The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Keats did not abandon the form, but contributed to its development with a new freedom of run-ons and syntactical complexity. This extract from ‘Lamia’ shows how close to dramatic blank verse it becomes, the enjambments almost disguising the rhymes.Pale grew her immortality, for woeOf all these lovers, and she grieved soI took compassion on her, bade her steepHer hair in weïrd syrops that would keepHer loveliness invisible, yet freeTo wander as she loves, in liberty.

Robert Browning wrestled with the form even more violently. His much anthologised ‘My Last Duchess’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in heroic verse. It is ‘spoken’ by the Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, who is showing around his palace an ambassador who has come to make the arrangements for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn, as the monologue proceeds, that the Duke had his first wife killed on account of her displeasing over-friendliness. Pointing at her portrait on the wall, the Duke explains how polite, compliant and smiling she was, but to everyone:

She hadA heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad,Too easily impressed; she liked whate’erShe looked on, and her looks went everywhere.Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,The dropping of the daylight in the West,The bough of cherries some officious foolBroke in the orchard for her, the white muleShe rode with round the terrace–all and eachWould draw from her alike the approving speech,

In the Duke’s view it was ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift’.

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,Whene’er I passed her; but who passed withoutMuch the same smile? This grew: I gave commands;Then all smiles stopped together. There she standsAs if alive.

In other words, he had her killed. You can see how different this heavily run-on and paused verse is from the restrained fluency of Augustan heroic couplets. But why has Browning not chosen to write in blank verse, in the Shakespearean or Jacobean manner, we might wonder? I cannot, of course, second-guess Browning’s motives, but the effect is to counter the fluency of everyday speech with the formality of a rhymed structure, creating an ironic contrast between the urbane conversational manner, the psychotic darkness of the story and the elegant solidity of a noble form. The heroic verse is the frame out of which character can leap; it is itself the nobly proportioned, exquisitely tasteful palace in which ignobly misproportioned, foully tasteless deeds are done.

Wilfred Owen’s use of rhyming couplets in the hell of war provides another kind of ironic contrast. In the same way that the employment of ballad form for the dreary and mundane makes both a distinction and a connection, so the use of heroic couplets both contrasts and unites in Owen’s verse: the august and decorous form in such ghastly conditions is a sick joke, but the death agonies, mutilations and horrors of the soldiers’ lives are raised to heroic status by their incarnation in heroic couplets. Owen’s ‘A Terre: (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)’ uses Browning-style dramatic monologue in slant-rhymed couplets, casting Owen himself as the visitor to a field hospital where a ruined soldier lies and addresses him.Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.Both arms have mutinied against me,–brutes.My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.I tried to peg out soldierly,–no use!One dies of war like any old disease.This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.I have my medals?–Discs to make eyes close.My glorious ribbons?–Ripped from my own backIn scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)

Laurence Lerner, Thom Gunn and Tony Harrison have all written with distinction in heroic couplets, as did Seamus Heaney in ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ and his superb poem ‘The Outlaw’, which might be regarded as a kind of darkly ironic play on an eclogue or georgic–Virgilian verse celebrating and philosophically discoursing upon the virtues of agricultural life.

You may find yourself drawn to heroic verse, you may not. Whatever your views, I would recommend practising it: the form has compelling and enduring qualities. Move in: the structure is still sound and spacious enough to accommodate all your contemporary furniture and modern gadgets.

Poetry Exercise 13

Try a short dramatic monologue, à la Browning, in which a young man in police custody, clearly stoned off his head, tries to explain away the half-ounce of cannabis found on his person. Use the natural rhythms of speech, running-on through lines, pausing and running on again, but within rhymed iambic pentameter. You will be amazed what fun you can have with such a simple form. If you don’t like my scenario, choose another one, but do try and make it contemporary in tone.

V

The Ode

Sapphic–Pindaric–Horatian–lyric–anacreontic