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

After being scythed, threshed, pounded, malted and mashed, John Barleycorn (not a man of course, but a crop) ends his cycle in alcoholic form:Here’s Little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,And brandy in a glass!And Little Sir John in the nut-brown bowlProved the stronger man at last!For the huntsman he can't hunt the foxNor loudly blow his horn,And the tinker can’t mend kettles nor potsWithout John Barleycorn!

There are ballad operas (John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera being the best known), jazz ballads and pop ballads culminating in that revolting genre, the power ballad–but here we are leaking into popular music where the word has come to mean nothing much more than a slow love song, often (in the case of the American diva’s power ballad) repulsively vain and self-regarding, all the authentic guts, vibrancy, self-deprecation and lively good humour bleached out and replaced by the fraudulent intensity of grossly artificial climaxing. I acquit country music of these vices. American ballads, cowboy ballads, frontier ballads and so on, were extensively collected by the Lomax family, much in the same way that Cecil Sharpe had done for rural and border ballads and other native British genres of folk and community music. Shel Silverstein came up with the ever-popular ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for Johnny Cash, who also wrote and performed his own superb examples, I would especially recommend the ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ if you don’t already know it.

One of the great strengths of the ballad in its more literary incarnations is that its rousing folk and comic associations can be subverted or ironically countered. Its sense of being somehow traditional, communal and authorless contrasts with that individuality and strong authorial presence we expect from the modern poet, often so alone, angst-ridden and disconnected. Both John Betjeman and W. H. Auden used this contrast to their advantage. The strong ballad structure of Betjeman’s ‘Death in Leamington’ counters the grim, grey hopelessness of suburban lives with a characteristically mournful irony:She died in the upstairs bedroomBy the light of the evening starThat shone through the plate glass windowFrom over Leamington Spa.

[…]Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,At the grey, decaying face,As the calm of a Leamington eveningDrifted into the place.She moved the table of bottlesAway from the bed to the wall;And tiptoeing gently over the stairsTurned down the gas in the hall.

While Auden does much the same with the less genteel ‘Miss Gee’:Let me tell you a little storyAbout Miss Edith Gee;She lived in Clevedon TerraceAt Number 83.…She bicycled down to the doctor,And rang the surgery bell;‘O doctor, I’ve a pain inside me,And I don’t feel very well.’Doctor Thomas looked her over,And then he looked some more;Walked over to his wash-basin,Said, ‘Why didn’t you come before?’Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,Though his wife was waiting to ring,Rolling his bread into pellets;Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.’…They laid her on the table,The students began to laugh;And Mr Rose the surgeonHe cut Miss Gee in half.

Casting such lost lives as ballad heroes certainly provides an ironic contrast with which to mock the arid futility of much twentieth-century life. To use the rhythms of the greenwood and the yardarm for the cloying refinement of Leamington or the grimness of Miss Gee’s forlorn little world can indeed point up the chasm between the sterile present and the rich past, but such a mismatch also works in the opposite direction, it raises the lonely spinsters out of their ordinariness and connects them to the tradition and richness of history, it mythologises them, if you like. When an artist paints a prostitute in the manner of a Renaissance Madonna he is simultaneously marking an ironic distinction and forging an affirmative connection. The artists Gilbert and George have done much the same with their skinheads in stained-glass. These are strategies that only work because of the nature of form and genre.

Poetry Exercise 12

A poet can be rough and flexible with the ballad, it is the beat and the narrative drive that sustains. Your exercise is to finish the one that I started a few pages ago.Now gather round and let me tellThe tale of Danny Wise:And how his sweet wife AnnabelleDid suck out both his eyes.And if I tell the story trueAnd if I tell it clearThere’s not a mortal one of youWon’t shriek in mortal fear.

Don’t worry about metre or syllable-count–this is a ballad. I have used an a rhyme, by all means drop it from time to time, but do stick to the four-line structure. Enjoy yourself. One thing I can guarantee you: after you have written just one or two stanzas, you’ll be chanting ballad lines to yourself as you make coffee, nip to the loo, walk to the shops and brush your teeth. The ballad has a certain flow, a rhythmic swing and a beat; it makes no difference where you go, you’re sure to tap your feet–well, hush my mouth…

IV

Heroic Verse H EROIC V ERSEhas passed the test of time: Iambic feet in couplets linked by rhyme,Its non-stanzaic structure simply screamsFor well-developed tales and epic themes.The five-stress line can also neatly fitSardonic barbs and aphoristic wit.Augustan poets marshalled their iambsTo culminate in pithy epigrams.Pope, Alexander, with pontific skillCould bend the verse to his satiric will.

The mode continued in this lofty styleUntil–with manic laugh and mocking smile New modes emerged, a kind of fractured, mad Enjambment turned up. Pauses. Something had Gone wrong…or right? The stops and starts of human Speech burst through. Now, once formal lines assume an Unforced, casual air, but nonethelessObey the rigid rules of metre, stressAnd rhyming. Gradually another changeTakes place. New poets start to rearrangeThe form, unpick the close-knit weave, make room For looser threads of consonantal rhyme.The modern age with all its angst and doubt Arrives, picks up the tab and pays its debtTo history, precedent and every voiceThat did its bit to mould heroic verse.And still today we grudgingly affirmThere’s life in the old dog; our mangy formStill bites, still barks, still chases cats and birds,Still wags its tail, still pens and shepherds words,And, taken off her leash, this bitch on heatWill walk you off your pentametric feet.

HEROIC VERSE is far from dead. Since its Chaucerian beginnings it has been endlessly revivified: after a playful Elizabethan reshaping it acquired marmoreal elegance in the eighteenth century, only to undergo a complex reworking under John Keats, Robert Browning and Wilfred Owen until it emerged blinking into the light of modern day. At first glance it seems remarkably simple, too simple, perhaps, even to deserve the appellation ‘form’: it is as open as they come, neither laid out in regular stanzas, nor fixed by any scheme beyond the simple aabbccdd of the rhyming couplet. New paragraph presentation is possible either with line breaks or indentation as I have offered above, but in general the verse is presented in one unbroken block. Only the occasional braced triplet will relieve the procession of couplets. To the modern eye this can be forbidding; we like everything in our world to come in handy bite-sized chunks. Yet you might say that handy bite-sized chunks is what heroic verse is best remembered for: Pope’s Essays on Man and on Criticism are veritable vending machines of aphorism.A little learning is dangerous thing;Not to go back, is somehow to advance,And men must walk at least before they dance.Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is man.Hope springs eternal in the human breast.All are but parts of one stupendous whole.One truth is clear. Whatever is, is right.True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,