The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

You may think that this is arbitrary–enjambment between stanzas two and three shows that each does not wholly contain its own thought. Hughes is following no closed or open form, why then should he bother to set his verse in stanzas at all? Why not one continuous clump of lines? All kinds of neat arguments could be made about the poem itself needing, as the ground does, to fight the random aggression of its thistling, bristling words, to be farmed; then again, maybe four stanzas reflect the four seasons of the thistles’ birth, flourishing, death and rebirth; or one might think the stanzas in their short definitive shape chime with the plainly laid down statements Hughes makes, but I do not think such sophistry, even when it convinces, is necessary. We see, we feel, we know that the layout is just plain right. Imagine the same lines in one group: something is lost. Perhaps Hughes wrote it as a single stream of lines and then realised that they needed arrangement into four groups of three much as an artist might realise that he needs to regroup his landscape, rubbing out a tree in the background, foregrounding that clump of bushes, moving the church spire to the right and so on. The artist does not consult a book on composition or apply absolutely set rules learned at art school, he just feels, he just knows. Experience and openness, instinct and a feel for order, these are not taught, but they are not entirely inborn either. Reading, preparation, concentration and a poetic eye that is every bit as attuned as a poetic ear all contribute to the craftsmanship, the poetic skill that might, in time, make such judgements second nature.

If, then, you wish to use your own stanzas, rhyming or not, organised in traditional or personal ways, allow yourself to feel that same sense of composition and rightness, just as you might when arranging knick-knacks and invitations on a mantelpiece or designing a birthday card. It is not a question of right and wrong, but nor is it a question of anything goes. Incidentally, do allow yourself to enjoy Hughes’s use of the word ‘fistful’–a fabulous consonantal and assonantal play on ‘thistle’, rhyming back to the first word of the second line. Is it not divine?

An open quatrain form whose qualities are sui generis enough to deserve a whole section on its own is the ballad. It is our next stop–once the following exercise is done.

Poetry Exercise 11

As you can see I have headed each section above with my own attempts to describe each stanza form under discussion in its own dress. Your exercise is to do the same but better. I look forward to bumping into you one day in the street or on a train and hearing you recite to me in triumphal tones your self-referential rhymes royal and auto-descriptive Ruba’iyat.

III

The Ballad

In fours and threes and threes and fours

The BALLAD beats its drum:

‘The Ancient Mariner’ of course

Remains the exemplum.

With manly eights (or female nines)

You are allowed if ’tis your pleasure,

To stretch the length to equal lines

And make a ballad of LONG MEASURE.

Well, what more need a poet know?

In technical prosodic parlance we could say that most ballads present in quatrains of alternate cross-rhymed iambic tetrameter and trimeter. However, since the ballad is a swinging, popular form derived from song and folk traditions it is much better described as a form that comes in four-line verses, usually alternating between four and three beats to line. The word comes from ballare, the Italian for ‘to dance’ (same root as ballet, ballerina and ball).

The ballad’s irresistible lilt is familiar to us in everything from nursery rhymes to rugby songs. We know it as soon as we hear it, the shape and the rhythm seem inborn:There’s nothing like a ballad songFor lightening the load–I’ll chant the buggers all day longUntil my tits explode.A sweetly warbled ballad verseWill never flag or tireI sing ’em loud for best or worseThough both my balls catch fire.I’ll roar my ballads loud and gruff,Like a lion in the zooAnd if I sing ’em loud enough’Twill tear my arse in two.