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

Onecomes along with two

and threeis there with four

Let old onetake two’shand

while young threehas a word with four

Here come oneand two

threeis there with four

Although ‘comes’, ‘along’, ‘there’, ‘hand’, ‘young’ and ‘word’ might seem to be words which ought properly to receive some stress, it is only the numbershere that take the primary accent. Try reading the three lines aloud, deliberately hitting the numbers hard.

You get the idea. Of course there will always be minor, secondary stresses on the other words, but it is those four stressed elements that matter. You could say, if you love odd words as much as most poets do, that a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is in reality a syzygy of dipodic hemistichs. A pair of yoked two-foot half-lines, in other words. But I prefer syzygy. It really is a word, I promise you. 31

Now for the alliterative principle, christened by Michael Alexander, Anglo-Saxon scholar and translator of Beowulf , the BANG, BANG, BANG–CRASH! rule.

ONE, TWO AND THREE ARE ALLITERATED, FOUR ISN’T

It is as simple as that. No rhyming, so syllable counting. In fact, why bother with the word hemistich at all? The line is divided into two: the first half has bangand bang, and the second half has bangand crash. That’s all you really need to know. Let us scan this kind of metre with bold for the first three beats and bold-underline for the fourth, to mark its unalliterated difference.

It em barkswith a bang

sucking breathfrom the lungs

And rollson di rectly

as rapidas lightning.

The speedand the splendour

come spilling like wine

Com pellingly perfect and

ap pealingly clear

The most venerable in vention

con veniently simple.

Important to note that it is the stressed syllables that matter: ‘com pelling’ and ‘ap pealing’ are perfectly legitimate alliteration words, as are ‘in vention’ and ‘con venient’, ‘ rolls’ and ‘di rectly’. So long as the stress falls heavily enough on the syllable belonging to the alliterating consonant, everything’s hotsy-totsy and right as a trivet. And I say again, because it might seem unusual after all the syllabic counting of the previous section of the book, IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY SYLLABLES THERE ARE, ONLY HOW MANY BEATS. Occasionally, in defiance of the b-b-b-crash rule you may see the fourth beat alliterate with the others, but usually it does not.

Although I said that it does not matter where in each half of the line the stressed elements go, it is close enough to a rule to say that the fourth stress (the CRASH) is very likely to be in the last word of the line, which may (like ‘lightning’ and ‘simple’ above) have a feminine ending.

I could give you some examples of Anglo-Saxon verse, but they involve special letters ( yoghs, eths and thorns ) and the language is distant enough from our own to be virtually incomprehensible to all but the initiated.

Medieval verse is not so tricky to decipher. Round about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English poets began to write once more in the Anglo-Saxon style: this flowering, known as the Alliterative Revival, gave rise to some magnificent works. Here is the opening to William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’. 32In a somer se soun, whan softewas the sonneI shopeme into shroudes, as I a shep were,In habite as an heremite, un holyof werkes, Wenteforth in the world wondres to here,And sawmany sellesand sellcouthe thynges.

You hardly need to know what every word means, but a rough translation would be:One summer, when the sun was gentleI dressed myself in rough clothes like a shepherdIn the habit of a lazy hermit 33Went forth into the world to hear wondersAnd saw many marvels and strange things.

You will notice that Langland does open with bang, bang, bang– bang . Perhaps it is his way of beginning his poem with special hoopla. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , an anonymous work from the same period (late fourteenth century: contemporary with Chaucer) opens thus: Sithen the segeand the as sautwatz sesed at TroyeThe borgh brittene dand brentto brondez and askezThe tulkthat the trammesof tresoun ther wroghtWatz triedfor his tricherie, the treweston erthe;

My spellcheck has just resigned, but no matter. Here is a basic translation:Since the siege and the assault ceased at TroyThe town destroyed and burned to brands and ashesThe man that the wiles of treason there wroughtWas tried for his treachery, the veriest on earth;

The Gawain Poet (as he is known in the sexy world of medieval studies–he is considered by some to be the author of three other alliterative works– Pearl, Patience and Purity ) occasionally breaks the ‘rule’ and includes an extra alliterating word, and therefore, one must assume, an extra beat, as he does here in the second line.

Modern poets (by which I mean any from the last hundred years) have tried their hands at this kind of verse with varying degrees of accomplishment. This is a perfect Langlandian four-stress alliterated line in two hemistichs and comes from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:On a bleak background of bald stone.

Ezra Pound’s ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo-Saxon’ contains lines like ‘Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth’ and ‘Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight’ but for the most part it does not follow the hemistich b-b-b-c pattern with such exactness. Among the more successful in this manner was that great prosodic experimenter, W.H. Auden. These extracts are from his verse drama The Age of Anxiety .Deep in my dark the dream shinesYes, of you, you dear always;My cause to cry, cold but myStory still, still my music.Mild rose the moon, moving through ourNaked nights: tonight it rains;Black umbrellas blossom out;Gone the gold, my golden ball.

What Auden manages, which other workers in this field often do not, is to imbue the verse with a sense of the modern and the living. He uses enjambment (something very rarely done by Old English and medieval poets) to help create a sense of flow. A grim failing when writing in alliterative four-stress lines is to overdo the Saxon and produce verse that is the poetic equivalent of morris dancing or Hobbit-speak. 34When reading such verse out loud you feel the urge to put a finger to your ear and chant nasally like a bad folk singer. This unpleasantness can be aggravated by an over-reliance on a trope known as a kenning . Kennings are found in great profusion in Anglo-Saxon, Old German and especially Norse poetry. They are a kind of compound metonym (a metaphoric trope, see the glossary) used to represent a single object, person or concept: thus a ship becomes an oar steed , the sea is the whale road or the gannet’s bath ( hron-rade or ganotes-bae? ,) and din of spears would stand for ‘battle’. My favourite is brow-stars for eyes. Eddic and Icelandic bards were very fond of these devices: I suppose modern equivalents would be iron horse for train, chalk face for the classroom, fleapit for cinema, bunfight for party, devil’s dandruff for cocaine and Hershey highway for…well, ask your mother.