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

You’d be right to think it ought to be called a double trochee too, but so far as I am aware this term isn’t used for such a foot, just ionic major.

For the record, you’ll find the other quaternary feet in the table at the end of this chapter: they include the antispast, the choriamb and the epitrite and paeon families. Again, good for name-dropping at parties, but like the other measures of four, vestiges of Greek poetry that really don’t have a useful place in the garden of English verse. Rupert Brooke experimented with accentual versions of choriambs, which go tum-titty- tum: Billy the Kid. True classical choriambic verse lines should start with a spondee followed by choriambs and a pyrrhic:

Brooke came up with lines like: Light-f oot dancein the woods, whisper of life, woome to wayfaring

To make the last two syllables a pyrrhic foot you have to read the word as ‘wafering’, which is not quite what Brooke means. He, of course, was classically educated to a degree unimaginable today and would from his early teens have written Greek and Latin poems scanned according to quantitative vowel length, not stress. The vast bulk of successful English verse is, as we know, accentual-syllabic. Nonetheless, he shows that all the metres lie in readiness, waiting for someone to experiment with them. The problem comes when a form is so specific as to cause you to cast about for what fits the metre rather than what fits the true sense of what you want to say. How far the meaning and feeling drives you and how far, as a poet, you allow form and metre to guide you where you never expected to go is for a later section of the book.

There is another kind of native metre, however, the accentual , at which we will take a look when you have completed one more drill.

Poetry Exercise 6

Write some anapaestic hexameters describing how to get to your house.

Just as faras the motorway takesyou then straightpast the Lakenheath bend.Take a lefton the Narborough Roadthen a rightwhen you cometo the end.It’s the housewith the shutters all closedand a garden that’s frankly a slum.When you’re there, why not parkround the backor just hooton your horntill I come?

And some dactylic pentameter on the subject of cows. For fun these should be in the classical manner: four dactyls and a spondee: try to make the spondee as spondaic as the English tongue will allow–two solid bovine stressed syllables.

Standing in randomly curious huddles in long grass Patient as statues, but twitching and steaming like stopped trains Pensively waiting for something to happen that just won’t Probably thinking we’re nervous and skittish as new calves.

Your turn now. You have forty minutes for your two verses.

V

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Accentual verse–alliteration and the two-beat hemistich

English verse sprang, like the English language, from two principal sources, Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon. From the Greeks and Romans we took ordered syllabic measures, from the Old English we took accent . We put them together to make the native accentual-syllabic verse that we have been looking at thus far. It is the classical stream that had the most obvious influence on our poetry and certainly on the technical language we use to describe it, but the Anglo-Saxon tributary has carved its way through our literary landscape too. For hundreds of years it lay isolated, like an old oxbow lake, cut off from the flow, but over the last century or more it has snaked its way back into the mainstream. It is worth dipping our toes in to see if we find it congenial. I suspect that after the syllable counting and footwatching of the foregoing pages, you will find its comparative freedom a great delight.

ANGLO-SAXON and OLD ENGLISH are (more or less) interchangeable terms used for verse written in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. MIDDLE ENGLISH or MEDIEVAL applies to a later, post-Norman revival of the Old English style. These are loose ascriptions but will do for our purposes.

With Old English poetry there is NO SYLLABIC COUNT and there is NO RHYME. Is it free verse , then, unbounded by rules? By no means. Old English verse is distinctly patterned. Until now we have been looking at metre composed according to rules of syllabic accentuation : Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed according to rules of accent only : it is a form of accentual verse. Accentual- alliterative to be precise. Oo-er, sounds a bit scary. It really isn’t, I promise you.

Alliteration is the trick of beginning a succession of words with the same consonant. 30W. S. Gilbert’s ‘life-long lock’, ‘short sharp shock’ and ‘big black block’ are examples of alliterative phrases that we have already met. Alliteration is still rife in English–advertisers and magazine sub-editors seem obsessed with it. Next time you find yourself out and about with your notebook, write down examples from advertising hoardings and newspaper headlines. It is an English disease: you won’t find it to anything like the same degree in Spanish, French or Italian. It lives on in phrases like ‘wit and wisdom’, ‘parent power’, ‘feast or famine’, ‘sweet sixteen’, ‘dirty dozen’, ‘buy British’, ‘prim and proper’, ‘tiger in your tank’, ‘you can be sure of Shell’ and so on. As we have seen, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream mocked its overuse when Bottom and his friends attempt dramatic verse. Here is another part of their dreadful ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;

That is cast in standard Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Old English verse made no such regular, organised use of iambs or any other kind of foot; instead, their verse was based on a much simpler kind of accentuation. The poetic line is divided in two . Two parts, each containing two stressed elements, two beats. The Greek for half a line is hemistich (pronounced hemmy-stick) and so, Greek being the language even of native English prosody, hemistich is the word commonly used to describe the Anglo-Saxon half-line.

Each hemistich must contain two stressedsyllables. It doesn’t matter where they come or how many unstressed syllables surround them. For now, we will call the stressed syllables one, two, threeand four. One and two are placed in the first hemistich, threeand fourin the second. I have left a deliberately wide gap to denote the vital caesura that marks the division into hemistichs.