The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

I was rather fascinated by why a sestina works the way it does and whether it could be proved mathematically that you only need six stanzas for the pattern to repeat. Being a maths dunce, I approached my genius of a father who can find formulas for anything and he offered an elegant mathematical description of the sestina, showing its spirals and naming his algorithm in honour of Arnaud Daniel, the form’s inventor, who was something of a mathematician himself, so legend has it. This mathematical proof can be found in the Appendix. If like me, formulae with big Greek letters in them mean next to nothing, you will be as baffled by it as I am, but you might like, as I do, the idea that even something as ethereal, soulful and personal as a poem can be described by numbers…

Sestinas are still being written by contemporary poets. After their invention by the twelfth-century mathematician and troubadour Arnaud Daniel, examples in English have been written by poets as varied in manner as Sir Philip Sidney, Rossetti, Swinburne, Kipling, Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Justice, Howard Nemerov and Kona Macphee (see if you can find her excellent sestina ‘IVF’). Swinburne’s ‘A Complaint to Lisa’ is a double sestina, twelve stanzas of twelve lines each, a terrifying feat first achieved by Sir Philip Sidney. I mean surely that’s just showing off…. I shall present two examples to show the possibilities of a form which my sample verse has made appear very false and stagy. The first is by Elizabeth Bishop, entitled simply ‘Sestina’, flowing between ten-, nine-and eight-syllable lines, ending with a final line of twelve:September rain falls on the house.In the failing light, the old grandmothersits in the kitchen with the childbeside the Little Marvel Stove,reading the jokes from the almanac,laughing and talking to hide her tears.She thinks that her equinoctial tearsand the rain that beats on the roof of the housewere both foretold by the almanac,but only known to a grandmother.The iron kettle sings on the stove.She cuts some bread and says to the child,It's time for tea now; but the childis watching the teakettle's small hard tearsdance like mad on the hot black stove,the way the rain must dance on the house.Tidying up, the old grandmotherhangs up the clever almanacon its string. Birdlike, the almanachovers half open above the child,hovers above the old grandmotherand her teacup full of dark brown tears.She shivers and says she thinks the housefeels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.I know what I know, says the almanac.With crayons the child draws a rigid houseand a winding pathway. Then the childputs in a man with buttons like tearsand shows it proudly to the grandmother.But secretly, while the grandmotherbusies herself about the stove,the little moons fall down like tearsfrom between the pages of the almanacinto the flower bed the childhas carefully placed in the front of the house.Time to plant tears, says the almanac.The grandmother sings to the marvelous stoveand the child draws another inscrutable house.

It is not considered de rigueur these days to enforce the end-word order of the envoi. This next (also called ‘Sestina’) is by the poet Ian Patterson–wonderful how his end-words slowly cycle their multiple meanings:Autumn as chill as rising water lapsand files us away under former stuffthinly disguised and thrown up on a screen;one turn of the key lifts a brass tumbler–another disaster probably averted, just,while the cadence drifts in dark and old.Voices of authority are burning an oldcar on the cobbles, hands on their laps,as if there was a life where justmen slept and didn’t strut their stuffon stage. I reach out for the tumblerand pour half a pint behind the screen.The whole body is in pieces. Screenmemories are not always as sharp as oldnoir phenomena. The child is like a tumblerdoing back-flips out of mothers’ lapsinto all that dark sexual stuffpermanently hurt that nothing is just.I’m telling you this justbecause I dream of watching you behind a screentaking your clothes off for me: the stuffof dreams, of course. Tell me the old, oldstory, real and forgetful. Time simply lapsus up, like milk from a broken tumbler.A silent figure on the stage, the tumblerstands, leaps and twists. He’s justa figure of speech that won’t collapselike the march of time and the silver screen;like Max Wall finally revealing he was oldand then starting again in that Beckett stuff.I’d like to take my sense of the real and stuffit. There’s a kind of pigeon called a tumblerthat turns over backwards as it flies, oldand having fun; sometimes I think that’s justwhat I want to do, but I can’t cut or screenout the lucid drift of memory that lapsmy brittle attention just off-screenaway from the comfortable laps and the velvety stuffI spilled a tumbler of milk over before I was old.