The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

creeps.…CORINNA wakes. A dreadful Sight!Behold the Ruins of the Night!A wicked Rat her Plaster stole,Half eat, and dragged it to his Hole.The Crystal Eye, alas, was miss’d;And Puss had on her Plumpers piss’d.A Pigeon pick’d her Issue-Peas;And Shock her Tresses fill’d with Fleas.The Nymph, tho’ in this mangled Plight,Must ev’ry Morn her Limbs unite.But how shall I describe her ArtsTo recollect the scatter’d Parts?Or show the Anguish, Toil, and Pain,Of gath’ring up herself again?The bashful Muse will never bearIn such a Scene to interfere.Corinna in the Morning dizen’d,Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison’d.

Heroic verse indeed. Even more scabrous, scatological and downright disgraceful was the seventeenth- century’s one-man Derek & Clive, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:She was so exquisite a whoreThat in the belly of her motherShe turned her cunt so right beforeHer father fucked them both together.

Mm, nice.

Light Verse

It is revealing that in polls to find the most popular poets, names like Shel Silverstein, Wendy Cope, Spike Milligan, Roald Dahl, Roger McGough, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Betjeman, Glyn Maxwell and Langston Hughes consistently appear high in the charts (not that all their work is comic, of course). Certainly Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Pablo Neruda feature too (not that all their work is serious, of course). There seems to be an inexhaustible appetite for verse whose major rhetorical instrument is wit or lightness of touch. It is notable also that long poems seem a great deal less appealing to the public. Perhaps this is something to do with our culture of immediacy: fast food verse for fast food people. Whatever the reason, it seems to me self-evident that if you wish your poetry to make a noise outside the world of academia, poetry magazines and private Gesellschaften, your chances are greatly increased by their possession of an element of esprit. Perhaps the description that best fits the work of the more popular poets is not comic, but light. ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly,’ said Chesterton.

LIGHT VERSE does not need to be comic in intent or witty in nature: it encourages readers to believe that they and the poet share the same discourse, intelligence and standing, inhabit the same universe of feeling and cultural reference, it does not howl in misunderstood loneliness, wallow in romantic agony or bombard the reader with learning and allusion from a Parnassian or abstrusely academic height. This kind of poetry, Auden argues in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, was mainstream until the arrival of the romantics. With the exception of sacred verse, Miltonic epics, drama and the more complex metaphysical poems of the seventeenth century, almost all poetry was, more or less, light. It was adult, it could be moving, angry, erotic and even religious, but it was digestible, it was not embarrassed by the idea of likeability and accessibility. A poem could be admired because it was prettily made and charming to read, Mozartian qualities if you like. Modernism appeared to drive lightness out of poetry for ever. These popularity polls, irksome as they be, seem to indicate that it is far from dead, however. In the knowledge that Gravity will destroy us in the end, perhaps Levity is not so trivial a response.

Parody

Neither are parody and pastiche an unfit manner for the poet. Chaucer began the trend in English with a scintillating parody of badly versified epical romance called Sir Thopas. Shakespeare parodied Marlowe, as did Donne (in praise of angling in the style of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’); Byron parodied and was parodied, Dryden, Johnson, and Swift parodied and were parodied and so it went on. Trends in the actual nuts and bolts of versification were ruthlessly guyed by Pope in the Dunciad: George Canning and John Hookham Frere (the former of Castlereagh, the latter of Whistlecraft fame and the pair of them high Tory ‘Anti-Jacobins’) made great sport of the democrat Southey’s experiments in dactylics:Wearisome Sonnetteer, feeble and querulous,Painfully dragging out thy democratic lays–Moon-stricken sonneteer, ‘ah! for thy heavenly chance!’Sorely thy Dactylics lag on uneven feet:Slow is the syllable which thou would’st urge to speed,Lame and o’erburden’d, and ‘screaming its wretchedness’.

They had a go at his Sapphic verse too:Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order–Bleak blows the blast; your hat has got a hole in ’t,

So have your breeches.

Byron was always savage at the expense of the ‘Lakers’. It is fair to observe that he, silver-spoon nobleman as was, remained a true radical all his life, while both Southey and Wordsworth accepted the King’s shilling and butt of malmsey as Poets Laureate, ending their lives as comfortable establishment grandees. Byron seemed to detect an air of fraudulence early on. Here is his parody of Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’.There’s something in a stupid ass:And something in a heavy dunce;But never since I went to schoolI saw or heard so damned a foolAs William Wordsworth is for once.

They say the modern literary world is full of squabbling hatred and simmering resentments, but it is as nothing to the past.

The individuality and restless stressed energy of Hopkins makes him ripe for pastiche. Anthony Brode was inspired to write a perfect Hopkins parody after reading this on his cereal packet one morning: ‘Delicious heart-of- the-corn, fresh-from-the-oven flakes are sparkled and spangled with sugar for a can’t-be-resisted- flavour.’Parenthesis proud, bracket-bold, happiest with hyphensThe writers stagger intoxicated by terms, adjective-unsteadied–Describing in graceless phrases fizzling like soda siphonsAll things crisp, crunchy, malted, tangy, sugared and shredded.

Parodies are rife in popular culture, a staple of television comedy, but literary and verse parodies seem to have fallen from fashion, Wendy Cope being one of the few practising poets who plays happily and fruitfully with the style of other poets. Now it’s your turn.

Poetry Exercise 17

I am sure you have a favourite poet. Write a parody of their style and prosodic manner. Try and make it comically inappropriate: if you like Ted Hughes, try writing a fearsome, physically tough description of a Barbie doll or something else very un-Hughesy. I know this is a bit of a Spectator Competition sort of exercise, but it is a good way of noticing all the metrical, rhyming and formal mannerisms of a poet. If you are really feeling bold, try writing a cento. You will need the collected works of the poet you choose, otherwise a cento mixing different verses from an anthology might be worth trying. Surprise yourself.

IX

Exotic Forms¹⁵

Haiku—senryu–tanka–ghazal–luc bat–tanaga

HAIKU

Five seven and five: