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

PARONOMASIA is a grand word for ‘pun’: Thomas Hood, whose rich rhyme effusion you have read, was famous for these: ‘He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell,’ that kind of thing.

Keats slips most of the name of his hero into a line in the poem Endymion: this is known as a PARAGRAM:

…IWill trace the story of Endymion.The v ery mus ic of the name has gone

There are those who loathe puns, anagrams and wordplay of any description. They regard practitioners as trivial, posey, feeble, nerdy and facetious. As one such practitioner, I do understand the objections. Archness, cuteness, pedantry and showoffiness do constitute dangers. However, as a non-singing, non-games-playing, -dancing, -painting, -diving, -running, -catching, -kicking, -riding, -skating, -skiing, -sailing, -climbing, -caving, -swimming, -free-falling, -cycling, -canoeing, -jumping, -bouncing, -boxing sort of person, words are all I have. As the old cliché has it, they are my friends . I like to say them, weigh them, poke them, tease them, chant their sound, gaze at their shape and savour their juiciness, and, yes, play with them. Some words are made up of the same letters as others, some can fit inside others, some can be said the same backwards as frontwards, some rhyme outrageously, some seem unique and peculiar like yacht and quirk and frump and canoodle . I take pleasure in their oddities and pleasures and contradictions. It amuses me that a cowboy is a boy who rounds up cows, but a carboy is a flagon of acid, that conifer is an anagram of fir cone and esoteric of coteries , that gold has a hundred rhymes but silver has none. 20It saddens me that the French talk of the jouissance of language, its joyousness, juiciness, ecstasy and bliss, but that we of all peoples, with English as our mother tongue, do not. Such frolicsome larkiness may put you off, but if you wish to make poems it seems to me necessary that some part of your verse, however small, will register the sensuousness, oddity and pleasure of words themselves, as words, regardless of their semantic and communicatory duties. Not all paintings draw attention to their brushwork–art can, of course, as validly make transparent its process as exhibit its presence–but each tradition has value and none represents the only true aesthetic.

In fact, I shall start the final chapter with an exploration of the idea that there are no limits to the depth of commitment to language that a poet can have. Not before you have completed…

Poetry Exercise 20

Write one PATTERN POEM in the shape of a cross, and another in the shape of a big capital ‘I’ (for ego) (obviously it should be a Roman I with serifs, otherwise it would just be a block of verse). Make the words relevant to their shape. When you have finished that, write a rhyming ACROSTIC VERSE spelling either your surname or forename.

CHAPTER FOUR

Diction and Poetics Today

I

How I learned to love poetry–two stories–diction

The Whale, the Cat and Madeline

I was fortunate in my own introduction to poetry. My mother had, and still has, a mind packed with lines of verse. She could recite, like many of her generation but with more perfect recall than most, all the usual nursery rhymes along with most of A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Struwwelpeter , Eleanor Farjeon and other hardy annuals from the garden of English verse. This standard childhood repertoire somehow slid, without me noticing and without any didactic literary purpose, into bedtime recitations, readings or merry snatches of Belloc, Chesterton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. Then one birthday a godfather gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury . This solid, Empire-made anthology (published in 1861, the same year as Mrs Beeton’s Household Management and regarded by some as its verse equivalent) had been updated by the then Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, and included works by Betjeman, Auden and Laurie Lee, but its greatest emphasis was still on the lyrical and the romantic. That year I won the first and only school prize of my life, an edition of the Collected Poems of John Keats. In this I found a line, just one line, that finished the job my mother started and made me for ever a true slave to poetry. I will come to it in a minute, but first, a story about Keats himself and then an instance of poetry in motion.

T HE W HALE

When Keats was a teenager (so the story goes), he came across a line from Spenser’s Faerie Queen . Not even a line, actually: a phrase:…the sea-shouldering whale.

Some versions of the story maintain that Keats burst into tears when he read this. He had never known before what poetic language could do . He had no idea it was capable of making images spring so completely to life. In an instant he was able to see, hear and feel the roar, the plunging, the spray, the great mass and slow colossal upheaving energy of a whale, all from two words yoked together: ‘sea’ and ‘shouldering’. From that moment on Keats got poetry. He began to understand the power that words could convey and the metaphorical daring with which a poet could treat them. We might say now that it was as if he had grasped their atomic nature, how with the right manipulation, and in the right combinations, words can release unimaginable energy. If not nuclear physics, then perhaps a living magick , whose verbal incantations conjure and summon a live thing out of thin air. Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream put it this way:And, as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.

For Keats the grand plan of The Faerie Queen , its narrative, its religious, metaphysical, political and philosophical allegory and high epic seriousness dwindled to nothing in comparison with the poetic act as realised in two words. He ‘would dwell in ecstasy’ on the phrase, his friend Charles Cowden Clarke wrote later. This may sound rather extreme–there goes another typically high-strung nancy-boy poet in a loose neckcloth, swooning at a phrase–but I think the story goes to the heart of poetry’s fundamental nature. I am sure there must have been moments like this for painters struck, not by the composition and grand themes of a masterpiece, but by one brush stroke, one extraordinary solution to the problem of transmitting truth by applying pigment to canvas. Poetry is constructed by the conjoining of words, one next to the other. Not every instance of poetic language will yield so rich an epiphany as Spenser’s did for Keats–there are muddy backgrounds in poems as in paintings–and poetry can never hope to rival the essay, the novel or a philosophical treatise when it comes to imparting thought, story and abstract truths, but it can make words live in a most particular way, it can achieve things like ‘the sea-shouldering whale’. You may not think it the finest poetic phrase ever wrought, but it unlocked poetry for the young Keats. Most of us have an inexplicably best-loved film or book that opened our eyes to the power of cinema and literature, and these favourites may not necessarily be part of the canon of Great Cinema or Great Literature, they just happened to be the ones that were there when we were ready for them. First Love comes when it comes and often we are hard put to explain later just why such and such a person was the object of our ardent youthful adoration when photographs now reveal just how plain they really were.