The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

We always say British, we never say British or Brit- ish, always machine, never machine or mach- ine. The weight we give to the first syllable of British or the second syllable of machine is called by linguists the TONIC ACCENT. Accent here shouldn’t be confused either with the written signs (DIACRITICAL MARKS) that are sometimes put over letters, as in cafe and Fuhrer, or with regional accents–brogues and dialects like Cockney or Glaswegian. Accent for our purposes means the natural push or stress we give to a word or part of a word as we speak. This accent, push or stress is also called ictus, but we will stick to the more common English words where possible.

In many-syllabled or POLYSYLLABIC words there will always be at least one accent.Credit. Dispose. Continue. Despair. Desperate.

Sometimes the stress will change according to the meaning or nature of the word. READ THE FOLLOWING PAIRS OUT LOUD:He inclines to project bad vibesA project to study the inclines.He proceeds to rebel.The rebel steals the proceeds.

Some words may have two stresses but one (marked here with an ?) will always be a little heavier:abdicate consideration.

Sometimes it is a matter of nationality or preference. READ OUT THESE WORDS: Chicken-soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigarette. Magazine.

Those are the more usual accents in British English. NOW TRY THE SAME WORDS WITH THESE DIFFERENT STRESSES…Chicken-soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake. Cigarette. Magazine.

That is how they are said in America (and increasingly these days in the UK and Australia too). What about the following?Lamentable. Mandatory. Primarily. Yesterday. In comparable.

Lamentable. Mandatory. Primarily. Yesterday. Incomparable.

Whether the tonic should land as those in the first line or the second is a vexed issue and subject to much controversy or controversy. The pronunciations vary according to circumstances or circumstances or indeed circum-stahnces too English, class-bound and ticklish to go into here.

You may think, ‘Well, now, hang on, surely this is how everyone (the Chinese and Thais aside) talks, pushing one part of the word but not another?’ Not so.

The French, for instance, tend towards equal stress in a word. They pronounce Canada, Can-a-da as opposed to our Canada. We say Bernard, the French say Ber-nard. You may have noticed that when Americans pronounce French they tend to go overboard and hurl the emphasis on to the final syllable, thinking it sounds more authentic, Ber-nard and so on. They are so used to speaking English with its characteristic downward inflection that to American ears French seems to go up at the end. With trademark arrogance, we British keep the English inflection. Hence the American pronunciation clichE, the English cliche and the authentic French cli-che. Take also the two words ‘journal’ and ‘machine’, which English has inherited from French. We pronounce them journal and machine. The French give them their characteristic equal stress: jour-nal and ma-chine. Even words with many syllables are equally stressed in French: we say repetition, they say repetition (ray-pay-tee-see- on).

As you might imagine, this has influenced greatly the different paths that French and English poetry have taken. The rhythms of English poetry are ordered by SYLLABIC ACCENTUATION, those of French more by QUANTITATIVE MEASURE. We won’t worry about those terms or what they portend just yet: it should already be clear that if you’re planning to write French verse then this is not the book for you.

In a paragraph of written prose we pay little attention to how those English accents fall unless, that is, we wish to make an extra emphasis, which is usually rendered by italics, underscoring or CAPITALISATION. In German an emphasised word is s t r e t c h e d. With prose the eye is doing much more than the ear. The inner ear is at work, however, and we can all recognise the rhythms in any piece of writing. It can be spoken out loud, after all, for recitation or for rhetoric, and if it is designed for that purpose, those rhythms will be all the more important.

But prose, rhythmic as it can be, is not poetry. The rhythm is not organised.

Meet Metre

Poetry’s rhythm is organised.

THE LIFE OF A POEM IS MEASURED IN REGULAR HEARTBEATS.

THE NAME FOR THOSE HEARTBEATS IS METRE.

When we want to describe anything technical in English we tend to use Greek. Logic, grammar, physics, mechanics, gynaecology, dynamics, economics, philosophy, therapy, astronomy, politics–Greek gave us all those words. The reservation of Greek for the technical allows us to use those other parts of English, the Latin and especially the Anglo-Saxon, to describe more personal and immediate aspects of life and the world around us. Thus to be anaesthetised by trauma has a more technical, medical connotation than to be numb with shock, although the two phrases mean much the same. In the same way, metre can be reserved precisely to refer to the poetic technique of organising rhythm, while words like ‘beat’ and ‘flow’ and ‘pulse’ can be freed up for less technical, more subjective and personal uses.

PLEASE DO NOT BE PUT OFF by the fact that throughout this section on metre I shall tend to use the conventional Greek names for nearly all the metrical units, devices and techniques that poets employ. In many respects, as I shall explain elsewhere, they are inappropriate to English verse,² but English-language poets and prosodists have used them for the last thousand years. It is useful and pleasurable to have a special vocabulary for a special activity.³Convention, tradition and precision suggest this in most fields of human endeavour, from music and painting to snooker and snow-boarding. It does not make those activities any