ACROSTICS have been popular for years; nineteenth-century children produced them instead of watching television–those who were lucky enough not to be sent down chimneys or kidnapped by gangs of pickpockets did, anyway.So you want a dedication then?For you I’ll do my very bestRead the letters downwards, darling, thenYou’ll see I’ve passed your little test.
What is going on below, you might wonder?age is areal buggerso few yearsending up whitewrinkled weak as strawincontinence comes and ipiss myself in every way–stopeternity’s too short too short a time
That is a DOUBLE ACROSTIC, both the first and last letters of each line spell out the same defiance and physical disgust. I haven’t highlighted the letters; you can trace them down yourself. In case you are wondering, I have not reached that stage yet–it is an imaginative leap, we are allowed those from time to time: all functions working smoothly last time I checked. You could in theory spell words down from the middle of a line–this is called a mesostich and is just plain silly.
The French seem to be the people most interested in acrostics and other poetic wordplay. Salomon Certon wrote a whole sonnet omitting the letter ‘e’: this is known as a LIPOGRAM. Not the same root as liposuction, as it happens, despite the apparent similarity of meaning. These days, you might feel, a poem that never uses an ‘I’ would be a real achievement…
PARONOMASIA is a grand word for ‘pun’: Thomas Hood, whose rich rhyme effusion you have read, was famous for these: ‘He went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell,’ that kind of thing.
Keats slips most of the name of his hero into a line in the poem Endymion: this is known as a PARAGRAM:
…IWill trace the story of Endymion.The very music of the name has gone
There are those who loathe puns, anagrams and wordplay of any description. They regard practitioners as trivial, posey, feeble, nerdy and facetious. As one such practitioner, I do understand the objections. Archness, cuteness, pedantry and showoffiness do constitute dangers. However, as a non-singing, non-games-playing, - dancing, -painting, -diving, -running, -catching, -kicking, -riding, -skating, -skiing, -sailing, -climbing, -caving, - swimming, -free-falling, -cycling, -canoeing, -jumping, -bouncing, -boxing sort of person, words are all I have. As the old cliche has it, they are my friends. I like to say them, weigh them, poke them, tease them, chant their sound, gaze at their shape and savour their juiciness, and, yes, play with them. Some words are made up of the same letters as others, some can fit inside others, some can be said the same backwards as frontwards, some rhyme outrageously, some seem unique and peculiar like yacht and quirk and frump and canoodle. I take pleasure in their oddities and pleasures and contradictions. It amuses me that a cowboy is a boy who rounds up cows, but a carboy is a flagon of acid, that conifer is an anagram of fir cone and esoteric of coteries, that gold has a hundred rhymes but silver has none.20 It saddens me that the French talk of the jouissance of language, its joyousness, juiciness, ecstasy and bliss, but that we of all peoples, with English as our mother tongue, do not. Such frolicsome larkiness may put you off, but if you wish to make poems it seems to me necessary that some part of your verse, however small, will register the sensuousness, oddity and pleasure of words themselves, as words, regardless of their semantic and communicatory duties. Not all paintings draw attention to their brushwork–art can, of course, as validly make transparent its process as exhibit its presence–but each tradition has value and none represents the only true aesthetic.
In fact, I shall start the final chapter with an exploration of the idea that there are no limits to the depth of commitment to language that a poet can have. Not before you have completed…
Poetry Exercise 20
Write one PATTERN POEM in the shape of a cross, and another in the shape of a big capital ‘I’ (for ego) (obviously it should be a Roman I with serifs, otherwise it would just be a block of verse). Make the words relevant to their shape. When you have finished that, write a rhyming ACROSTIC VERSE spelling either your surname or forename.
Diction and Poetics Today
I
How I learned to love poetry–two stories–diction
The Whale, the Cat and Madeline
I was fortunate in my own introduction to poetry. My mother had, and still has, a mind packed with lines of verse. She could recite, like many of her generation but with more perfect recall than most, all the usual nursery rhymes along with most of A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Struwwelpeter, Eleanor Farjeon and other hardy annuals from the garden of English verse. This standard childhood repertoire somehow slid, without me noticing and without any didactic literary purpose, into bedtime recitations, readings or merry snatches of Belloc, Chesterton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. Then one birthday a godfather gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. This solid, Empire-made anthology (published in 1861, the same year as Mrs Beeton’s Household Management and regarded by some as its verse equivalent) had been updated by the then Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, and included works by Betjeman, Auden and Laurie Lee, but its greatest emphasis was still on the lyrical and the romantic. That year I won the first and only school prize of my life, an edition of the Collected Poems of John Keats. In this I found a line, just one line, that finished the job my mother started and made me for ever a true slave to poetry. I will come to it in a minute, but first, a story about Keats himself and then an instance of poetry in motion.
THE WHALE
When Keats was a teenager (so the story goes), he came across a line from Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Not even a line, actually: a phrase:…the sea-shouldering whale.
Some versions of the story maintain that Keats burst into tears when he read this. He had never known before what poetic language could do. He had no idea it was capable of making images spring so completely to life. In an instant he was able to see, hear and feel the roar, the plunging, the spray, the great mass and slow colossal upheaving energy of a whale, all from two words yoked together: ‘sea’ and ‘shouldering’. From that moment on Keats got poetry. He began to understand the power that words could convey and the metaphorical daring with which a poet could treat them. We might say now that it was as if he had grasped their atomic nature, how with the right manipulation, and in the right combinations, words can release unimaginable energy. If not nuclear physics, then perhaps a living magick, whose verbal
