The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

makes a noise,And wakes the sleeping boys.4 Beats–TetrameterHe bangs the drum and makes a noise,It shakes the roof and wakes the boys.5 Beats–PentameterHe bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise,It shakes the roof and wakes the sleeping boys.6 Beats–HexameterHe bangs the drum and makes the most appalling noise,It shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.7 Beats–HeptameterHe bangs the wretched drum and makes the most appalling noise,Its racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.8 Beats–OctameterHe starts to bang the wretched drum and make the most appalling noise,Its dreadful racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

I have hardly given more information in the octameter, heptameter, hexameter or pentameter than there is in the tetrameter–of course the boys are sleeping, you can’t wake someone who isn’t, and a very roof is still a roof. I have made up my own nonsense specifically to show the variation in feel when the sense or narrative is broadly the same and the number of feet marks the only real difference. Generally speaking, and I do mean very generally, the pentameter is used for ‘serious’ poetry, for contemplative, epic, heroic and dramatic verse. That doesn’t mean that the other measures can’t be. We will come to how we choose a particular form or line of verse later. At the moment we are more interested in discovering and defining terms than ascribing value or function to them. The technical difference is what concerns us, the stylistic difference is for a later section of the book.

Six feet give us a hexameter, the line of choice in most classical verse:

As a single line it works fine. The experience of writing whole poems in hexameters, in six footers, is that they turn out to be a bit cumbersome in English. The pentameter seems to fit the human breath perfectly (which is why it was used, not just by Shakespeare, but by just about all English verse dramatists). French poets and playwrights like Racine did use the hexameter or alexandrine²⁰all the time, in English verse it is rare. What’s so different about French, then? I think the most important reason is, as I made clear earlier, that French words tend not to be so varied in their accentuation as English. Why is this relevant? Well, it means that French poetry, since so many words are equally stressed, relies more on what is known as ‘quantitative measure’–divisions based on the temporal duration of long and short vowels.²¹ This is how classical Greek and Latin poetry was constructed. Most English verse–as I hope we have discovered–is metred by syllabic accentuation, the rises and falls of stress.

You can certainly try to write whole English poems composed of iambic hexameter, but I suspect you’ll find, in common with English language poets who experimented with it on and off for the best part of a thousand years, that it yields rather clumsy results. Its best use is as a closing line to stanzas, as in Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)’:And consummation comes and jars two hemispheres.

Keats ends each stanza of ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ with an alexandrine in a style derived from the verse of Edmund Spenser.She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.

Alexander Pope in his (otherwise) pentametric An Essay on Criticism was harsh on these Spenserian mannerisms and included this self-descriptive hexameter:A needless Alexandrine ends the song,That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

There are very few examples of eight-beat lines in English verse. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ is a rare successful example of a trochaic octameter:

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the Robin’s breast;In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Another very familiar example is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

You will notice Poe chooses to end the even-numbered lines strongly, docking the final weak syllable, as Tennyson does for every line of ‘Locksley Hall’. You might also notice how in reading, one tends to break up these line lengths into two manageable four-stress half-lines: Poe’s lines have very clear and unmistakable caesuras, while Tennyson’s are less forceful. The four-stress impulse in English verse is very strong, as we shall see. Nabokov, in his Notes on Prosody, suggests that the hexameter is a limit ‘beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks in two’.

Heptameters, seven-stress lines, are possible, and certainly do tend to ‘break in two’. They are known in the trade as ‘fourteeners’, referring to the usual syllable count. Here’s a line from Hardy’s ‘The Lacking Sense’.Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may

As you can see, it is perfectly iambic (though one could suggest demoting the fourth foot to a pyrrhic):

Actually, fourteeners were very popular in the sixteenth century, although Shakespeare disdained their use, a fact which has been adduced by some to damn the claims of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the Shakespearean canon, for Oxford loved them:My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways,My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days.

This preposterously over-alliterated couplet hardly seems Shakespearean–in fact, Shakespeare mocked precisely such bombastic nonsense in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the other unlettered ‘rude mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, having great fun at the expense of Oxfordian fourteeners and their vulgar alliterations:But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here?Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear.

You may notice that Hardy’s example is a ‘true’ heptameter, whereas Oxford’s lines (and Shakespeare’s parody of them) are in effect so broken by the caesuras after the fourth foot that they could be written thus:My life through