The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Luc bat is the Vietnamese for ‘six eight’. The form is commonly found as a medium for two-line riddles, rhyming as above.Completely round and whiteAfter baths they’re tight together.Milk inside, not a yakHairy too, this snack is fleshy

Plates and coconuts, in case you hadn’t cracked them.¹⁶ Proper poems in Vietnamese use a stress system divided into the two pleasingly named elements bang and trac, which I cannot begin to explain, since I cannot begin to understand them. Once more the Internet seems to have been responsible for raising this form, obscure outside its country of origin, to something like cult status. It has variations. SONG THAT LUC BAT (which literally means two sevens, six-eight, although it begs in English to have the word ‘sang’ after it, as in ‘The Song That Luc Bat Sang’) consists of a seven-syllable rhyming couplet, followed by sixes and eights that rhyme according to another scheme that I won’t bother you with. I am sure you can search Vietnamese literature (or van chuong bac hoc) resources if you wish to know more.

TANAGAThe TANAGA owes its genesTo forms from the Philippines.To count all your words like beansYou may need adding machines.

The TANAGA is a short non-metric Filipino form, consisting of four seven-syllable lines rhyming aaaa, although modern English language tanagas allow abab, aabb and abba.¹⁷ I am not aware of any masterpieces having yet been composed in our language. But there it is for your pleasure.

Poetry Exercise 18

Four haikus in the usual mongrel English form: one for each season, so do not forget your kigo word.

X

The Sonnet

PETRARCHAN AND SHAKESPEAREANI wrote a bad PETRARCHAN SONNET once,In two laborious weeks. A throttled streamOf words–sure following the proper schemeOf Abba Abba–oh, but what a dunceI was to think those yells and tortured gruntsCould help me find an apt poetic theme.The more we try to think, the more we dream,The more we whet our wit, the more it blunts.But give that dreaming part of you release,Allow your thrashing conscious brain a break,Let howling tom become a purring kittenAnd civil war dissolves to inward peace;A thousand possibilities awake,And suddenly your precious sonnet’s written.

The sonnet’s fourteen lines have called to poets for almost a thousand years. It is the Goldilocks form: when others seem too long, too short, too intricate, too shapeless, too heavy, too light, too simple or too demanding the sonnet is always just right. It has the compactness to contain a single thought and feeling, but space enough for narrative, development and change.

The sonnet was, they say, invented in the thirteenth century by Giacomo da Lentini in the Sicilian court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Dante and d’Arezzo and others experimented with it, but it was Francesco Petrarca, Petrarch, who shaped it into the form which was to have so tremendous an impact on European and English poetry. In the papal court of Avignon he composed his cycle of sonnets to Laura, a girl he always claimed was flesh and blood, but whom many believed to be a conjured ideal. His sonnets made their way over to god-fearing medieval England and lay there like gleaming alien technology: dazzling in their sophistication, knowledge, mastery and promise, frightening in their freedom, daring and originality.

Chaucer knew of them and admired them but their humanism, their promotion of personal feeling and open enquiry, the vigour and self-assertion of their individual voice would have made any attempt on his part to write such works, if indeed he had that desire, a kind of heresy or treason. We had to wait two hundred years for the warm winds of the Renaissance truly to cross the channel and thaw us out of our monkish and feudal inertia. In the hundred and twenty or so years between the Reformation and the Restoration the sonnet had, like some exotic plant, been grafted, grown, hothoused and hybridised into a flourishing new native stock, crossbred to suit the particular winds and weather of our emotional and intellectual climate. This breeding began under Wyatt and Surrey, great pioneers in many areas of English verse, and was carried on by Sidney, Shakespeare, Drummond, Drayton, Donne, Herbert and Milton. The next century saw an equally rapid decline: it is hard to think of a single sonnet being written between the death of Milton in the 1670s and the publication of Wordsworth’s first sonnets a hundred and thirty years later. Just as Wren and the Great Fire between them redesigned half-timbered, higgledy- piggledy Tudor London into a metropolis of elegant neoclassical squares and streets, so Dryden, Johnson and Pope preferred to address the world from a Palladian balcony, the dignified, harmonious grandeur of the heroic couplet replacing what they saw as the vulgar egoism of the lowly sonnet and its unedifying emotional wrestling matches. Those very personal qualities of the sonnet were precisely what attracted Wordsworth and the romantic poets of course, and from their day to ours it has remained a popular verse forum for a poet’s debate with himself.

The structure of the PETRARCHAN SONNET, preferred and adapted by Donne, Milton and many others, is easily expressed. The first eight lines abba-abba are called the OCTAVE, the following six lines cdecde (or cddccd or cdccdc) the SESTET.

The ninth line, the beginning of the sestet, marks what is called the VOLTA, the turn. This is the moment when a contrary point of view, a doubt or a denial, is often expressed. It is the sonnet’s pivot or fulcrum. In mine at the top of this section the ninth line begins with ‘But’, a rather obvious way of marking that moment (although you may recall Donne uses the same word in his ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ cited in Chapter Two). In Wordsworth’s ‘The world is too much with us’ below, the volta comes in the middle of the ninth line, at the ‘en dash’: it is precisely here, after ‘It moves us not’ that, overlooking the sea, having pondered the rush of the modern Christian world in its commerce and crassness and its blindness to nature, Wordsworth as it were draws breath and makes his point: he would rather be a pagan for whom at least nature had life and energy and meaning. A volta can be called a crisis, in its literal Greek sense of ‘turning point’ as well as sometimes bearing all the connotations we now place upon the word.The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Within the Petrarchan form’s basic octave–sestet structure there are other sub-divisions possible. Two groups of four and two of three are natural, two quatrains and two tercets if you prefer.