The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

back.I was giving the fish girl her payment,The cod were ninety a pound–When, with a snap and a rustle of raimentMy trousers, they dropped to the ground. Con-ster- nation.

Border ballads, like ‘Barbara Allen’ and those of Walter Scott, became a popular genre in their own right, often like broadsheet ballads expressing political grievances, spreading news and celebrating the exploits of highwaymen and other popular rebels, rogues and heroes: subgenres like the murder ballad still exist,⁶ often told from the murderer’s point of view, full of grim detail and a sardonic acknowledgement of the inevitability of tragedy.Frankie and Johnny were lovers,O Lordy, how they could love;They swore to be true to each other,Just as true as the stars above.He was her man but he done her wrong.

Robert Service, the English-born Canadian poet, wrote very popular rough’n’tough ballads mostly set around the Klondike Gold Rush; you will really enjoy reading this out, don’t be afraid (if alone) to try a North American accent– and it should be fast:A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and glare,There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

To observe the regularity of the caesuras in this ballad would be like complimenting an eagle on its intellectual grasp of the principles of aerodynamics, but I am sure you can see that ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’ could as easily be laid out with line breaks after ‘up’ and ‘box’ in the first two lines, ‘drink’ in the last and as the commas indicate elsewhere, to give it a standard four-three structure. We remember this layout from our examination of Kipling’s ballad in fourteeners, ‘Tommy’. A. E. Housman’s ‘The Colour of his Hair’,⁷ a bitter tirade against the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, is also cast in fourteeners. I can’t resist quoting it in full.Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fairFor the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paidTo hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,And the quarry-gang on portland in the cold and in the heat,And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spareHe can curse the god that made him for the colour of his hair.

There is also a strong tradition of rural ballad, one of the best-known examples being the strangely macabre ‘John Barleycorn’:There were three men come out of the WestTheir fortunes for to try,And these three men made a solemn vow:John Barleycorn should die!They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,Threw clods upon his head,And these three men made a solemn vow:John Barleycorn was dead!They let him lie for a very long time’Til the rain from Heaven did fall,Then Little Sir John sprung up his head,And so amazed them all.

After being scythed, threshed, pounded, malted and mashed, John Barleycorn (not a man of course, but a crop) ends his cycle in alcoholic form:Here’s Little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,And brandy in a glass!And Little Sir John in the nut-brown bowlProved the stronger man at last!For the huntsman he can't hunt the foxNor loudly blow his horn,And the tinker can’t mend kettles nor potsWithout John Barleycorn!

There are ballad operas (John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera being the best known), jazz ballads and pop ballads culminating in that revolting genre, the power ballad–but here we are leaking into popular music where the word has come to mean nothing much more than a slow love song, often (in the case of the American diva’s power ballad) repulsively vain and self-regarding, all the authentic guts, vibrancy, self-deprecation and lively good humour bleached out and replaced by the fraudulent intensity of grossly artificial climaxing. I acquit country music of these vices. American ballads, cowboy ballads, frontier ballads and so on, were extensively collected by the Lomax family, much in the same way that Cecil Sharpe had done for rural and border ballads and other native British genres of folk and community music. Shel Silverstein came up with the ever-popular ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for Johnny Cash, who also wrote and performed his own superb examples, I would especially recommend the ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ if you don’t already know it.

One of the great strengths of the ballad in its more literary incarnations is that its rousing folk and comic associations can be subverted or ironically countered. Its sense of being somehow traditional, communal and authorless contrasts with that individuality and strong authorial presence we expect from the modern poet, often so alone, angst-ridden and disconnected. Both John Betjeman and W. H. Auden used this contrast to their advantage. The strong ballad structure of Betjeman’s ‘Death in Leamington’ counters the grim, grey hopelessness of suburban lives with a characteristically mournful irony:She died in the upstairs bedroomBy the light of the evening starThat shone through the plate glass windowFrom over Leamington Spa.

[…]Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,At the grey, decaying face,As the calm of a Leamington eveningDrifted into the place.She moved the table of bottlesAway from the bed to the wall;And tiptoeing gently over the stairsTurned down the gas in the hall.

While Auden does much the same with the less genteel ‘Miss Gee’:Let me tell you a little storyAbout Miss Edith Gee;She lived in Clevedon TerraceAt Number 83.…She bicycled down to the doctor,And rang the surgery bell;‘O doctor, I’ve a pain inside me,And I don’t feel very well.’Doctor Thomas looked her over,And then he looked some more;Walked over to his wash-basin,Said, ‘Why didn’t you come before?’Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,Though his wife was waiting to ring,Rolling his bread into pellets;Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.’…They laid her on the table,The students began to laugh;And Mr Rose the surgeonHe cut Miss Gee in half.

Casting such lost lives as ballad heroes certainly provides an ironic contrast with which to mock the arid futility of much twentieth-century life. To use the rhythms of the greenwood and the yardarm for the cloying refinement of Leamington or the grimness of Miss Gee’s forlorn little world can indeed point up the chasm between the sterile present and the rich past, but such a mismatch also works in the opposite direction, it raises the lonely spinsters out of their ordinariness and connects them to the tradition and richness of history, it mythologises them, if you like. When an artist paints a prostitute in the manner of a Renaissance Madonna he is simultaneously marking an ironic distinction and forging an affirmative connection. The artists Gilbert and George have done much the same with their skinheads in stained-glass. These are strategies that only work because of the nature of form and genre.

Poetry Exercise 12

A poet can be rough and flexible with the ballad, it is the beat and the narrative drive that sustains. Your exercise is to finish the one that I started a few pages ago.Now gather round and let me tellThe tale of Danny Wise:And how his sweet wife AnnabelleDid suck out both his eyes.And if I tell the story trueAnd if I tell it