The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

When you have finished, try this as the second part of your rhyming exercise. Take your notebook and wander about the house and garden, if you have one. If you are not reading this at home, then wander around your office, hospital ward, factory floor or prison cell. If you are outside or on a train, plane or bus, in a café, brothel or hotel lobby you can still do this. Simply note down as many things as you can see, hear or smell. They need not be nouns, you can jot down processes, actions, deeds. So, if you are in a café, you might write down: smoking, steam, raincoat, lover’s tiff, cappuccino machine, sipping, flapjacks, cinnamon, jazz music, spilt tea and so on–whatever strikes the eye, ear or nose. Write a list of at least twenty words. When you’ve done that, settle down and once more see how many rhymes you can come up with for each word. You may find that this simple exercise gets your poetic saliva glands so juiced up that the temptation to turn the words into poetry becomes irresistible. Yield to it. A random, accidental and arbitrary consonance of word sounds can bring inspiration where no amount of pacing, pencil chewing and looking out of the window can help.

Rhyme Categories

1. Masculine rhyme–box/frocks, spite/tonight, weird/beard, amaze/delays

2. Feminine rhyme–breathing/seething, relation/nation, waiter/equator

3. Triple rhyme–merrily/verily, merited/inherited, drastically/ fantastically

4. Slant-rhyme:

Assonance–pit/kiss, mean/dream, stub/rug, slack/shag, hop/dot

Partial consonance–coils/gulls, wild/fold, mask/tusk, stump/ramp

Full consonance–coils/cools, wild/weld, mask/musk, stump/stamp

Eye-rhyme–fool/wool, want/pant, heard/beard, mould/could, rove/love

Rich-rhyme–red rose/he rose, single file/nail file, nose/knows, eye/I

RHYMING COUPLETSKnow then thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is Man.ALEXANDER POPE: An Essay on Man

RHYMING TRIPLETSWhat Flocks of Critiques hover here today,As vultures wait on Armies for their Prey,All gaping for the carcass of a Play!JOHN DRYDEN: Prologue to All for Love

CROSS-RHYMEThe boy stood on the burning deckWhence all but he had fled;The flame that lit the battle’s wreckShone round him o’er the dead.FELICIA HEMANS: ‘Casabianca’

ENVELOPE RHYMEMuch have I travell’d in the realms of goldAnd many goodly states and kingdoms seen;Round many western islands have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.JOHN KEATS: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

CHAPTER THREE

Form

I

The Stanza

So we can write metrically, in iambs and anapaests, trochees and dactyls. We can choose the length of our measure: hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter. We can write accentually, in three-stress and four-stress lines. We can alliterate and we can rhyme, but thus far our verse has merely been stichic, presented in a sequence of lines. Where those lines terminate is determined, as we know, by the measure or, in the case of syllabic verse, by the syllable count. Prose, such as you are reading now, is laid out (or lineated) differently–as I write this I have no reason to start a new line (to ‘press the return key’) until it is time for a new paragraph or a quotation and you certainly won’t

find me doing this

or this, for that

matter; it would be

highly

odd,

not to mention confusing:

in poetry such a procedure

would not be considered

strange at all, although as

we shall see, how we

manage the lineation of our poems is not a question of random line

breaks, or it had better not be…

Our first clue that the written words on a page might qualify as poetry may indeed be offered by lineation, but an even more obvious indicator is the existence of stanzas. The word derives from the Italian for ‘stand’, which in turn developed into the word for ‘room’ (stanza di pranzo is ‘dining room’, for example). In everyday speech, in songwriting, hymn singing and many other popular genres a stanza will often be referred to as a verse (meaning ‘turn’, as in ‘reverse’, ‘subvert’, ‘diversion’ and so on). I will be keeping to the word stanza, allowing me to use verse in its looser sense of poetic material generally. Also, I like the image of a poem being a house divided into rooms. Some traditional verse forms have no stanzaic layout, for others it is almost their defining feature. But first we need to go deeper into this whole question of form…