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

stress The feeling that comes upon an author when he knows he must deliver a book to his publisher when it isn’t quite finished yet and there’s a glossary to be completed.

strophe The first part of a Pindaric Ode’s triad . What Jonson called the turn .

substitutions The use of an alien metric foot in a line of otherwise regular metrical pattern. Pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions are common in iambic verse, for example.

suspension of disbelief Term coined by Coleridge to describe a reader’s willingness to accept as true what clearly is not.

syllable, syllabic The basic sound unit of a word. Come on, you know perfectly well. Of poetry it refers to forms that are predicated on their syllabic count rather than any metric considerations. The haiku and the tanaga , for example.

syllepsis Kind of zeugma q.v. where a verb governs two unlikely nouns or phrases: as in ‘he left in a cab and a temper’, and Pope’s ‘Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade’.

synaeresis A gliding of two syllables into one: in the opening line of Paradise Lost ‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit’ d becomes the four-syllable ‘disobedyence’. Also called synaloepha .

synaloepha Look up at the preceding entry.

syncope The elision of a syllable from a word: ‘prob’ly’ for ‘probably’ etc.

synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole or vice versa: e.g. ‘England won the Ashes’ where ‘England’ means the English Cricket XI, ‘twenty hands’, where ‘hand’ stands for a crewman etc.

syzygy High score at Scrabble that means a pair of connected or corresponding things. Two hemistichs make a syzygy, you might say, or a plug and a socket together. In poetics also refers to multiple alliteration and consonance, as in the Ms in Tennyson’s ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable bees’ (from ‘The Princess’).

tanaga A syllabic Filipino verse form.

tanka A syllabic Japanese cinquain form of verse. The count is 5-7-5-7-7.

telestich An acrostic where it is the last letters that do the spelling out.

teleuton The terminating element of a line.

tercet A three-line stanza.

ternary A foot composed of three metrical elements. Anapaest, dactyl, amphimacer etc.

terza rima An open stanzaic form with interlocking cross-rhyming. Used by Dante for his Inferno .

tetractys Bizarre form of syllabic verse developed by Mr Stebbing.

tetrameter A four-stress line.

transferred epithet Illogical (often comic) use of image, transferring meaning from mood of person to object: ‘I lit a moody cigarette’, ‘sad elms’ etc.

triad, triadic The three-part structure of Pindaric Odes. Each triad consists of strophe, antistrophe and epode or turn, counter-turn and stand as Ben Jonson dubbed them. Originated as actual physical movements in Greek choric dances.

tribrach Ternary unit of three unstressed syllables. Forget it.

trimeter A three-stress line.

triolet A closed French form of some sweetness. Or perhaps it’s just the name. It rhymes ABaAbbAB where A and B are rentrements .

triple rhyme Tri-syllabic (usually dactylic) rhyme, merited/inherited, eternal/infernal, merrier/terrier etc.

triplet Three-line couplet, aaa , bbb etc. Augustan poets braced them in a curly bracket.

trochee A binary metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables:

.

trope Any rhetorical or poetic trick, device or figure of speech that changes the literal meaning of words. Metaphor and other common figures are tropes.

tumbling verse See Skeltonics.

turn Ben Jonson’s word for a strophe .

twiner Term used by Walter de la Mare to describe a kind of double limerick form.

ubi sunt Lit. ‘where are they?’ Poetic formula addressing something vanished: ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ (Keats, ‘Ode to Autumn’), ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan ? Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ (Ballade by François Villon).

vatic A poetic prophecy.

Venus and Adonis Stanza A six-line stanzaic form of iambic pentameter that takes its name from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis . It rhymes ababcc . Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ etc.

vers libre French for free verse.

vignette In poetry, a delicate but precise scene or description.

villanelle See section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

virgule In metrics, the mark used for foot division.

volta The ‘turn’ marking the change of mood or thought between the (Petrarchan) sonnet’s octave and sestet q.q.v.

Vorticism Word coined by Pound for British phalanx of the modernist movement. Most often used to refer to work (in paint and verse) of Wyndham Lewis. They had their own fanzine– Blast!. Rejection of sentimentality and verbal profusion.

waka Original Japanese verse from which haikai and haiku descended.

weak ending See feminine ending , but take no offence therefrom.

wrenched accent Sound and sense of words vitiated by the need for them to fit the metre.

wrenched rhyme A word forced out of its natural pronunciation by its need to rhyme.

wretched rhyme Bad rhyme.

wretched sinner Me.

zeugma Lit. ‘yoking’: ‘she wore a Chanel dress and an expression of disappointment’. Essentially the same as syllepsis q.v. The differences between them are trivial and undecided.

zymurgy Word that always tries to get into glossaries and dictionaries last but is often beaten by zythum , which, ironically perhaps, it helps create. Something to do with fermentation. More connected to Yeast than Yeats.

zythum Ancient Egyptian beer.

APPENDIX

Arnaut’s Algorithm

The line-ends of the first stanza (A, B, C, D, E and F) are chosen for the second and subsequent stanzas according to a ‘spiral’ algorithm illustrated in Figure 1. It can be seen that the position and relative order of the line ending alters in a complex manner from stanza to stanza.

Figure 1: The ‘spiral’ algorithm

Consider line-end A: it moves down one line for the second stanza and then down two lines for the third stanza, down one line again for the fourth stanza and so on. The algorithm can therefore be considered as the sequence of displacements from the starting position, namely, +1; +2; +1,–2; +3;–5. The last displacement returns the first line-end (A) from the last line of the last stanza to the starting position.

Defining the sequence of translations as a we see that:

How do the other line-ends behave after six iterations? Well, consider the situation after the first iteration; line-end A now occupies the position previously occupied by line-end B. Now carry out six iterations, namely +2; +1;–2; +3;–5 and finally the first of the next cycle: +1. This sequence also sums to zero, meaning that the line-end returns to where it was. In general therefore we can say for all line ends in the first stanza corresponding to the position of line-end A after interation m ;