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

DRYDEN: ‘Epilogue to Oxford’And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,One truth is clear, ‘Whatever is, is right.’

POPE: An Essay on Man , Epistle 1And thus they formed a group that’s quite antique,Half naked, loving, natural, and Greek.

BYRON: Don Juan , Canto II, CXCIVNow fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sightAnd all the air a solemn stillness holds.

GRAY: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’And certain hopes are with me, that to theeThis labour will be welcome, honoured Friend!

WORDSWORTH: The Prelude , Book OneSt Agnes’ Eve–Ah, bitter chill it was!The owl for all his feathers was a-cold;

KEATS: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,The vapours weep their burthen to the ground

TENNYSON: ‘Tithonus’If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

WILFRED OWEN: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’When you are old and grey and full of sleepAnd nodding by the fire, take down this book

W. B. YEATS: ‘When You Are Old’And death is better, as the millions know,Than dandruff, night-starvation, or B.O.

W. H. AUDEN: ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, IIHe’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,

ROBERT FROST: ‘The Death of the Hired Man’Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drillsWe trekked and picked until the cans were full,

SEAMUS HEANEY: ‘Blackberry Picking’And praised his wife for every meal she made.And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.

SIMON ARMITAGE: ‘Poem’

Nearly seven hundred years of iambic pentameter represented there. Marking the beats is not a supremely challenging exercise, but remains a good way of becoming more familiar with the nature of the line and its five regular accents.

Having marked the couplets up, now GO BACK AND READ THEM, either out loud or to yourself. Simply relish them as if you were tasting wine.

Lines of iambic pentameter are, as I hope you will agree, capable of being formal, strongly accented, flowing, conversational, comic, descriptive, narrative, contemplative, declamatory and any combination of those and many other qualities. I deliberately chose pairs of lines, to show the metre flowing in more than just one line.

For all that the progression of beats is identical in each extract I hope you also saw that there are real differences of bounce and tempo, rise and fall, attack and cadence. Already it should be apparent that a very simple form, constructed from the most basic rules, is capable of strikingly different effects.

Armed with nothing more than the knowledge that an iambic pentameter is a line of five alternating weak-strong beats, it is time to attempt our own!

Poetry Exercise 2

What I want you to do in a moment is to put down this book, pick up your notepad and write out at least twenty lines of your own iambic pentameter. If you haven’t time, or you’re in an unsuitable place, then wait until the moment is right or go back and read the samples above again. I don’t want you to read any further until you’ve tried this exercise. Before we begin, here are the rules:

Write some SINGLE LINES and some PAIRS OF LINES.

For this exercise, do not use rhyme.

Write some lines, or pairs, that are conversational, some that are simple, some that are more complicated in construction, some that are descriptive, some that are silly, some that are grave.

Write with increasing speed: allow the rhythm and line length to become second nature. You will find yourself feeling ten syllables and five accents in an iambic line very quickly. You will hear the feet falling ahead of you to their final stressed syllable.

By all means revise and rewrite your lines but DO NOT polish or strive for any effect beyond the metrical.

This is an exercise : even if you already know about enjambment and feminine endings, or trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions avoid them. If you don’t know about them, don’t worry or be put off. You soon will.

Give yourself about thirty seconds a line. That’s ten minutes for twenty. No more. This is not about quality, it is about developing a feel for the metre and allowing it to become second nature.

Try to use a variety of word lengths: heed Alexander Pope’s warning against monosyllables:

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line 5

Avoid ‘wrenching’: a wrenched accent is a false stress applied to a word in order for it to fit the metre, thus:

He chose a word to force a wrenched accént

Write in contemporary English, avoiding archaic ‘poetical’ vocabulary, word order inversions, unnecessary (‘expletive’) filler words like ‘did’ and ‘so’ in tortured constructions of this kind:

The swain did stand ’midst yonder sward so green

Then heard I wide the vasty portals ope

I shall do the exercise myself now, adhering to all the conditions, just to give a vague idea of the kind of thing I’m expecting.

Tock- ticktock- ticktock- ticktock- ticktock- tick…

Right. This is what I have come up with.I wonder why the postman hasn’t come.I looked at eight, I’ll look again at nine.The curtains closed remind me of my death.You might induce excretion using figs.Don’t worry if the words don’t make no sense.You look at me, your looking turns me on.I haven’t time to take your call right now,So leave a message when you hear the tone.The mind of man can not contain itself.Some people eat like pigs and some like birds,Some eat like horses nosing in a trough.I write the line and feel the metre flow.There’s nothing you can say to ease my pain.You can’t explain the beauty of a desk–That rightness ink and paper seem to breathe.The needs of many far outweigh our own.Oh Christ, I hate the way you do your hair,Expect you feel the same about my tie.Your sharpness rips my paper heart in two.I’ve been and gone and done a stupid thing.

I hope that gives you the confidence to see that this exercise isn’t about quality, poetic vision or verbal mastery.

Your turn now. I’ll give you some blank space. It’s just in case you’ve come without a pad. Well, blow me, look at that line ‘it’s justin caseyou’ve comewith outa pad’–iambic pentameter gets into the system like a germ, as a seasoned Shakespearean actor will tell you.

By all means refer to the samples of iambic pentameter above: mine or those of the Masters…

It is time to make your metre…now.

How did you do? Did you get any feeling that, crude, elementary, nonsensical and bizarre as some of the lines you’ve written may be, they nonetheless hint at that thing we call poetry? That nothing more than the simplest use of the simplest metre suggested to you a way of expressing thoughts, stories, reflections, ideas and passions that ordinary speech or prose could never offer? Above all, that writing in strict metre doesn’t result in stiff, formal or old-fashioned English?

I would recommend doing that exercise whenever you can. It is like performing scales on your piano or sketching sugar bowls and wineglasses for practice. You just get better and better and better as the extraordinary possibilities of this most basic form begin to open up.

‘Nothing more than taking a line for a walk.’ That is how the artist Paul Klee described drawing. It can be much the same with poetry.

For the next few days, take lots of iambs for a walk and see where their feet lead you. With notebook in hand and a world of people, nature, thoughts, news and feelings to be compressed into iambic pentameter you are taking your first poetic steps.