The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (3 page)

CHAPTER ONE

Metre

Poetry is metrical writing.

If it isn’t that I don’t know what it is.

J.V. C
UNNINGHAM

I

Some very obvious but nonetheless interesting observations about how English is spoken–meet metre–the iamb–the iambic pentameter–Poetry Exercises 1 & 2

Y
OU HAVE ALREADY
achieved the English-language poet’s most important goal: you can read, write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence. If this were a book about painting or music there would be a lot more initial spadework to be got through.

Automatic and inborn as language might seem to be, there are still things we need to know about it, elements that are so obvious very few of us ever consider them. Since language for us, as poets in the making, is our paint, our
medium
, we should probably take a little time to consider certain aspects of spoken English, a language whose oral properties are actually very different from those of its more distant ancestors, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek and even from those of its nearer relations, French and German.

Some of what follows may seem so obvious that it will put you in danger of sustaining a nosebleed. Bear with me, nonetheless. We are beginning from first principles.

How We Speak

Each English word is given its own weight or push as we speak it within a sentence. That is to say:

Each Eng
lish
word
is
giv
en its own
weight
and
push
as we
speak
it with
in
a
sent
ence.

Only a very badly primitive computer speech programme would give equal stress to all the words in that example. Throughout this chapter I use
bold
type to indicate this weight or push, this ‘accent’, and I use
italics
for imparting special emphasis and
SMALL CAPITALS
to introduce new words or concepts for the first time and for drawing attention to an exercise or instruction.

A real English speaker would speak the indented paragraph above much, but certainly not
exactly
, as I (with only the binary choice of
heavy
/light available to me) have tried to indicate. Some words or syllables will be slid over with hardly a breath or a pause accorded to them (light), others will be given more weight (
heavy
).

Surely that’s how the whole world speaks?

Well, in the Chinese languages and in Thai, for example, all words are of one syllable (
monosyllabic
) and speech is given colour and meaning by variations in
pitch
, the speaker’s voice will go up or down. In English we colour our speech not so much with alterations in pitch as with variations in stress: this is technically known as
ACCENTUATION
.
¹
. English, and we shall think about this later–is what is known as a
STRESS-TIMED
language.

Of course, English does contain a great many monosyllables (many more than most European languages as it happens): some of these are what grammarians call
PARTICLES
, inoffensive little words like prepositions (
by, from, to, with
), pronouns (
his, my, your, they
), articles (
the, an, a
) and conjunctions (
or, and, but
). In an average sentence these are
unaccented
in English.

From
time
to
time
and for as
long
as it
takes
.

I must repeat, these are not
special emphases
, these are the
nat
ural
ac
cents im
part
ed. We glide over the particles (‘from’, ‘to’, ‘and’, ‘for’, ‘as’, ‘it’) and give a little push to the important words (‘
time’, ‘long’, ‘takes
’).

Also, we tend to accent the
operative
part of monosyllabic words when they are extended, only lightly tripping over the -ing and -ly, of such words as
hop
ing and
quick
ly. This light tripping, this gliding is sometimes called
scudding
.

We always say
Brit
ish, we never say Brit
ish
or
Brit-ish
, always mach
ine
, never
mach
ine or
mach-ine
. The weight we give to the first syllable of
Brit
ish or the second syllable of ma
chine
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 café and Führer, 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.

Cred
it. Dis
pose
. Con
tin
ue. De
spair. Des
perate.

Sometimes the stress will change according to the meaning or nature of the word. R
EAD THE FOLLOWING PAIRS OUT LOUD
:

He in
clines
to pro
ject
bad vibes

A
pro
ject to study the
in
clines.

He pro
ceeds
to re
bel
.

The
re
bel steals the
pro
ceeds.

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

áb
di
cate
con
sid
er
át
ion.

Sometimes it is a matter of nationality or preference. R
EAD OUT THESE WORDS
:

Chick
en-
soup. Arm-chair. Sponge-cake
. Cigar
ette
. Maga
zine
.

Those are the more usual accents in
British
English. N
OW TRY THE SAME WORDS WITH THESE DIFFERENT STRESSES
…

Chick
en-soup.
Arm
-chair.
Sponge
-cake.
Cig
arette.
Mag
azine.

That is how they are said in America (and increasingly these days in the UK and Australia too). What about the following?

Lám
entable.
Mánd
atory.
Prím
arily.
Yés
terday. In
cómp
arable.

