The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The translation of the Ruba’iat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald ranks alongside Burton’s Arabian Nights as one of the great achievements of English orientalism:A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread,–and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness–Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!…’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and DaysWhere Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,And one by one back in the Closet lays.The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;And he that toss’d Thee down into the Field,He knows about it all–He knows–HE knows!The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

If that kind of poetry doesn’t make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends. Open forms in sixain also exist in English verse. Wordsworth in his ‘Daffodils’ used the stanza form Shakespeare developed in ‘Venus and Adonis’, essentially a cross-rhymed quatrain closing with a couplet, abab cc:For oft when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude,And then my heart with pleasure fills,And dances with the Daffodils.

Rhyme RoyalRHYME ROYAL has a noble historyFrom Geoffrey Chaucer to the present dayIts secret is no hidden mystery:Iambic feet, the classic English wayWith b and b to follow a b a.This closing couplet, like a funeral hearse,Drives to its end the body of the verse.

RHYME ROYAL (or Rime Royal as it is sometimes rendered) is most associated with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Troilus and Criseyde marks the form’s first appearance in English. It was once thought that the name derived from its later use by Henry IV, but this is now, like all pleasing stories (from King Alfred’s Cakes to Mr Gere’s way with gerbils), disputed by scholars. I suppose by rights a seven-line stanza should be called a heptain or septain, but I have never seen either word used. Auden used the ababbcc of rhyme royal in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. You would think that he would choose ottava rima, the form in which the addressee so conspicuously excelled. Auden apologises to his Lordship for not doing so:Ottava Rima would, I know, be properThe proper instrument on which to payMy compliments, but I should come a cropper;Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,At least my modern pieces shall be cheeryLike English bishops on the Quantum Theory.

Auden’s reluctance to use ottava rima stemmed, one suspects, from its demand for an extra rhyme. I have always loved this form, however, as my sample verse makes clear.

Ottava RimaOTTAVA RIMA is a poet’s dream,The most congenial of forms by far.It’s quite my favourite prosodic schemeAnd Byron’s too, which lends it some éclat.Much more adaptable than it may seem,It plays both classical and rock guitar;It suits romantic lyric inspiration,But I prefer Byronic-style deflation.

As you can see, OTTAVA RIMA rhymes abababcc and thus presents in eight lines, hence the ottava, as in octave. It is in effect rhyme royal with an extra line, but just as one or more gene in the strand of life can make all the difference, so one or more line in a stanza can quite alter the identity of a form. The origins of ottava rima are to be found in Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso and it entered English in translations of this and other Italian epics. John Hookham Frere saw its potential for mock-heroic use and it was through his 1817 work Whistlecraft that Byron came to use the form, first in Beppo and then in his masterpiece of subverted epic and scattergun satire, Don Juan.

As Auden remarks, ‘Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough…’. Two pairs of three rhymes and a couplet per verse. Perverse indeed.

Some of W. B. Yeats’s best loved later poems take the form away from scabrous mock-heroics by mixing true rhyme with the sonorous twentieth-century possibilities opened up by the use of slant-rhyme, finding an unexpected lyricism. This is the celebrated last stanza of ‘Among School Children’:Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I trust you are still reading out loud…