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

Hmmm…bit lame. Rhymes for guns might come in handy. Buns, runs, sons, Huns (shame the enemy are Ruskies), stuns, shuns ? Hm, come back to that later. Six hundred and seventy three is simply too long: a whole three-beat line used up.Six hundred and seventy-threeCharging to victory!

Only it isn’t a victory–it is a terrible defeat.Six hundred and seventy-threeCharging for Queen and Country!Oh what a wonder to see,Marvellous gallantrySix hundred and seventy-three!

This is dreadful . Six hundred and seventy-three sounds too perky and too literal at the same time. Should we round it up or down? Six hundred or seven hundred? Hundred doesn’t rhyme with much though–oh, hang on, there are some good slant-rhymes here: thundered, sundered, blundered, wondered, onward .Onward, Light Brigade, OnwardOnward you splendid six-hundred.‘There are the guns to raid,Charge them,’ brave Nolan said.On rode the Light Brigade,Not knowing that Nolan had blundered!

It is getting there. The accidental consonance/assonance of knowing/Nolan is inelegant. But a bit of a polish and who knows?

Your turn now. See if you can come up with some phrases with that metre and those rhyme words, or ones close to them.

Well, as you probably know, Tennyson did not retire from his laureateship and this is what he came up with to mark the calamity.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

‘Charge for the guns!’ he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldier knew

Someone had blunder’d:

Their’s not to make reply,

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made,

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

Naturally, I cannot tell how Tennyson embarked upon the preparation and composition of his poem. Quite possibly he charged (as it were) straight in. Maybe the rhythm and some of the phrasing came to him in the bath or while walking. It is possible that he made notes not unlike those we’ve just made or that the work emerged whole in one immediate and perfect Mozartian stream. We shall never know. What we can agree upon I hope, is that the rhyming is perfect. Shell/hell, brigade/made/dismayed and the wondered/blundered, thundered/sundered, hundred/onward group work together superbly. A small nucleus of rhyming words like this throughout one poem can set up a pattern of expectation in the listener’s or reader’s ear. ‘Thundered’ is close to onomatopoeic , it seems somehow more than just descriptive of thunder, it actually seems to mimic it–and those thunderous qualities are in turn passed on to its rhyme-partners, lending a power and force to wondered and hundred that they would not otherwise possess. The rhyming , quite as much as the rhythm, helps generate all the pity, pride and excitement for which the poem is renowned.

We do know that in writing this Tennyson created a rod for the back of all subsequent British Poets Laureate who have struggled in vain to come up with anything that so perfectly captures an important moment in the nation’s history. It was perhaps the last great Public Poem written in England, the verse equivalent of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

It is a hoary old warhorse to our ears now I suppose, as much as a result of social change as literary. Most modern readers, academic, poetic or amateur, would probably feel that Hopkins and Hardy engage our sensibilities more directly than Tennyson, in the same way that–for all their technical mastery–we are less moved by the painters of the mid-Victorian period than by the later impressionists and post-impressionists. Nonetheless, there is always much to be learned from virtuosity and I disbelieve any poet who does not confess that he would give even unto half his wealth to have come up with ‘Their’s not to reason why, Their’s but to do and die’. We should recognise that Tennyson’s is a poem written for the nation while the Hopkins and Hardy are essentially inward looking. Indeed, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland ’ is much more an autobiographical contemplation of the poet’s religious development than a commemoration of a shipwreck.

Whatever our feelings we can surely acknowledge that Tennyson’s versifying is magnificent. It is pleasingly typical, at all events, that this, the best-known poem we have on a military theme, memorialises failure. There are no stirring odes celebrating Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar or the Battle of Britain in our popular anthologies. No English verse equivalent of the 1812 Overture for us to cheer at and weep over. Earlier on the morning of that same October day in 1854, on the same Crimean battlefield, the Heavy Brigade had fought a supremely successful battle during which more men died than in the later disaster, they were just as gallant but their heroism goes unremembered. 11Misfortune, failure and incompetence remain our great themes. It is probable that without the poem the Light Brigade’s futile charge would have vanished into history. Among the many books on the subject there are works whose titles and subtitles include: ‘Honour the Charge they Made’, ‘Noble Six Hundred’, ‘Do or Die’, ‘Into the Valley of Death’, ‘The Reason Why’, ‘The Real Reason Why’ and ‘Someone Had Blundered’. Not many poems that I can think of can have so completely caught the public attention or for ever defined our understanding of an historical event. Anyway, I hope I have convinced you that in great part, it is the rhyming that has contributed to this immortality. Tennyson’s discovery of the hundred/blundered wondered/thundered group is the heart of the poem, its engine.

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail. I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming. Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words. It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting ‘ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace…’ when surely a proper poet should be thinking high, pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus. Well, yes. But a rhyme is a rhyme and won’t come unless searched for. Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme. To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas. It is one of the things we do .

Rhyming Practice Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things. GERTRUDE STEIN