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

May with their wholesome and preventative shears

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Clip your phylacteries, 18though baulk your ears,

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And succor our just fears,

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When they shall read this clearly in your charge:

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New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.

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Those last two words, of course, writ large , have entered the language.

In the nineteenth century the poet and novelist George Meredith developed a form of sixteen line sonnet with four sets of envelope rhymes abba cddc effe ghhg .

There are traditions in the writing of SONNET SEQUENCES, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-four Sonnets from the Portuguese and Meredith’s sequence ‘Modern Love’ (in his own Meredithian sixteen-line form). Christina Rossetti’s Monna Innominata , being a sequence of fourteen sonnets, is known as a SONNET OF SONNETS. More complex sequences exist, such as one of indeterminate length in which each new sonnet opens with the last line of the previous until you reach the final sonnet which terminates with the opening line of the first. This is called a

CORONA SEQUENCE. John Donne wrote such a sequence in seven sonnets, called ‘La Corona’. More complex variations on that include the SONNET REDOUBLÉ, a corona sequence of fourteen sonnets terminating with a fifteenth which is wholly composed of each linking line of the corona in sequence. If there is no good reason for such complexity it will look like showing off, I feel. Donne’s corona had a purposeful religious structure, to make a crown of poetry to match Christ’s crown of thorns.

There are two very well-known examples of SONNET COMPETITIONS which reveal, among other things, the form’s special place in poetry. The ability to write them fluently was, and to some extent still is, considered the true mark of the poet.

On the evening of 30 December 1816, John Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’. Legend has it that they each took just fifteen minutes to write the following. I shall not tell you straight away who wrote which. All I ask is that you decide which you prefer:1Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,Catching your heart up at the feel of June,Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;And you, warm little housekeeper, who classWith those who think the candles come too soon,Loving the fire, and with your trick some tuneNick the glad silent moments as they pass;Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belongOne to the fields, the other to the hearth,Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strongAt your clear hearts; and both were sent on earthTo sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:Indoors and out, summer and winter,–Mirth.2The poetry of earth is never dead:When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,And hide in cooling trees, a voice will runFrom hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;That is the Grasshopper’s–he takes the leadIn summer luxury,–he has never doneWith his delights; for when tired out with funHe rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.The poetry of earth is ceasing never:On a lone winter evening, when the frostHas wrought a silence, from the stove there shrillsThe Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Our second two sonnets share the subject of an inscription on the great statue of Rameses II (Greek name Ozymandias): one is by Percy Byssche Shelley and the other by his friend Horace Smith. Shelley’s is more than a little well known, but which ‘Ozymandias’ do you like best?1I met a traveller from an antique land,Who said–‘two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert…near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal these words appear:“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.’2In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throwsThe only shadow that the Desert knows:–‘I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone,‘The King of Kings; this mighty City showsThe wonders of my hand.’–The City’s gone,–Naught but the Leg remaining to discloseThe site of this forgotten Babylon.We wonder,–and some Hunter may expressWonder like ours, when thro’ the wildernessWhere London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guessWhat powerful but unrecorded raceOnce dwelt in that annihilated place.

Of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’ pair, the first is by Leigh Hunt and the second by Keats. In a recent Internet poll (for what it is worth) seventy-five per cent preferred the Leigh Hunt and only a quarter went for the Keats. As a matter of fact Keats would have agreed with them; he thought Leigh Hunt’s clearly the superior poem. One the other hand, ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’ is one of the finest opening lines imaginable. If you have read Keats before, ‘one in drowsiness half lost’ would be a dead giveaway as to authorship. Leigh Hunt’s sonnet scores, we feel, as a whole poem; even if it doesn’t contain such moments of perfect music, the progression of ideas (which is so much of what a sonnet is there to exhibit) seems clearer and more satisfactory. They are both Petrarchan, and both have clear voltas at the beginning of their ninth lines. The Leigh Hunt sestet rhymes cdcdcd , while Keats sticks to the more traditional cdecde .

Of the next pair, Shelley’s is the first, Smith’s second, as I’m sure you guessed even if you didn’t already know. They were both published in The Examiner in 1818 and are both entitled ‘Ozymandias’. They each, as you can see, tell the same story–the opening descriptions being, in their basic outlines, identical. There all similarity ends. There is something dreadfully comic about ‘In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,/Stands a gigantic Leg…’. If Shelley’s sonnet outlasts even the ancient monument it commemorates, Smith’s will be fortunate to endure as a curiosity. His is not a terrible poem, but immensely ordinary by comparison. Perhaps you disagree? Shelley and Smith, as you may have noticed if you have been a good and attentive girl or a boy, have both dreamt up their own rhyme schemes.

Whether you choose to write Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets in blank, full or slant-rhyme, or adapt or reinvent as many poets have, the form is there for you to explore. I find it hard to imagine anyone calling themselves a poet who has not at least experimented with the sonnet and, like Wordsworth, found–In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be boundWithin the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

So now it is your turn.

Poetry Exercise 19

Write a Petrarchan Sonnet on Electoral Apathy . Use the octave to complain about how lazy and uninterested voters are and then, at the volta, decide that apathy is probably the best response.

Now write a Shakespearean Sonnet on exactly the same subject. Use the first four lines for a description of apathy, the second four for a complaint against it, the third for an admission of your own apathy and then, in the final couplet express the concluding thought that, what the hell, it makes no difference anyway.