The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

⁷ From the French rime riche.

⁸Hight is an archaic word for ‘called’, as in ‘named’: ‘a poet hight Thomas Hood’.

⁹ Anthony Burgess wrote a novel Abba Abba which imagines a meeting between Keats and the Italian sonneteer Belli: the title is a pun on the Petrarchan rhyme-scheme and the Hebrew for ‘father’. Not sure where the Swedish popsters got their name.

¹⁰Sir William ‘Topaz’ McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma, a title conferred by King Thibaw of Burma and the Andaman Islands in 1894

¹¹ Despite Tennyson writing a poem about their charge too: ‘The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!’ Don’t milk it Alfie, love…

¹² Having said which I have invented a poetic method that utilises the provokingly silly incompetence of Voice Recognition Software, allowing its mistakes to furnish interesting poetic ideas. It gave me ‘power monkey’ for ‘poet manque’ recently. Such aleatory assistance can be suggestive.

¹ Although, to be fair, he did repent and write: ‘the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.’

² Incidentally, on the off-chance that you have submitted a poem for any competition that I have judged, or plan to in the future, please don’t think that I will condemn a poem to the bin because it is in free verse or raise one to the top of the pile because it is formal. A good free verse poem is better than a bad sonnet and vice versa.

³ Actually, I have to confess I quite like ‘afterloved’…

⁴ You may think ‘forbade to wade’ is a clumsy internal rhyme–actually ‘forbade’ was (and still should be, I reckon) pronounced ‘for-bad’.

⁵ Mind you, at the time of going to print the website advertising these glories had not been updated since 2004. I do hope the competition hasn’t been stopped.

⁶ Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds produced their album Murder Ballads in 1996.

⁷ Written at the time of the trial but published posthumously. Another wonderful Housman tirade against sexual intolerance is to be found in ‘The Laws of God, the Laws of Man’.

⁸ A dithyramb is a kind of wild choral hymn (usually to Dionysus, the Greek God of wine–Bacchus to the Romans). It now often refers to any rather overblown, uncontrolled verse style.

⁹ Someone told me they saw a grave to one John Longbottom, who died at the age of ten. His gravestone read ars longa, vita brevis: a rude epitaph for a churchyard, but witty. Works especially well if you remember that in Latin the ‘s’ is always unvoiced…

¹⁰ I don’t want you to go thinking that this is the usual kind of conversation I have, least of all my friends.

¹¹ Not triplets, which are three-line groups that rhyme with each other aaa, bbb etc.

¹² In its strictest form, the word Sestina should also appear in the envoi. Crazy, huh?

¹³ Anthony Holden, in The Wit in the Dungeon, his masterly biography of Leigh Hunt, has this to say about the incident: ‘Whether or not Carlyle’s crusty old wife actually had given Hunt a kiss, let alone leapt from her chair to do so, we will never know; no such unlikely moment is documented in any of the relevant parties’ letters or journals.’

¹⁴ See if you can get hold of ‘A Platonic Blow’ for example.

¹⁵ I mean exotic in its original sense of ‘from far away’ not in the travel brochure sense.

¹⁶Cracked them! Coconuts, you see. And china plates. Cracked them! Ho, ho. No but really, ho ho.

¹⁷ A manila envelope rhyme?

¹⁸ Jewish readers may wonder why Milton is writing about the tefillin: ‘phylacteries’ here actually refer to religious trinkets used by Presbyterians, whose intolerance the sonnet attacks. Presbyterians, as you may know although Milton probably did not, is an anagram of