The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The rhythm comes through just as clearly with…

or…

…where every foot has a different number of words. It is the beats that give the rhythm. Who would have thought poetry would be so arithmetical? It isn’t, of course, but prosodic analysis and scansion can be. Not that any of this really matters for our purposes: such calculations are for the academics and students of the future who will be scanning and scrutinising your work.

Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ is in anapaestic ballad form (four-stress lines alternating with three-stress lines):

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreamsOf the beautiful Annabel Lee.

I suppose the best-known anapaestic poem of all (especially to Americans) is Clement Clarke Moore’s tetrametric ‘The Night Before Christmas’:

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;The stockings were hung by the chimney with care In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

The second couplet has had its initial weak syllable docked in each line. This is called a clipped or acephalous (literally ‘headless’) foot. You could just as easily say the anapaest has been substituted for an iamb, it amounts to precisely the same thing.

Both the Poe and the Moore works have a characteristic lilt that begs for the verse to be set to music (which they each have been, of course), but anapaests can be very rhythmic and fast moving too: unsuited perhaps to the generality of contemplative poetry, but wonderful when evoking something like a gallop. Listen to Robert Browning’s ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’:I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and heI galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

It begs to be read out loud. You can really hear the thunder of the hooves here, don’t you think? Notice, though, that Browning also dispenses with the first weak syllable in each line. For the verse to be in ‘true’ anapaestic tetrameters it would have to go something like this (the underline represents an added syllable, not a stress):Then I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and heAnd I galloped, Dirk galloped, we galloped all three.

But Browning has given us clipped opening feet:Da-dum, titty- tum, titty-tum, titty-tumDa-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum.

instead of the fullTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tumTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty- tum, titty-tum

If you tap out the rhythms of each of the above with your fingers on the table, or just mouth them to yourself (quietly if you’re on a train or in a cafe, you don’t want to be stared at) I think you will agree that Browning knew what he was about. The straight anapaests are rather dull and predictable. The opening iamb or acephalous foot, Da-dum! makes the whole ride so much more dramatic and realistic, mimicking the way horses hooves fall. Which is not to say that, when well done, pure anapaests can’t work too. Byron’s poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacharib’ shows them at their best.

TAKE OUT YOUR PENCIL AND MARK THE ANAPAESTS HERE (Assyrian is three syllables, by the way, not four):The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;And the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea,And the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Byron doesn’t keep this up all the way through, however: For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

He could have written the anapaest ‘And he breathed…’ but I think his instinct to use the clipped ‘And breathed’ instead is exactly right for the conceit. It is a very subtle difference. What do you think? Try saying each alternative aloud. I think the clipping causes us to linger a tiny bit longer on the word ‘breathed’ than we would in strict anapaestic rhythm and this brings the image to life. Now, back to those standard anapaests beating:Titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty- tumTitty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

Imagine that, instead of doing what Browning and Byron did and clipping off the head like so:Da- dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty- tumDa-dum, titty-tum, titty-tum, titty-tum

you started with anapaests and ended with a spondee which, as I mentioned earlier, is a double-stressed foot: Hard cheese. HumdrumAnapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon-dee!Anapaest, anapaest, anapaest, spon- dee!

That might remind you of the gallop from Rossini’s overture to William Tell, famously used for the TV series The Lone Ranger and the three-way orgy in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

The spondee (inasmuch as it truly exists in English) makes a great full stop, either serious like a tolling bell or comic, as in the famous knocking rhythm that Americans express as:Shave and a hair cut, two bits!