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

As it happens Gerard Manley Hopkins had already composed another ‘disaster poem’, his ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland ’ exactly four years earlier: it was written to commemorate the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who lost their lives at sea in 1875.Into the snows she sweeps,Hurling the haven behind,The Deutschland , on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,For the infinite air is unkind,And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blowSitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snowSpins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

That splendid last line has spawned the popular kenning ‘widowmaker’ to describe the sea, and latterly by extension vessels of the deep, as in the Hollywood movie K-19: The Widowmaker. Wiry and white-fiery works well as internal rhyme, together with all the usual head rhymes, assonances and consonances we expect from Hopkins. Otherwise he uses the fairly neutral and simple sweeps/keeps/deeps, blow/snow and behind/kind . He nestles the eye-rhyme wind into the quarter wiry white alliteration and it doesn’t stand out as too ugly. Mind you, there is some less than comfortable rhyming elsewhere in the poem. Stanza 15 contains this unfortunate internal rhyme:And frightful the nightfall folded rueful a day

Frightful indeed–to our ears at least: but perhaps ‘frightful’ was not such a trivial word in 1875. Some three and a half decades later the loss of the Titanic inspired Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’:

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later destiny,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Says ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

While I yield to none in my admiration of Hardy, I do not believe this to be his finest work. The characteristic obsession with ‘the Spinner of the Years’ (‘The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything’ he calls it in an earlier alexandrine in the same poem, or ‘the President of the Immortals’ in his deathless phrase from Tess of the D’Urbervilles ) gives the whole an appropriate sense of imminent, inexorable doom, which is of course its very subject as we know from the title. But ‘they were bent/By paths coincident’ is not very happy, nor is ‘being anon twin halves of one august event’. ‘August’ seems an almost comically inappropriate word for such a tragedy and ‘anon’ smells very dated in a poem written just two years before T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and indeed in the very same year that Ezra Pound and others were founding the Imagist movement. All in all it is a surprisingly flawed poem from so fine a poet and it is partly the rhyming that makes it so. In stanza VIII the word hue is manifestly used only to go with grew . The image of the iceberg ‘growing’ was so important to the central idea of the poem that Hardy could not resist the rhyme. But what was so special about the hue of the Titanic ? Its red funnel? You could argue I suppose that in such a monochrome world as the North Atlantic anything man-made would seem colourful, but really it is clear that the word is a dud, chosen primarily for its rhyme. Also unattractively primitive is the internal rhyme in the alexandrine ‘In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too ’. In the following stanza the slight wrenching of ‘destiny’ can hardly be counted a wonderful success either. Infelicitous rhyming triplets in stanzas omitted here include meant/opulent/indifferent and sea/vanity/she . Nonetheless it is clearly a whole continent better as verse than poor old McGonagall’s effort. There is effortless metrical consistency, there is a scheme : three-line stanzas (rhyming triplets) the last of which is an alexandrine. The two shorter trimetric lines atop each hexameter look a little like a ship on a wide sea with the roman numeral stanza numbers forming the funnel. That may sound fanciful, but if you squint through half-closed eyes at that last stanza I’m sure you will see what I mean. For all its less than technically superior rhyming (and therefore word choices or diction ) it is at least memorable, grave and thoroughly thought through.

Now for the second disaster poem that you, the Victorian poet, must write: the year is 1854 and you are Britain’s Poet Laureate. Alfred, Lord Tennyson has just unexpectedly resigned the post so it is now your patriotic duty to write a poem about a disastrous British cavalry charge that has just taken place on the peninsula that lies between the Ukraine and the Black Sea. Due to some monstrous error, an officer, Captain Nolan, had galloped down from the Causeway Heights above the Balaclava plain pointing with his sabre at the Russian battery in the valley below, yelling ‘There are your guns, charge them!’ or words to that effect, according at least to the report by W. H. Russell in The Times that you, along with the rest of the nation have just read with avid horror. Those were not in fact the guns that Lord Cardigan, his commanding officer, had meant at all, the whole thing has been a catastrophic cock-up from start to finish. A cock-up but a gallant one: Disraeli has just told a packed and stunned House of Commons that it was ‘a feat of chivalry, fiery with consummate courage, and bright with flashing courage’. Of the 673 mounted officers and men of the 13th Light Dragoons, 17th Lancers and 11th Hussars–a cavalry troop collectively known as the Light Brigade–157 have lost their lives. Nothing was achieved. A military disaster as traumatic and tragic for the nation as the collapse of the Tay Bridge was to be in twenty-five years’ time.

Your mission, then, is to write up the debacle into a poem that will tell the story, sum up the public mood and stand as a worthy memorial to the brave dead.

What do you do? What sort of preparatory scribbles do you make in your poet’s notebook?

As for metre, short lines, you decide. Falling rhythms of dactyls and trochees would be a good choice, echoing the fierceness and rush of the action and suggesting the cadences of a bugle sounding the charge: Tum-da-da, tum-da-da, tum-da-da dum-da! Tum-dada, tum-da-da, tum-da-da dum! That sort of effect. But as for rhymes …

Hussar is a bummer, only para-rhymes seem to fit: bizarre, beaux arts, faux pas, disbar, ajar, papa and hurrah might do at a pinch, but they hardly promise suitably solemn material; besides, the plural Hussars excludes at least half of them. Lancers is OK: dancers, prancers, answers –some suggestive possibilities there. Dragoons is if anything worse than Hussars: lagoons seems to be the only proper rhyme, the slant-rhyme racoon is unlikely to come in handy, nor are jejune, cartoon and baboon , one feels. Brigade is better, much better. Made, invade, fade, raid, dismayed, laid , all words that might offer some connection with the subject matter. Russian ? There’s Prussian which is of no relevance, otherwise there are only bad para-rhymes available, hushin’, cushion, pushin’ . Horses gives the rather obvious forces and courses , while steeds offers deeds …Off on their galloping steedsPraise for their marvellous deeds…