Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

Fourteen lines, but sixteen caesuras and seven enjambments: the verse in its stop-start jerking is as pathological and possessed as the mind of the man speaking. Compare it to another fourteen lines, the fourteen lines of the famous Eighteenth sonnet: out loud, please, or as near as dammit:Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed,And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shadeWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, ¶ and this gives life to thee.

No run-ons at all, and just one caesura, 9an absolute killer example, which gives weight to the grand and glorious resolution of the sonnet delivered by those three final feet: ‘and thisgives lifeto thee’. The perfectly end-stopped verse, unbroken by caesura up until that point, perfectly reflects a sense of assurance, just as the broken, spasmodic breaks and runs of Leontes’s ravings perfectly reflect the opposite: a crazed and unstable state of mind.

Macbeth, considering whether or not to kill Duncan and grasp his destiny, is in something of a dither too. Say this:–I have no spur To prick the sides of my intent ¶ but only Vaulting ambition ¶ which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other ¶–How now! what news? Macbeth , Act I, Scene 7

How insupportably dull and lifeless dramatic verse would be if made up only of end-stopped lines. How imponderably perfect a poem can be if it is all end-stopped.

I should mention here that in performance many Shakespearean actors will give a vocal (and often almost imperceptible) end-stop to a line, even when there is clear run-on in its sense. In the same way that the verse works better to the eye and inner ear when the metric structure is in clear pentameters, so spoken verse can work better when the actor represents each line with a faint pause or breath. It is a matter of fashion, context and preference. Some theatre directors hate dramatic end-stopping and are determined that meaning should take precedence over metre, others insist upon it (sometimes at the expense of clarity). An actor friend of mine, unaware of the jargon, was very alarmed on his first day as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company to hear an old hand ask the director before the first read-through of a new production: ‘Are we end-stopping, darling?’ Took him three weeks to dare to ask what it meant: he had imagined it was something to do with rehearsal tea breaks.

Robert Browning, some of whose most memorable verse took the form of the dramatic monologue (not verse written for the stage, but poems written as if spoken by a first-person narrator), was an absolute master of the interior rhythmic play possible within the wider structures of the metre. Out loud:No, friend, you do not beat me: hearken why!The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s,Is not to fancy what were fair in lifeProvided it could be,–but, finding firstWhat may be, then find how to make it fairUp to our means; a very different thing!BROWNING: ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’

I’ll let you mark that with caesuras and enjambments yourself. It is a marvellously complex and animated series of clauses and subordinate clauses, yet all subservient to the benign tyranny of pure iambic pentameter. Not a syllable out of place, not a ‘cheat’ (rogue extra syllable or rogue docked one) anywhere. A complicated and disgracefully self-justifying point is being made by the bishop, who is excusing his life of cheating, double-dealing and irreligious selfishness by means of subtle and sophisticated argument. The pauses, inner rhythms and alterations of momentum provided by the use of enjambment and caesura echo this with great wit and precision.

Doubt, assertion, reassurance, second thoughts, affirmation, question and answer, surprise and the unstable rhythms of thought and speech are some of the effects that can be achieved with these two simple devices, caesura and enjambment, within verse that still obeys the ‘rules’ of iambic pentameter.

I wouldn’t want you to believe that they are only for use in dramatic verse like Shakespeare’s and Browning’s, however. After all, it is unlikely that this is the kind of poetry you will be writing yourself. Verse as reflective and contemplative as that of Wordsworth’s Prelude makes great use of them too. MARK THE CAESURAS AND ENJAMBMENTS HERE: I shan’t let you read on till you’ve fished out a pencil and begun, saying out loud as you go:Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to makeA present joy the matter of a song,Pour forth that day my soul in measured strainsThat would not be forgotten, and are hereRecorded: to the open fields I toldA prophecy: poetic numbers cameSpontaneously to clothe in priestly robeA renovated spirit singled out,

How did it go? You might have found as I did that it was tricky to decide precisely whether or not there were caesuras in the third and seventh lines and whether there was more than one in the first. I have put the doubtful ones in brackets.Thus far, O Friend! did I, ¶ not used to make ¶A present joy the matter of a song,Pour forth that day my soul (¶) in measured strains (¶)That would not be forgotten, ¶ and are here ¶Recorded: ¶ to the open fields I told ¶A prophecy: ¶ poetic numbers came ¶Spontaneously (¶) to clothe in priestly robe (¶)A renovated spirit singled out,

If you read the poem to yourself I think the bracketed caesuras do indicate the faintest of breaths or pauses which would in turn suggest the bracketed run-ons. It is not an exact science despite the claims of some scholiasts and poetasters. 10Of course, it is only of importance or interest to us here because we are examining the verse as budding poets eager to think about how life and variation is given to an otherwise over-drilled regiment of foot; we are not marking verse up either for performance or for correction by a teacher.

Enjambment and caesura can pack a great comic punch, which Byron demonstrates when he opens his mock epic Don Juan with a savage blast aimed precisely at the Wordsworth of the Prelude above and his fellow Lake District romantic poets, Coleridge and Southey. Byron hated them and what he saw as their pretension and vain belief that theirs was the only Poesy (poetry) worthy of wreaths (prizes and plaudits). Say this out loud:You–Gentlemen! ¶ by dint of long seclusion From better company, ¶ have kept your own At Keswick, and, ¶ through still continued fusion Of one another’s minds, ¶ at last have grown To deem as a most logical conclusion,That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:There is a narrowness in such a notion,Which makes me wish you’d change your lakes for ocean.