The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

clearThere’s not a mortal one of youWon’t shriek in mortal fear.

Don’t worry about metre or syllable-count–this is a ballad. I have used an a rhyme, by all means drop it from time to time, but do stick to the four-line structure. Enjoy yourself. One thing I can guarantee you: after you have written just one or two stanzas, you’ll be chanting ballad lines to yourself as you make coffee, nip to the loo, walk to the shops and brush your teeth. The ballad has a certain flow, a rhythmic swing and a beat; it makes no difference where you go, you’re sure to tap your feet–well, hush my mouth…

IV

Heroic VerseHEROIC VERSE has passed the test of time: Iambic feet in couplets linked by rhyme,Its non- stanzaic structure simply screamsFor well-developed tales and epic themes.The five-stress line can also neatly fitSardonic barbs and aphoristic wit.Augustan poets marshalled their iambsTo culminate in pithy epigrams.Pope, Alexander, with pontific skillCould bend the verse to his satiric will.

The mode continued in this lofty styleUntil–with manic laugh and mocking smile New modes emerged, a kind of fractured, mad Enjambment turned up. Pauses. Something had Gone wrong… or right? The stops and starts of human Speech burst through. Now, once formal lines assume an Unforced, casual air, but nonethelessObey the rigid rules of metre, stressAnd rhyming. Gradually another changeTakes place. New poets start to rearrangeThe form, unpick the close-knit weave, make room For looser threads of consonantal rhyme.The modern age with all its angst and doubt Arrives, picks up the tab and pays its debtTo history, precedent and every voiceThat did its bit to mould heroic verse.And still today we grudgingly affirmThere’s life in the old dog; our mangy formStill bites, still barks, still chases cats and birds,Still wags its tail, still pens and shepherds words,And, taken off her leash, this bitch on heatWill walk you off your pentametric feet.

HEROIC VERSE is far from dead. Since its Chaucerian beginnings it has been endlessly revivified: after a playful Elizabethan reshaping it acquired marmoreal elegance in the eighteenth century, only to undergo a complex reworking under John Keats, Robert Browning and Wilfred Owen until it emerged blinking into the light of modern day. At first glance it seems remarkably simple, too simple, perhaps, even to deserve the appellation ‘form’: it is as open as they come, neither laid out in regular stanzas, nor fixed by any scheme beyond the simple aabbccdd of the rhyming couplet. New paragraph presentation is possible either with line breaks or indentation as I have offered above, but in general the verse is presented in one unbroken block. Only the occasional braced triplet will relieve the procession of couplets. To the modern eye this can be forbidding; we like everything in our world to come in handy bite-sized chunks. Yet you might say that handy bite-sized chunks is what heroic verse is best remembered for: Pope’s Essays on Man and on Criticism are veritable vending machines of aphorism.A little learning is dangerous thing;Not to go back, is somehow to advance,And men must walk at least before they dance.Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is man.Hope springs eternal in the human breast.All are but parts of one stupendous whole.One truth is clear. Whatever is, is right.True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

That last apothegm might be the motto of this book. John Dryden, in my estimation, was the absolute master of the heroic couplet; his use of it seems more natural, more assured, more fluid even than Pope’s:Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.For those whom God to ruin hath design’d,He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.Errors, like straw, upon the surface flow;He who would search for pearls must dive below.Beware the fury of a patient manBy education most have been misled;So they believe, because they so were bred.The priest continues what the nurse began,And thus the child imposes on the man.

But these were poets from a time when poems, like architecture and garden design, were formal, elegant and assured: this was the Age of Reason, of Certitude, Sense, Wit, Discernment, Judgement, Taste, Harmony–of ‘Capital Letter Moralists’ as T. E. Hulme called them. The voice and manner of these Augustans can sound altogether too de haut en bas for our ears, from lofty to lowly, as if delivered from Olympus.

Their taste and proportion is akin to that of the architecture of the period; by the time of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads their course seemed run, the profusion of nature and the agony of self seemed to become a more proper study of poets, just as the Gothic and picturesque began to entice the architects. Run your eye down the Index of First Lines in an edition of Pope and then of any Romantic poet and compare the number of entries in each which begin with the word ‘I’. The ‘egotistical sublime’ had landed. It would be a pity if, in our instinctive veneration for all things post-classical, Romantic, post-Romantic, Decadent, Modernist and Postmodernist we overlooked the virtues of late-seventeenth-and eighteenth-century verse. After all, most of us aspire to live in houses of that period, fill them with eclectic fittings and furniture from later eras as we may. The neoclassical harmony and elegance of construction remains our ideal for housing. I think it can be so with verse too. Naturally the discourse and diction, the detail and decor as it were, are of our age, but the rationality and harmony of the Augustans is not to be despised.

Keats did not abandon the form, but contributed to its development with a new freedom of run-ons and syntactical complexity. This extract from ‘Lamia’ shows how close to dramatic blank verse it becomes, the enjambments almost disguising the rhymes.Pale grew her immortality, for woeOf all these lovers, and she grieved soI took compassion on her, bade her steepHer hair in weird syrops that would keepHer loveliness invisible, yet freeTo wander as she loves, in liberty.

Robert Browning wrestled with the form even more violently. His much anthologised ‘My Last Duchess’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in heroic verse. It is ‘spoken’ by the Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, who is showing around his palace an ambassador who has come to make the arrangements for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn, as the monologue proceeds, that the Duke had his first wife killed on account of her displeasing over-friendliness. Pointing at her portrait on the wall, the Duke explains how polite, compliant and smiling she was, but to everyone:

She hadA heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad,Too easily impressed; she liked whate’erShe looked on, and her looks went everywhere.Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,The dropping of the daylight in the West,The bough of cherries some officious foolBroke in the orchard for her, the white muleShe rode with round the terrace–all and eachWould draw from her alike the approving speech,

In the Duke’s view it was ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift’.

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,Whene’er I passed her; but who passed withoutMuch the same smile? This grew: I gave commands;Then all smiles stopped together. There she standsAs if alive.

In other words, he had her killed. You can see how different this heavily run-on and paused verse is from the restrained fluency of Augustan heroic couplets. But why has Browning not chosen to write in blank verse, in the Shakespearean or Jacobean manner, we might wonder? I cannot, of course, second- guess Browning’s motives, but the effect is to counter the fluency of everyday speech with the formality of a rhymed structure, creating an ironic contrast between the urbane conversational manner, the psychotic darkness of the story and the elegant solidity of a noble form. The heroic verse is the frame out of which character can leap; it is itself the nobly proportioned, exquisitely tasteful palace in which ignobly misproportioned, foully tasteless deeds are done.