The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Forgetting caesuras and enjambments this time, have a look at the three lines as an example of iambic pentameter. Get that pencil out and try marking each accented and unaccented syllable.

Eleven syllables! There’s a rogue extra syllable at the end of line 1, isn’t there? An unstressed orphan bringing up the rear. The line scans like this:

There is more: the next line doesn’t start with an iamb at all! Unless the actor playing Macbeth says ‘vaulting ambition’ the line goes…

The mighty Shakespeare deviating from metre? He is starting an iambic line with a tum-ti, a trochee.

Actually, in both cases he is employing two variations that are so common and necessary to lively iambic verse that they are not unusual enough even to call deviations.

We will attend to that opening trochaic foot in a moment. Let us first examine this orphan or ‘rogue’ unaccented syllable at the end of the line. It makes the line eleven syllables long or hendecasyllabic.

It results in what is called a weak or feminine ending (I hope my female readers won’t be offended by this. Blame the French, we inherited the term from them. I shall try not to use it often). Think of the most famous iambic pentameter of all:

To be or not to be that is the question

Count the syllables and mark the accents. It does the same thing (‘question’ by the way is disyllabic, two syllables, any actor who said quest-i- on would be laughed off the stage and out of Equity. It is certainly kwestchn¹¹ ).¹¹

If you think about it, the very nature of the iamb means that if this additional trick were disallowed to the poet then all iambic verse would have to terminate in a stressed syllable, a masculine ending…If winter comes can spring be far behind?

…would be possible, butA thing of beauty is a joy for ev(er)

…would not. Keats would have had to find a monosyllabic word meaning ‘ever’ and he would have ended up with something that sounded Scottish, archaic, fey or precious even in his own day (the early nineteenth century).A thing of beauty is a joy for ay.

Words like ‘excitement’, ‘little’, ‘hoping’, ‘question’, ‘idle’, ‘widest’ or ‘wonder’ could never be used to close an iambic line. That would be a ridiculous restriction in English. How absurdly limiting not to be able to end with an -ing, or an -er or a -ly or a -tion or any of the myriad weak endings that naturally occur in our language.

BUT THERE IS MORE TO IT THAN THAT. A huge element of all art is constructed in the form of question and answer. The word for this is dialectic. In music we are very familiar with this call-and-response structure. The opening figure of Beethoven’s Fifth is a famous example:Da-da-da-DahDa-da-da-Derr

Beethoven actually went so far as to write the following in the score of the Finale of his String Quartet in F major:Muss es sein? Must it be?Es muss sein! It must be!

In poetry this is a familiar structure:Q: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?A: Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

It is common in rhetoric too.Ask not what your country can do for youBut what you can do for your country.

This is a deep, instinctive property of so much human communication. In the Greek drama and dance it was called strophe and antistrophe, in the liturgy of the Church it is known as versicle and response.

One might suggest that this is something to do with the in-and-out pumping of the heart itself (systole and diastole) and the very breath of life (inhalation and exhalation). Yin and yang and other binary oppositions in thought and the natural world come to mind. We also reason dialectically, from problem to solution, from proposition to conclusion, from if to then. It is the copulation of utterance: the means by which thought and expression mimic creation by taking one thing (thesis), suggesting another (antithesis) and making something new of the coupling (synthesis), prosecution, defence, verdict.

The most obvious example of a poem with an if then structure is of course Kipling’s poem ‘If’, regularly voted ‘the nation’s favourite’. It is written in strict iambic pentameter, but with alternating feminine and masculine line endings throughout. He does this with absolute regularity throughout the poem: switching between lines of weak (eleven syllable) and strong (ten syllable) endings, which gives a characteristic swing to the verse. Try reading out loud each stanza (or verse) below, exaggerating the tenth syllable in each line as you read, tapping the table (or your thigh) and really emphasising the last beat. Do you see how this metrical alternation precisely suggests a kind of dialectical structure?If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt youBut make allowance for their doubting too,If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd meet those two impostors just the same;And meet those two impostors just the same;If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!