The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

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.

II

End-stopping–enjambment–caesura–weak endings–trochaic and pyrrhic substitutions

End-stopping, Enjambment and Caesura

In our first exercise we looked at existing fragments of iambic pentameter:The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.

And we had a go at producing our own:I haven’t time to take your call right now,So leave a message when you hear the tone.

In both examples each line contains a single thought that finishes with the line. This is called end-stopping, which we could mark like this.The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.I haven’t time to take your call right now.

The iambic pentameter would be a dull dog indeed if that were all it could do.

I have already included (in Poetry Exercise 1) a couplet from Wilfred Owen where the meaning doesn’t stop with the line, but RUNS ON through to the next:If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

No end-stopping there. The term used to describe such a running on is enjambment, from the French enjamber to stride, literally to get one’s leg over…His mother was a learned lady, famed For every branch of every science known.BYRON: Don Juan, Canto I, XSo threatened he, but Satan to no threats Gave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:MILTON: Paradise Lost, Book IV

Look closely at those two examples above. Not only do they feature these run-ons or enjambments, which allow a sense of continual flow, they also contain pauses which break up that flow; in the examples above it happens that these pauses are expressed by commas that serve the office of a breath, or change of gear: I shall render them like this ¶.His mother was a learned lady ¶ famed For every branch of every science known.So threatened he ¶ but Satan to no threats Gave heed ¶ but waxing more in rage replied:

The name for such a pause or break is a caesura⁶ (from the Latin caedere, caesum, to cut.⁷ You’d pronounce it as in ‘he says YOU’RE a fool’).

Caesuras don’t by any means have to lead on to an enjambment as in the two examples above, however. You can have a caesura in an end-stopped line.The woods decay ¶ the woods decay and fall.St Agnes’ Eve ¶ Ah, bitter chill it was!.And, spite of Pride ¶ in erring Reason’s spite.One truth is clear ¶‘Whatever is, is right.’

Not every comma will signal a caesura, by the way. In Poetry Exercise 1 I included this pair of lines from Paradise Lost:Their wand’ring course, now high, now low, then hidProgressive, retrograde, or standing still.

Only the first comma of the first line is a caesura.Their wand’ring course ¶ now high, now low, then hid.Progressive, retrograde, or standing still.

Commas in lists (serial commas and Oxford commas as grammarians would call them–a now archaic usage of commas, placing them before conjunctions like ‘and’, ‘with’ and ‘or’) do not usually herald a caesura; though some readers might argue that the second comma of the second line above could betoken the small pause or breath that defines a caesura.

How can a scrutiny of such minuscule nuances possibly help you in your writing of poetry? Well, you wait until Exercise 3: I confidently predict that you will astonish yourself.

The fact is, enjambment and caesura, these two–what shall we call them? techniques, effects, tricks, devices, tools?–however we describe them, are crucial liberators of the iambic line. They either extend or break the flow, allowing the rhythms and hesitations of human breath, thought and speech to enliven and enrich the verse. They are absolutely not a failure to obey the rules of pentameter. Let’s look at the Byron and the Milton again:His mother was a learned lady, famedFor every branch of every science known.So threatened he, but Satan to no threatsGave heed, but waxing more in rage replied:

You might be tempted to believe that for the sake of sense the lines should be written thus:His mother was a learned lady,Famed for every branch of every science known.So threatened he,But Satan to no threats gave heed,But waxing more in rage replied:

And Wilfred Owen’s two lines could become: If you could hear, at every jolt,The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

This arrangement would enable us to end-stop in our heads or out loud as we read the verse. Surely that’s a better way of organising things? That is the sense after all, so why not therefore break the lines accordingly? This is the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

NO, DAMN YOU, NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!

THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE VERSE IS NOT THE