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

Poetry Exercise 4

You can probably guess what I’m going to ask for here. Sixteen unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The idea is to use pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions (five points for each), weak endings–that extra syllable at the end (two points for each) but all without going overboard and losing the primary iambic rhythm. You can also award yourself two points for every successful enjambment.

Before you embark upon your own, we are going take a look at and mark my attempt at the exercise. I have sought inspiration, if that is the word, from the headlines on today’s BBC news website and would recommend this as preferable to staring out of the window chewing the end of a pencil awaiting the Muse’s kiss. Four news stories in all.Policemen, in a shocking poll revealedThey have no time for apprehending felonsCriminals now at last are free to work.Why can’t the English play the game of cricket?Inside a tiny wooden urn are buriedThe Ashes of a great and sporting nation. 19Babies are now available in femaleOr male. Hard to decide which sex I’ll pick.Maybe I’ll wait till gender is redundant.Towards the middle of a mighty oceanSquats a forgotten island and its people;The sea that laps the margins of the atollBroadcasts no mindless babble on its waves;No e-mail pesters the unsullied palm grovesNewspaper stories pass it quietly by.How long before we go there and destroy it?

I know. Pathetic, isn’t it? I hope you are filled with confidence. Once again, I must emphasise, these are no more poems than practise scales are sonatas. They are purely exercises, as yours should be. Work on solving the problems of prosody, but don’t get hung up about images, poetic sensibility and word choices. The lines and thoughts should make sense, but beyond that doggerel is acceptable.

GET YOUR PENCIL OUT and mark the metre in each line of my verses. It should be fairly clear when the line starts with a trochee, but pyrrhics can be more subjective. I shall do my marking below: see if you agree with me. Pfor a pyrrhic substitution, Tfor a trochaic. Hfor hendecasyllable (or for hypermetric, I suppose). Eis for enjambment.

That’s a pretty clear pyrrhic in the second foot: no need to stress the ‘in’ and I reckon the rest of the line recovers its iambic tread, so five points to me.

Straight iambics, just two points for the hypermetric ending.

Five points for the initial trochee.

Five for the opening trochee (I think you’ll agree that it is ‘ whycan’t’, not ‘why can’t’) plus two for the weak ending.

Iambics: just two for the ending (it’s a bit like scoring for cribbage, this…)

Five for the pyrrhic and two for the ending. 7

High-scoring one here: five for the trochaic switch in the first foot, five for the pyrrhic in the fourth: plus two for the ending and two for the enjambment. The question is: does it still feel iambic with all those bells and whistles? My view is that it would if it were in the midst of more regular iambic lines, but since it is the first line of a stanza it is hard for the ear to know what is going on. A trochaic first foot allied to a weak ending gives an overall trochaic effect, especially when the middle is further vitiated by the slack syllables of the pyrrhic. Also, the end word ‘female’ is almost spondaic. So I shall deduct five for bad style.

A trochaic switch mid line for five points: since it follows a caesura the rest of the line picks up the iambic pulse adequately.

Trochaic of the first with pyrrhic of the fourth again. For some reason I don’t think this one misses its swing so much as the other, so I’ll only deduct three. Then again, perhaps it keeps its swing because it isn’t a real pyrrhic: hard not to give a push to the ‘is’ there, don’t we feel?

I make my score 106. I’m sure you could do better with your sixteen lines. To recap:

16 lines of iambic pentameter

5 points for trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions

2 points for enjambments

2 points for feminine endings

Be tough on yourself when marking. If, in a bid to make a high score, you have lost the underlying rising tread of the iambic pentameter, then deduct points with honesty. Have fun!

III

More Meters

Octameters–hexameters–heptameters–tetrameters–trimeters–dimeters–monometers

Why five feet to a line, why not four or six? Three or seven? Eight even.

Why not indeed. Here’s a list of the most likely possibilities:1 Beat–MonometerHe bangsThe drum.2 Beats–DimeterHis drumming noiseA wakesthe boys.3 Beats–TrimeterHis drumming makesa noise,And wakesthe sleeping boys.4 Beats–TetrameterHe bangsthe drumand makesa noise,It shakesthe roofand wakesthe boys.5 Beats–PentameterHe bangsthe drumand makesa dreadful noise,It shakesthe roofand wakesthe sleeping boys.6 Beats–HexameterHe bangsthe drumand makesthe mostap palling noise,It shakesthe very roofand wakesthe sleeping boys.7 Beats–HeptameterHe bangsthe wretched drumand makesthe mostap palling noise,Its racket shakesthe very roofand wakesthe sleeping boys.8 Beats–OctameterHe startsto bangthe wretched drumand makethe mostap palling noise,Its dreadful racket shakesthe very roofand wakesthe sleeping boys.