The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

It is a hoary old warhorse to our ears now I suppose, as much as a result of social change as literary. Most modern readers, academic, poetic or amateur, would probably feel that Hopkins and Hardy engage our sensibilities more directly than Tennyson, in the same way that–for all their technical mastery–we are less moved by the painters of the mid-Victorian period than by the later impressionists and post-impressionists. Nonetheless, there is always much to be learned from virtuosity and I disbelieve any poet who does not confess that he would give even unto half his wealth to have come up with ‘Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die’. We should recognise that Tennyson’s is a poem written for the nation while the Hopkins and Hardy are essentially inward looking. Indeed, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is much more an autobiographical contemplation of the poet’s religious development than a commemoration of a shipwreck.

Whatever our feelings we can surely acknowledge that Tennyson’s versifying is magnificent. It is pleasingly typical, at all events, that this, the best-known poem we have on a military theme, memorialises failure. There are no stirring odes celebrating Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar or the Battle of Britain in our popular anthologies. No English verse equivalent of the 1812 Overture for us to cheer at and weep over. Earlier on the morning of that same October day in 1854, on the same Crimean battlefield, the Heavy Brigade had fought a supremely successful battle during which more men died than in the later disaster, they were just as gallant but their heroism goes unremembered.¹¹ Misfortune, failure and incompetence remain our great themes. It is probable that without the poem the Light Brigade’s futile charge would have vanished into history. Among the many books on the subject there are works whose titles and subtitles include: ‘Honour the Charge they Made’, ‘Noble Six Hundred’, ‘Do or Die’, ‘Into the Valley of Death’, ‘The Reason Why’, ‘The Real Reason Why’ and ‘Someone Had Blundered’. Not many poems that I can think of can have so completely caught the public attention or for ever defined our understanding of an historical event. Anyway, I hope I have convinced you that in great part, it is the rhyming that has contributed to this immortality. Tennyson’s discovery of the hundred/blundered wondered/thundered group is the heart of the poem, its engine.

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail. I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming. Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words. It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting ‘ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace…’ when surely a proper poet should be thinking high, pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus. Well, yes. But a rhyme is a rhyme and won’t come unless searched for. Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme. To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas. It is one of the things we do.

Rhyming PracticePoetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things.GERTRUDE STEIN