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

The name and character of the KYRIELLE derive from the Mass, whose wail of Kyrie eleison !–‘Lord, have mercy upon us’–is a familiar element. For those of us not brought up in Romish ways it is to be heard in the great requiems and other masses of the classical repertoire.

The final line of every stanza is the same, indeed rime en kyrielle is an alternative name for repeated lines in any style of poetry. Most examples of the kyrielle to be found in English are written, as mine is, in iambic tetrameter. As I have tried to demonstrate, quatrains of aabB and abaB or couplets of aA, aA are all equally acceptable. There is no set length. The Elizabethan songwriter and poet Thomas (‘Cherry Ripe’) Campion wrote a ‘Lenten Hymn’ very much in the spirit, as well as the letter, of the kyrielle:With broken heart and contrite sigh,A trembling sinner, Lord, I cry:Thy pard’ning grace is rich and free:O God, be merciful to me.I smite upon my troubled breast,With deep and conscious guilt opprest,Christ and His cross my only plea:O God, be merciful to me.

Incidentally, many kyrielles were written in 1666. Not just to apologise to God for being so sinful and tasteless as to perish in plague and fire, but because numbers were considered important and the Roman numerals in ‘ Lor Dha Ve Mer CIe Vpon Vs’ add up to 1666: this is called a CHRONOGRAM.

The kyrielle need not exhibit agonised apology and tortured pleas for mercy, however. The late Victorian John Payne managed to be a little less breast-beating in his ‘Kyrielle’ as well as demonstrating the scope for slight variation in the repeat:A lark in the mesh of the tangled vine,A bee that drowns in the flower-cup’s wine,A fly in sunshine,–such is the man.All things must end, as all began.A little pain, a little pleasure,A little heaping up of treasure;Then no more gazing upon the sun.All things must end that have begun.Where is the time for hope or doubt?A puff of the wind, and life is out;A turn of the wheel, and rest is won.All things must end that have begun.Golden morning and purple night,Life that fails with the failing light;Death is the only deathless one.All things must end that have begun

Well, haven’t we learned a lot! Bags of French forms beginning with ‘r’ that repeat their lines en kyrielle . To be honest, you could call them all rondeaux and only a pedant would pull you up on it. It is not too complicated a matter to invent your own form, a regular pattern of refrains is all it takes. You could call it a rondolina or rondismo or a boundelay or whatever you fancied. Destiny and a place in poetic history beckon.

Poetry Exercise 16

Your FIRST task is to write a less emetic triolet than mine for your true love, as sweet without being sickly as you can make it, your SECOND to compose a RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ on any subject you please.

VIII

Comic Verse

The cento–the limerick and the clerihew–reflections on comic verse, light verse and parody

C ENTO Wordsworth Comes Out My heart leaps up when I beholdThe pansy at my feet;Ingenuous, innocent and boldBeside a mossy seat.For oft when on my couch I lieUpon the growing boy,A little Cyclops with one eyeWill dwell with me–to heighten joy.

CENTOS are cannibalised verse, collage poems whose individual lines are made up of fragments of other poetry. Often each line will be from the same poet. The result is a kind of enforced self-parody. In mine above, all the lines are culled from different poems by Wordsworth. Ian Patterson has produced some corkers. Here are two, one from A. E. Housman, the other a cento stitched from Shakespeare sonnets. Just to emphasise the point: all the lines are genuine lines from the poet in question, panels torn from their own work to make a new quilt. First, his Housman Cento:The happy highways where I wentWarm with the blood of lads I knowHave willed more mischief than they durstA hundred years ago.Clay lies still, but blood’s a roverSafe through jostling markets borne;The nettle nods, the wind blows over,With hurts not mine to mourn.When you and I are spilt on air,What’s to show for all my pain?Duty, friendship, bravery o’er,And Ludlow fair again.

Extraordinary how much sense it seems to make. This is Patterson’s Shakespeare Cento:When in the chronicles of wasted timeThat thy unkindness lays upon my heart,Bearing the wanton burthen of the primeTo guard the lawful reasons on thy part,My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lieThe perfect ceremony of love’s rite,And scarcely greet me with that sun thine eyeTo change your day of youth to sullen night,Then in the number let me pass untoldSo that myself bring water for my stain,That poor retention could not so much holdKnowing thy heart torment me in disdain:O cunning love, with tears thou keep’st me blind,

Since I left you my eye is in my mind.

They are, I suppose, no more than a game, but one which can be surprisingly revealing. If nothing else, they provide a harmlessly productive way of getting to know a particular poet’s way with phrase and form. Centos that mix completely dissimilar poets’ lines are another harmless kind of comic invention.

T HE C LERIHEWELIZABETH BARRETTWas kept in a garret.Her father resented it bitterlyWhen Robert Browning took her to Italy.ALFRED, LORD TENNYSONPreferred Victoria Sponge to venison.His motto was ‘Regina semper floreat’And that’s how he became Poet Laureate.OSCAR WILDEHad his reputation defiled.When he was led from the dock in tearsHe said ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking

at two years.’D. H. LAWRENCEHeld flies in abhorrence.He once wrote a verse graffitoDeploring the humble mosquito.TED HUGHESHad a very short fuse.What prompted his wrathWas being asked about Sylvia Plath.

The CLERIHEW is named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, father of Nicolas, that peerless illustrator who always signed his work ‘Nicolas Bentley Drew the pictures’. The rules state that clerihews be non-metrically written in two couplets, the first of which is to be a proper name and nothing else. The best-known originals include:Christopher WrenSaid ‘I am going to dine with some men,‘If anyone callsSay I am designing St Paul’s.’Sir Humphrey DavyAbominated gravy.He lived in the odiumOf having discovered sodium.John Stuart Mill,By a mighty effort of will,Overcame his natural bonhomieAnd wrote ‘Principles of Economy’.

Metrical clumsiness is very much a desideratum; indeed, it is considered extremely bad form for a clerihew to scan. Properly done, they should tell some biographical truth, obvious or otherwise, about their subject, rather than be sheer nonsense. Sir Humphrey’s dislike of gravy, for example, may well be whimsical tosh, but he did discover sodium: I have tried to cleave to this requirement in my clerihews on the poets. Clerihews have therefore some utility as biographical mnemonics.

T HE L IMERICKThere was a middle-aged writer called FryWhose book on verse was a lie.For The Ode Less Travelled Soon unravelledTo reveal some serious errors in its scansion and rhy…

Unlike clerihews, LIMERICKS, as we discovered when considering their true metrical nature (we decided they were anapaestic, if you recall), do and must scan. I am sure you need to be told little else about them. The name is said to come from a boozy tavern chorus ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’. Although they are popularly associated with Edward Lear, anonymous verses in the ‘There was an old woman of…’ formulation pre-dated him by many years:A merry old man of Oporto,Had long had the gout in his fore-toe;And oft when he spokeTo relate a good joke,A terrible twinge cut it short-O.Said a very proud Farmer at Reigate,When the Squire rode up to his high gate