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

You get out your notebook and consider some of the words that are likely to be needed. Rhyme words are of great importance since–by definition–they form the last words of each line, the repetition of their sounds will be crucial to the impact of your poem. They need therefore to be words central to the story and its meaning. Let us look at our options.

Well, the River Tay is clearly a chief player in the drama. Tay, say, day, clay, away, dismay and dozens of others available; no real problems there. Bridge ? Hm, not so easy. Ridge is possible, but doesn’t seem relevant. Plenty of midges in Scotland, but again hardly suitable for our purposes. Fridges have not yet been invented. The word carriage , marvellously useful as it might be, would have to be wrenched into carri age so that is a non-starter too. Girders offers murders , but that seems a bit unjust. Sir Thomas Bouch, the bridge’s chief engineer, may have been incompetent, but he was scarcely homicidal. Dundee ? See, three, be, thee, wee, flee, key, divorcee, employee, goatee, catastrophe . The last, while excellently apposite, might lose some of its power with the slight extra push needed on the last syllable for a proper rhyme, catastrophee . Ditto calamitee . Pity. Eighteen seventy-nine ? Well, there are rhymes aplenty there: fine, brine, wine, mine, thine–railway line even, now that does suggest possibilities. Other useful rhymes might be river/quiver/shiver, train/strain/rain, drown/down/town, perhaps/collapse/snaps and so on.

I hope this gives an idea of the kind of thought processes involved. Of course, I am not suggesting that in praxis any poet will approach a poem quite in this manner: much of these thoughts will come during the trial and error of the poem’s development.

I am not going to ask you to write the whole poem, though you might like to do so for your own satisfaction: the idea is to consider the elements that will go into the construction of such a work, paying special attention to the rhyming. We should now try penning a few lines and phrases, as a kind of preliminary sketch:The bridge that spans the River TayFor bridges are iron, but man is clayIcy galeWould not prevailThe steaming trainThe teeming rainStress and strainThe girders sigh, the cables quiverThe troubled waters of the riverLocked for ever in the deepsThe mighty broken engine sleepsThe arctic wind’s remorseless breathFrom laughing life to frozen deathSo frail the life of mortal manHow fragile seems the human spanHow narrow then, how weak its girth–The bridge between our death and birthThe cable snapsAll hopes collapse

Nothing very original or startling there: ‘human clay’ is a very tired old cliché, as is ‘stress and strain’; ‘girth’ and ‘birth’ don’t seem to be going anywhere, but with some tweaking and whittling a poem could perhaps emerge from beneath our toiling fingers. See now if you can come up with four or five couplets, rhyming snatches or phrases of a similar nature: do not try and write in modern English–you are a Victorian, remember. When you have done that we can proceed.

How did you do? Well enough to be driven on to complete a few verses? As it happens and as perhaps you already knew from the moment I mentioned the River Tay, a poem was written on this very catastrophe by William McGonagall. 10It remains the work for which he is best known: his masterpiece, if you will. I am too kind to you and to his memory to reproduce the entire poem:

The Tay Bridge Disaster Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!Alas! I am very sorry to sayThat ninety lives have been taken awayOn the last Sabbath day of 1879,Which will be remember’d for a very long time.’Twas about seven o’clock at night,And the wind it blew with all its might,And the rain came pouring down,And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,And the Demon of the air seem’d to say–‘I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.’When the train left EdinburghThe passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,But Boreas blew a terrific gale,Which made their hearts for to quail,And many of the passengers with fear did say–‘I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay’So the train sped on with all its might,And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,And the passengers’ hearts felt light,Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,And wish them all a happy New Year.…

(Burma’s last monarch). Sadly, many believe this was one of many cruel hoaxes perpetrated on the unfortunate poet.I must now conclude my layBy telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,That your central girders would not have given way,At least many sensible men do say,Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,At least many sensible men confesses,For the stronger we our houses do build,The less chance we have of being killed.

Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse. His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it is the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it. It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.

I will not linger long on why it fails so spectacularly: it must surely be apparent to you. The metre of course is all over the place. Even if this were accentually written like a music hall turn, folk ballad or other non-syllabic rhythmic verse, there is no discernible pattern of three-stress, four-stress or five-stress rhythm at work. The poem is arbitrarily laid out in stanzas of five, six, six, five, six, eight, nine and thirteen lines which create no expectations to fulfil or withhold. This in part contributes to its overall narrative slackness.

We have lots of Tay rhymes: say, midway, dismay, lay, bray . There are night, might, sight and moonlight; known/blown, down/frown, gale/quail and build/killed .

There is, however, excruciating para-rhyme laid on for our pleasure. Edinburgh/felt no sorrow forces a rather American Edin-borrow pronunciation, or else surrer for sorrow. Buttresses/confesses will never be a happy pair, nor is the repeated seventy-nine / time assonance at all successful. If you are going to assonate, much better to do it within the verse, not on the last line of a stanza, as we saw with the Zephaniah poem.

The archaic expletives (metrical fillers) and inversions: ‘did say’ and ‘do build’ for ‘said’ and ‘build’ and ‘their hearts for to quail’ are not pleasant; ‘the wind it blew’ is a common enough formulation in ballads trying to get round the problem of the lack of a weak syllable between ‘wind’ and ‘blew’(‘the rain it raineth every day’ and so on), but cannot be considered a satisfactory phrase in a serious poem. Nor do such archaisms as ‘hove’ (for ‘came’) and ‘lay’ (for ‘song’) please the reader. It is, of course, the sheer banality that lives longest in the mind and most contributes to our sense of this being such a tour de farce . This banality mostly derives from McGonagall’s word choice (what is known as poetic diction ) and word choice is shown here to be most pitifully at the mercy of rhyme . It is not only the rhyming words themselves that are at fault, but the phrases and syntax used in order to reach those rhyme words. Not to mention the accidental and gruesome internal rhyme Sabbath day in line 4 of stanza 1. With his rhyming alone McGonagall has already sabotaged his poem. A perfectly fine piece might in other hands have been worked up from the full rhyme pairs he found, night / might et cetera, and from the perfectly laudable sentiments he expresses, but a committee comprising Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Frost, Auden and Larkin could do little with those unfortunate para-rhymes.