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

I am sure you have now got the point that pausing and running on are an invaluable adjunct to the basic pentametric line. I have taken a long time over this because I think these two devices exemplify the crucial point that ADHERENCE TO METRE DOES NOT MILITATE AGAINST NATURALNESS. Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny. Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy. As Auden suggested in his analogy of Robinson Crusoe, some poets might be able to live outside convention and rules, but most of us make a hash of it.

It is time to try your own. This exercise really is fun: don’t be scared off by its conditions: I’ll take you through it all myself to show you what is required and how simple it is.

Poetry Exercise 3

Write five pairs of blank (non-rhyming) iambic pentameter in which the first line of each pair is end-stopped and there are no caesuras.

Now write five pairs with (give or take) the same meaning in which there is enjambment.

Make sure that each new pair also contains at least two caesuras.

This may take a little longer than the first writing exercise, but no more than forty-five minutes. Again, it is not about quality.

To make it easier I will give you a specific subject for all five pairs.

1. Precisely what you see and hear outside your window.

2. Precisely what you’d like to eat, right this minute.

3. Precisely what you last remember dreaming about.

4. Precisely what uncompleted chores are niggling at you.

5. Precisely what you hate about your body.

Once again I have had a pitiful go myself to give you an idea of what I mean.

WITHOUT caesura or enjambment: 1 Outside the Window I hear the traffic passing by my house,While overhead the blackbirds build their nests. 2 What I’d Like to Eat I’d really like some biscuits I can dunk,Unsalted crisps would fill a gap as well. 3 A Recent Dream I dreamt an airport man had lost my bagsAnd all my trousers ended up in Spain. 4 Pesky Tasks Overdue I need to tidy up my papers nowAnd several ashtrays overflow with butts. 5 My Body Too many chins and such a crooked nose,Long flabby legs and rather stupid hair.

With caesura and enjambment: 1 Outside the Window The song of cars, so like the roar the seaCan sing, has drowned the nesting blackbirds’ call. 2 What I’d Like to Eat Some biscuits, dunked–but quick in sudden stabsLike beaks. Oh, crisps as well. Unsalted, please. 3 A Recent Dream Security buffoons, you sent my stridesTo Spain, and all my bags to God knows where. 4 Pesky Tasks Overdue My papers seethe. Now all my writing deskErupts. Volcanic mountains cough their ash. 5 My Body Three flobbing chins are bad, but worse, a bentAnd foolish nose. Long legs, fat thighs, mad hair.

These are only a guide. Go between each Before and After I have composed and see what I did to enforce the rules. Then pick up your pencil and pad and have a go yourself.

Use the same titles for your couplets that I did for mine. The key is to find a way of breaking the line, then running on to make the enjambment. It doesn’t have to be elegant, sensible or clever, mine aren’t, though I will say that the very nature of the exercise forces you, whether you intend it or not, to concentrate the sense and movement of the phrasing in a way that at least gestures towards that distillation and compactness that marks out real poetry. Here’s your blank space.

Weak Endings, Trochaic and Pyrrhic Substitutions

Let us now return to Macbeth, who is still considering whether or not he should kill Duncan. He says out loud, as indeed do you: ‘I have no spur…To prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itselfAnd falls on th’ other.–How now! what news?

Forgetting caesuras and enjambments this time, have a look at the three lines as an example of iambic pentameter. Get that pencil out and try marking each accented and unaccented syllable.

Eleven syllables! There’s a rogue extra syllable at the end of line 1, isn’t there? An unstressed orphan bringing up the rear. The line scans like this:

There is more: the next line doesn’t start with an iamb at all! Unless the actor playing Macbeth says ‘vault ingambition’ the line goes…

The mighty Shakespeare deviating from metre? He is starting an iambic line with a tum-ti, a trochee .

Actually, in both cases he is employing two variations that are so common and necessary to lively iambic verse that they are not unusual enough even to call deviations.

We will attend to that opening trochaic foot in a moment. Let us first examine this orphan or ‘rogue’ unaccented syllable at the end of the line. It makes the line eleven syllables long or hendecasyllabic .

It results in what is called a weak or feminine ending (I hope my female readers won’t be offended by this. Blame the French, we inherited the term from them. I shall try not to use it often). Think of the most famous iambic pentameter of all:

To be or not to be that is the question

Count the syllables and mark the accents. It does the same thing (‘question’ by the way is disyllabic , two syllables, any actor who said quest-i- onwould be laughed off the stage and out of Equity. It is certainly kwestch n 11). 11

If you think about it, the very nature of the iamb means that if this additional trick were disallowed to the poet then all iambic verse would have to terminate in a stressed syllable, a masculine ending…If winter comes can spring be far behind?

…would be possible, butA thing of beauty is a joy for ev(er)

…would not. Keats would have had to find a monosyllabic word meaning ‘ever’ and he would have ended up with something that sounded Scottish, archaic, fey or precious even in his own day (the early nineteenth century).A thing of beauty is a joy for ay.

Words like ‘excitement’, ‘little’, ‘hoping’, ‘question’, ‘idle’, ‘widest’ or ‘wonder’ could never be used to close an iambic line. That would be a ridiculous restriction in English. How absurdly limiting not to be able to end with an -ing, or an -er or a -ly or a -tion or any of the myriad weak endings that naturally occur in our language.

BUT THERE IS MORE TO IT THAN THAT. A huge element of all art is constructed in the form of question and answer . The word for this is dialectic . In music we are very familiar with this call-and-response structure. The opening figure of Beethoven’s Fifth is a famous example:Da-da-da-DahDa-da-da-Derr