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

That last apothegm might be the motto of this book. John Dryden, in my estimation, was the absolute master of the heroic couplet; his use of it seems more natural, more assured, more fluid even than Pope’s:Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.For those whom God to ruin hath design’d,He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.Errors, like straw, upon the surface flow;He who would search for pearls must dive below.Beware the fury of a patient manBy education most have been misled;So they believe, because they so were bred.The priest continues what the nurse began,And thus the child imposes on the man.

But these were poets from a time when poems, like architecture and garden design, were formal, elegant and assured: this was the Age of Reason, of Certitude, Sense, Wit, Discernment, Judgement, Taste, Harmony–of ‘Capital Letter Moralists’ as T. E. Hulme called them. The voice and manner of these Augustans can sound altogether too de haut en bas for our ears, from lofty to lowly, as if delivered from Olympus.

Their taste and proportion is akin to that of the architecture of the period; by the time of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads their course seemed run, the profusion of nature and the agony of self seemed to become a more proper study of poets, just as the Gothic and picturesque began to entice the architects. Run your eye down the Index of First Lines in an edition of Pope and then of any Romantic poet and compare the number of entries in each which begin with the word ‘I’. The ‘egotistical sublime’ had landed. It would be a pity if, in our instinctive veneration for all things post-classical, Romantic, post-Romantic, Decadent, Modernist and Postmodernist we overlooked the virtues of late-seventeenth-and eighteenth-century verse. After all, most of us aspire to live in houses of that period, fill them with eclectic fittings and furniture from later eras as we may. The neoclassical harmony and elegance of construction remains our ideal for housing. I think it can be so with verse too. Naturally the discourse and diction, the detail and decor as it were, are of our age, but the rationality and harmony of the Augustans is not to be despised.

Keats did not abandon the form, but contributed to its development with a new freedom of run-ons and syntactical complexity. This extract from ‘Lamia’ shows how close to dramatic blank verse it becomes, the enjambments almost disguising the rhymes.Pale grew her immortality, for woeOf all these lovers, and she grieved soI took compassion on her, bade her steepHer hair in weïrd syrops that would keepHer loveliness invisible, yet freeTo wander as she loves, in liberty.

Robert Browning wrestled with the form even more violently. His much anthologised ‘My Last Duchess’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in heroic verse. It is ‘spoken’ by the Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, who is showing around his palace an ambassador who has come to make the arrangements for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn, as the monologue proceeds, that the Duke had his first wife killed on account of her displeasing over-friendliness. Pointing at her portrait on the wall, the Duke explains how polite, compliant and smiling she was, but to everyone :

She hadA heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad,Too easily impressed; she liked whate’erShe looked on, and her looks went everywhere.Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,The dropping of the daylight in the West,The bough of cherries some officious foolBroke in the orchard for her, the white muleShe rode with round the terrace–all and eachWould draw from her alike the approving speech,

In the Duke’s view it was ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift’.

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,Whene’er I passed her; but who passed withoutMuch the same smile? This grew: I gave commands;Then all smiles stopped together. There she standsAs if alive.

In other words, he had her killed. You can see how different this heavily run-on and paused verse is from the restrained fluency of Augustan heroic couplets. But why has Browning not chosen to write in blank verse , in the Shakespearean or Jacobean manner, we might wonder? I cannot, of course, second-guess Browning’s motives, but the effect is to counter the fluency of everyday speech with the formality of a rhymed structure, creating an ironic contrast between the urbane conversational manner, the psychotic darkness of the story and the elegant solidity of a noble form. The heroic verse is the frame out of which character can leap; it is itself the nobly proportioned, exquisitely tasteful palace in which ignobly misproportioned, foully tasteless deeds are done.

Wilfred Owen’s use of rhyming couplets in the hell of war provides another kind of ironic contrast. In the same way that the employment of ballad form for the dreary and mundane makes both a distinction and a connection, so the use of heroic couplets both contrasts and unites in Owen’s verse: the august and decorous form in such ghastly conditions is a sick joke, but the death agonies, mutilations and horrors of the soldiers’ lives are raised to heroic status by their incarnation in heroic couplets. Owen’s ‘A Terre: (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)’ uses Browning-style dramatic monologue in slant-rhymed couplets, casting Owen himself as the visitor to a field hospital where a ruined soldier lies and addresses him.Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.Both arms have mutinied against me,–brutes.My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.I tried to peg out soldierly,–no use!One dies of war like any old disease.This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.I have my medals?–Discs to make eyes close.My glorious ribbons?–Ripped from my own backIn scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)

Laurence Lerner, Thom Gunn and Tony Harrison have all written with distinction in heroic couplets, as did Seamus Heaney in ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ and his superb poem ‘The Outlaw’, which might be regarded as a kind of darkly ironic play on an eclogue or georgic –Virgilian verse celebrating and philosophically discoursing upon the virtues of agricultural life.

You may find yourself drawn to heroic verse, you may not. Whatever your views, I would recommend practising it: the form has compelling and enduring qualities. Move in: the structure is still sound and spacious enough to accommodate all your contemporary furniture and modern gadgets.

Poetry Exercise 13

Try a short dramatic monologue, à la Browning, in which a young man in police custody, clearly stoned off his head, tries to explain away the half-ounce of cannabis found on his person. Use the natural rhythms of speech, running-on through lines, pausing and running on again, but within rhymed iambic pentameter. You will be amazed what fun you can have with such a simple form. If you don’t like my scenario, choose another one, but do try and make it contemporary in tone.

V

The Ode

Sapphic–Pindaric–Horatian–lyric–anacreontic

Deriving from odein , the Greek for to chant, the ode is an open form of lyric verse made Public Monument. In English poetry it was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for ‘poem’.

Partly this is the due to the popularity of John Keats’s four great odes ‘To Autumn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which, together with the odes of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and the rest, turned the form in on itself. Poets today may choose to call their works odes, but rather than suggesting any formal implications this is likely to promise, in the shadow of Keats, a romantic reflection on such themes as nature, beauty, art, the soul and their relationship to the very making of a poem itself.