The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

almost

what

ever

she

wishes

up down

side to side

the world is hers

but

a

small

PAWN

gets

the

chance

to be a king

The idea of shaping your poem on the page to make a picture, symbol or pattern is a very old one. The best-known example in English verse is George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ which, rotated ninety degrees, takes on the shape of two angels’ wings:

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more

Till he became

Most poore:

With Thee

O let me rise

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;

And still with wickedness and shame

Thou didst so punish sinne,

That I became

Most thin.

With Thee

Let me combine

And feel this day thy victorie;

For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Another of Herbert’s pattern poems, ‘The Altar’, reveals the shape of its title, an altar table.

When I was small I remember endlessly looking through my parents’ copy of the collected poems of e e cummings and being fascinated and appalled by the things he did with punctuation, his blithe disregard for majuscules and spaces and the general appearance of childish illiteracy his work presented. My teachers, I felt, would never allow me to get away with such liberties and yet there he was, sharing shelf-space with Robert Browning and John Keats. The collection included this poem; I found the slippage of the ‘l’ from ‘loneliness’ unbearably sad.

1(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

It is, incidentally, the only poem I know of whose title contains all the words of the poem: 1(a…(a leaf falls on loneliness), yet of course the poem is not the words, it is the sum of the words and their layout, a truth in all poetry but one most obviously declared in this kind of patterned or shaped verse. cummings was a Cubist painter as well as a poet: ‘The symbol of all art is the Prism,’ he wrote. ‘The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains.’ I am not sure how one would categorise such a work as the famous ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’:

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

PPEGORHRASS

eringint(o-

aThe):l