The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

ANACREONTICSSyllabically it’s seven.Thematically it’s heaven,Little lines to celebrateWine and love and all that’s great.Life is fleeting, death can wait,Trochees bounce along with zestTelling us that Pleasure’s best.Dithyrambic⁸ measures traipse,Pressing flesh and pressing grapes.Fill my glass and squeeze my thighs,Hedonism takes the prize.Broach the bottle, time to pour!Cupid’s darts and Bacchus’ juiceUse your magic to produceSomething humans can enjoy.Grab a girl, embrace a boy,Strum your lyre and hum this tune–Life’s too quick and death’s too soon.

Anacreon (pronounced: Anacreon) was a sixth-century Greek poet whose name lives on in the style of verse that bears his name ANACREONTICS (anacreontics). Actually, we barely know anything he wrote, his reputation rests on a haul of work called the Anacreontea, published in France in the sixteenth century. It was later discovered that these were actually not works by him, but later imitations written in his honour. No matter, Anacreon had been venerated by Horace, who shared his sybaritic, Epicurean philosophy, and by many English-language poets from Herrick and Cowley to the present day.

There was an Anacreontic Society in the eighteenth century dedicated to ‘wit, harmony and the god of wine,’ though its real purpose became the convivial celebration of music, hosting evenings for Haydn and other leading musicians of the day, as well as devising their own club song: ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’. A society member, John Stafford Smith, wrote the music for it, a tune which somehow got pinched by those damn Yankees who use it to this day for their national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’–‘Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light’ and so on. Strange to think that the music now fitting

…yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

was actually written to fit

…entwineThe myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s wine!

And this in a country where they prohibited alcohol for the best part of a quarter of a century, a country where they look at you with pitying eyes if you order a weak spritzer at lunchtime. Tsch!

The poet most associated with English anacreontics is the seventeenth-century Abraham Cowley: here he is extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism in ‘The Epicure’:Crown me with roses while I live,Now your wines and ointments give:After death I nothing crave,Let me alive my pleasures have:All are Stoics in the grave.

And a snatch of another, simply called ‘Drinking’:Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,Fill all the glasses there, for whyShould every creature drink but I,Why, man of morals, tell me why?

Three hundred years later one of my early literary heroes, Norman Douglas, observing a wagtail drinking from a birdbath, came to this conclusion:Hark’ee, wagtail: Mend your ways;Life is brief, Anacreon says,Brief its joys, its ventures toilsome;Wine befriends them–water spoils ’em.Who’s for water? Wagtail, you?Give me wine! I’ll drink for two.

One of the enduring functions of all art from Anacreon to Francis Bacon, from Horace to Damien Hirst has been, is and always will be to remind us of the transience of existence, to stand as a memento mori that will never let us forget Gloria Monday’s sick transit. We do, of course, know that we are going to die, and all too soon, but we need art to remind us not to spend too much time in the office caring about things that on our deathbeds will mean less than nothing. The particularity of anacreontics (simply writing in seven-syllable trochaic tetrameter as above does not make your verse anacreontic: the verse must concern itself with pleasure, wine, erotic love and the fleeting nature of existence) is echoed in the contemplative odes and love poetry of Horace; we find it in Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell and all poetry between them and the present day. It is also a theme of Middle- Eastern poetry, Hafiz (sometimes called the Anacreon of Persia) and Omar Khayyam most notably.

What of Dylan Thomas’s ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’?In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.

Wonderful as the poem is, dedicated to lovers as it is, presented in short sweet lines as it is, it would be bloody-minded to call it anacreontic: a hint of Eros, but no sense of Dionysus or of the need to love or drink as time’s winged chariot approaches. However, I would call one of the most beautiful poems in all twentieth-century English verse, Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ (1937), anacreontic, although I have never seen it discussed as such. Here are a few lines from the beginning:Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;Time and fevers burn awayIndividual beauty fromThoughtful children, and the graveProves the child ephemeral:But in my arms till break of dayLet the living creature lie,Mortal, guilty, but to meThe entirely beautiful.

The references to flesh, love and the transience of youth make me feel this does qualify. I have no evidence that Auden thought of it as anacreontic and I may be wrong. Certainly one feels that not since Shakespeare’s earlier sonnets has any youth had such gorgeous verse lavished upon him. I dare say both the subjects proved unworthy (the poets knew that, naturally) and both boys are certainly dead–the grave has proved the child ephemeral. Ars longa, vita brevis:⁹ life is short, but art is long.

VI

Closed Forms

Villanelle–sestina–ballade, ballade redouble

Certain closed forms, such as those we are going to have fun with now, seem demanding enough in their structures and patterning to require some of the qualities needed for so-doku and crosswords. It takes a very special kind of poetic skill to master the form and produce verse of a quality that raises the end result above the level of mere cunningly wrought curiosity. They are the poetic equivalent of those intricately carved Chinese etuis that have an inexplicable ivory ball inside them.

THE VILLANELLEKitchen VillanelleHow rare it is when things go rightWhen days go by without a slipAnd don’t go wrong, as well they might.The smallest triumphs cause delight– The kitchen’s clean, the taps don’t drip,How rare it is when things go right.Your ice cream freezes overnight,Your jellies set, your pancakes flipAnd don’t go wrong, as well they mightWhen life’s against you, and you fightTo keep a stiffer upper lip.How rare it is when things go right,The oven works, the gas rings light,Gravies thicken, potatoes chipAnd don’t go wrong as well they might.Such pleasures don’t endure, so biteThe grapes of fortune to the pip.How rare it is when things go rightAnd don’t go wrong as well they might.

The villanelle is the reason I am writing this book. Not that lame example, but the existence of the form itself.

Let me tell you how it happened. I was in conversation with a friend of mine about six months ago and the talk turned to poetry. I commented on the extraordinary resilience and power of ancient forms, citing the villanelle.¹⁰