La
mént
able. Man
dát
ory. Pri
már
ily.
Yes
ter
dáy
. Incom
pár
able.

Whether the tonic should land as those in the first line or the second is a vexed issue and subject to much
cón
tro
vers
y or con
tróv
ersy. The pronunciations vary according to
cir
cumstances or
cir
cum
stánces
or indeed
cir
cum-
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
Can
ada. We say
Ber
nard, 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 cli
chÉ
, the English
cli
ché and the authentic French
cli-ché
. Take also the two words ‘journal’ and ‘machine’, which English has inherited from French. We pronounce them
jour
nal and ma
chine
. 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 repe
ti
tion, they say
répétition
(
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.

P
LEASE 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.
³
Convention, 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 less rich, individual and varied. So let it be with poetry.

Poetry is a word derived from Greek, as is Ode (from
poein
, to make and
odein
, to sing). The majority of words we use to describe the
anatomy
of a poem are Greek in origin too. Metre (from
metron
) is simply the Greek for measure, as in metronome, kilometre, biometric and so on. The Americans use the older spelling
meter
which I prefer, but which my UK English spellcheck refuses to like.

In the beginning, my old cello teacher used to say, was
rhythm
. Rhythm is simply the Greek for ‘flow’ (we get our word diarrhoea from the same source as it happens). We know what rhythm is in music, we can clap our hands or tap our feet to its beat. In poetry it is much the same:

ti-
tum
, ti-
tum
, ti-
tum
, ti-
tum
, ti-
tum

Say that out loud. Tap your feet, drum your fingers or clap your hands as you say it. It is a meaningless chant, certainly. But it is a meaningless
regular
and
rhythmic
chant.

Ten sounds, alternating in beat or accent. Actually, it is not very helpful to say that the line is made up of
ten
sounds; we’ll soon discover that for our prosodic purposes it is more useful to look at it as
five
repeating sets of that ti-
tum
heartbeat. My old cello teacher liked to do it this way, clapping her hands as she did so:

and
one
and
two
and
three
and
four
and
five

In music that would be five bars (or five measures if you’re American). In poetry such a bar or measure is called a
foot
.

Five
feet
marching in rhythm. If the foot is the heartbeat, the metre can best be described as the readout or cardiogram trace.

Let’s give the metre meaning by substituting words.

He
bangs
the
drum
and
makes
a
dread
ful
noise

That line consists of
FIVE
ti-
tum
feet:

It is a line of
TEN
syllables (
decasyllabic
):

Ten syllables where in this metre the accent always falls on the
even-numbered beat
. Notice, though, that there aren’t ten
words
in this example, there are only nine. That’s because ‘dreadful’ has two syllables.

Bangs, drum, makes, dread
and
noise
are those even-numbered accented words (and syllable) here. You could show the rhythm of the line like this:

Some metrists would call ‘he’, ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘a’ and ‘-ful’
DEPRESSIONS
. Other words to describe a non-stressed syllable are
SLACK
,
SCUD
and
WEAK
. The line has a rising rhythm, that is the point: from weak to strong, terminating in its fifth stressed beat.

The most usual way to
SCAN
the line, in other words to demonstrate its metric structure and show the cardiogram trace as it were, is to divide the five feet with this mark| (known as a
VIRGULE
, the same as the French word for ‘comma’ or ‘slash’ that you might remember from school) and use symbols to indicate the accented and the weak syllables. Here I have chosen
to represent the off-beat, the depressed, unaccented syllable, and
for the beat, stress or accented syllable.

There are other accepted ways of marking
SCANSION
: using–or u or x for an
un
accented beat and / for an
accented
one. If you were taught scansion at school or have a book on the subject you will often see one of the following:

For the most part I shall be sticking to
and
however, as I find they represent the ti and the
tum
more naturally. Besides, the other scansion marks derive from classical metre, which was concerned with vowel
length
rather than stress.

The Great Iamb (and other binary feet)

The word for a rising-rhythm foot with a ti-
tum
,
beat like those above is an iambus, more usually called an
IAMB
.

I remember this by thinking of Popeye, whose trademark rusty croak went:

I
yam
what I
yam
…

Iámb, iámb, iámb

We will concentrate on this foot for the rest of this section, but you should know that there are three other feet in the same
BINARY
(two unit) family.

The
TROCHEE
is a backwards iamb, a
falling
rhythm,
tum
-ti: