The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

If you are a nerdy, anagrammy, crossword puzzler sort of a person, as I tragically and irredeemably am, you will be especially drawn to the pantoum. The art, as with other lexically repetitive and patterned schemes, is to choose ‘open-ended’ repeating lines allowing ambiguity and room for manoeuvre. It is one thing, of course, to write them as a fun exercise, quite another to make a poem of readable qualities for others. Technically the ideal is to push the normative requirements of the mode hard, sometimes to breaking point. There in lies the knack–stretching the bubble until just before it bursts. Without hard pressure on the inner walls of its membrane the pantoum–and this holds true of the other complex forms–can seem a flaccid, futile exercise in wordsmanship.

THE BALLADEBALLADE is not an easy form to crackNo other rhymes, but only A or B;The paeon, dactyl and the amphibrach,The antispast, molossus and spondeeWill not assist us in the least degreeAs through the wilderness we grimly hackAnd sow our hopeful seeds of poetry.It’s always one step forward, two steps back.But let me be Marvell, not KerouacThe open road holds no allure for me.A garden path shall be my desert track,The song of birds my jukebox melody,The neighbour’s cat my Neil Cassidy.With just a mower for a CadillacI won’t get far, but nor will they. You see–It’s always one step forward, two steps back.A hammock is my beatnik bivouacMy moonshine bourbon is a cup of tea.No purple hearts, no acid trips, no smackMy only buzz the humble honeybee.So let them have their free-verse libertyAnd I shall have my handsome garden shackWe’ll see which one of us is truly free,It’s always one step forward, two steps back.EnvoiPrince and peasant, workers, peers or bourgeoisieMcGonagall, Lord Byron, PasternakOf mongrel stock or high born pedigree—It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

The BALLADE, not to be confused with the ballad (or with the musical ballade devised by Chopin), is a venerable French form of some fiendishness for English poets. The difficulty arises, not from any complexity of patterning or repetition such as is to be found in the sestina, but from the number of rhyme sounds needed. It ends with an envoi which, tradition dictates, must be addressed to a Prince. Indeed the very word ‘Prince’ is usually the envoi’s first word: this happy convention, maintained even by modern poets like Dorothy Parker, is a nod to the royal patronage enjoyed by early practitioners such as François Villon and Eustache Deschamps. Those who elected to write sacred ballades would begin their envois with the invocations ‘Prince Jesus!’, or ‘Prince and Saviour!’. Each stanza, the envoi included, ends with the same refrain or rentrement. Early ballades were often composed in three seven-line stanzas, but these days an eight-line stanza with an envoi of four lines seems to have been settled upon by English-language poets. The usual rhyme scheme is ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA, in other words ten a rhymes (and a refrain, A, to rhyme with them) and fourteen b rhymes. This is no doubt a doddle in French but the very bastard son of a mongrel bitch in English. G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Ballade of Suicide’ is one of the better-known examples:The gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall;I tie the noose on in a knowing wayAs one that knots his necktie for a ball;But just as all the neighbours–on the wall–Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘Hurray!’The strangest whim has seized me…. After allI think I will not hang myself to-day.To-morrow is the time I get my pay–My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall–I see a little cloud all pink and grey–Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call–I fancy that I heard from Mr GallThat mushrooms could be cooked another way–I never read the works of Juvenal–I think I will not hang myself to-day.The world will have another washing-day;The decadents decay; the pedants pall;And H. G. Wells has found that children play,And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,Rationalists are growing rational–And through thick woods one finds a stream astraySo secret that the very sky seems small–I think I will not hang myself to-day.EnvoiPrince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,The tumbrels toiling up the terrible way;Even to-day your royal head may fall,I think I will not hang myself to-day.