Manley Hopkins had already composed another ‘disaster poem’, his ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ exactly four years earlier: it was written to commemorate the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who lost their lives at sea in 1875.Into the snows she sweeps,Hurling the haven behind,The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,For the infinite air is unkind,And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blowSitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snowSpins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

That splendid last line has spawned the popular kenning ‘widowmaker’ to describe the sea, and latterly by extension vessels of the deep, as in the Hollywood movie K-19: The Widowmaker. Wiry and white-fiery works well as internal rhyme, together with all the usual head rhymes, assonances and consonances we expect from Hopkins. Otherwise he uses the fairly neutral and simple sweeps/keeps/deeps, blow/snow and behind/kind. He nestles the eye-rhyme wind into the quarter wiry white alliteration and it doesn’t stand out as too ugly. Mind you, there is some less than comfortable rhyming elsewhere in the poem. Stanza 15 contains this unfortunate internal rhyme:And frightful the nightfall folded rueful a day

Frightful indeed–to our ears at least: but perhaps ‘frightful’ was not such a trivial word in 1875. Some three and a half decades later the loss of the Titanic inspired Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’:

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later destiny,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Says ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.