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

On that head. Should you use a rhyming dictionary? I must confess that I do, but only as a last resort. They can be frustrating and cumbersome, they can break concentration, they offer no help with assonance or consonance rhymes and are too crammed with irrelevant words like multicollinearity and cordwainer and eutectic (something to do with melting points apparently) or types of Malayan cheese and Albanian nose-flutes which are never going to be of the least use to one’s poetry. I prefer first simply to chant the sound to myself in the rhythm the word needs to fit. If that doesn’t bear fruit I will write all the letters of the alphabet at the top of a page and then go through the permutations one by one. It is easy enough to find monosyllabic masculine rhymes, they get harder to pop into your mind when you try to think of their compound versions, the various syllables that can precede the word. For boy , words like joy, toy, soy, cloy, coy, ploy slip into the mind quite quickly. Employ, deploy, alloy, annoy, destroy and enjoy might take a little longer. Decoy and convoy have just occurred to me (although they would need careful use as there is a little more stress on their first syllables) and now I am going to turn to the dictionary. Hm. I’ve missed buoy , but that’s a silly rich-rhyme (besides, it doesn’t rhyme for Americans, who pronounce it boo-ey ). McCoy is there (as in ‘the real’ I suppose), Hanoi, savoy and bok choi (strange to find two different types of cabbage). Envoy, c arboy, borzoi and viceroy are there, though I would argue that they are usually stressed on their first syllable. There are compounds of words we have already found: redeploy and overjoy . I’m very cross that I failed to find corduroy for myself and I would like to think that given enough time saveloy, hobbledehoy and hoi polloi might have come to me unaided. The assonance rhymes void, Lloyd, Freud, hoik, foil and so on are naturally not shown. By all means invest in a good rhyming dictionary, there are several available from the usual publishing houses and they are all much the same so far as I can tell. If it is musical lyrics you are thinking of then I would recommend Sammy Cahn’s The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary ; the lyricist who gave us ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’ is full of excellent and affable advice. There is no index, however, so it will take a bit of getting used to. There are also software rhyming dictionaries available either as stand-alone applications or as online resources. Personally I feel that a poet’s words are better mumbled out or scribbled on paper. Words have colour, feel, texture, density, shape, weight and personality, they are–I have said this before–all we have. Deeply dippy about most things digital I may be, but when it comes to poetry I want the words to have been uttered with my breath and shaped by my hand 12I am writing this now on my computer, but even the most frivolous sample lines of verse I have composed for you have been sketched on paper first. You may feel differently and no doubt some reader yet unborn who chances upon this book in an antiquarian bookshop of the future will marvel at such distinctions. I send you greetings from the grave: I do trust the sun hasn’t exploded yet and that The Archers is still running.

Poetry Exercise 10

Your task now is to discover as many rhymes as you can for the word girl (my rhyming dictionary offers twenty-four, many of which are absurd dialect words). As many syllables as you like, but obviously it is a masculine rhyme so the ‘url’ sound will terminate each word you find. When you’ve done that, you have to do the same for the feminine-rhyming martyr (the dictionary offers twenty-eight, many of which are again farcically weird). This is not Scrabble: proper nouns, place names, foreign words and informal language of any description all count. Ten for each would be an excellent score, but don’t worry if you can’t manage it. Facility and speed in the hunting down of rhyme-words is hardly a sign of poetic genius.

When you have finished, try this as the second part of your rhyming exercise. Take your notebook and wander about the house and garden, if you have one. If you are not reading this at home, then wander around your office, hospital ward, factory floor or prison cell. If you are outside or on a train, plane or bus, in a café, brothel or hotel lobby you can still do this. Simply note down as many things as you can see, hear or smell. They need not be nouns, you can jot down processes, actions, deeds. So, if you are in a café, you might write down: smoking, steam, raincoat, lover’s tiff, cappuccino machine, sipping, flapjacks, cinnamon, jazz music, spilt tea and so on–whatever strikes the eye, ear or nose. Write a list of at least twenty words. When you’ve done that, settle down and once more see how many rhymes you can come up with for each word. You may find that this simple exercise gets your poetic saliva glands so juiced up that the temptation to turn the words into poetry becomes irresistible. Yield to it. A random, accidental and arbitrary consonance of word sounds can bring inspiration where no amount of pacing, pencil chewing and looking out of the window can help.

Rhyme Categories

1. Masculine rhyme– box/frocks, spite/tonight, weird/beard, amaze/delays

2. Feminine rhyme– breathing/seething, relation/nation, waiter/equator

3. Triple rhyme– merrily/verily, merited/inherited, drastically/ fantastically

4. Slant-rhyme:

Assonance– pit/kiss, mean/dream, stub/rug, slack/shag, hop/dot

Partial consonance– coils/gulls, wild/fold, mask/tusk, stump/ramp

Full consonance– coils/cools, wild/weld, mask/musk, stump/stamp

Eye-rhyme– fool/wool, want/pant, heard/beard, mould/could, rove/love

Rich-rhyme–red rose /he rose , single file /nail file, nose/knows, eye/I

R HYMING C OUPLETSKnow then thyself, presume not God to scan ;The proper study of mankind is Man .ALEXANDER POPE: An Essay on Man

RHYMING TRIPLETSWhat Flocks of Critiques hover here today ,As vultures wait on Armies for their Prey ,All gaping for the carcass of a Play !JOHN DRYDEN: Prologue to All for Love

CROSS-RHYMEThe boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled ;The flame that lit the battle’s wreck Shone round him o’er the dead .FELICIA HEMANS: ‘Casabianca’

ENVELOPE RHYMEMuch have I travell’d in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ;Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold .JOHN KEATS: ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

CHAPTER THREE

Form

I

The Stanza

So we can write metrically, in iambs and anapaests, trochees and dactyls. We can choose the length of our measure: hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter. We can write accentually, in three-stress and four-stress lines. We can alliterate and we can rhyme, but thus far our verse has merely been stichic , presented in a sequence of lines. Where those lines terminate is determined, as we know, by the measure or, in the case of syllabic verse, by the syllable count. Prose, such as you are reading now, is laid out (or lineated ) differently–as I write this I have no reason to start a new line (to ‘press the return key’) until it is time for a new paragraph or a quotation and you certainly won’t