The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within
The Ode Less Travelled
Unlocking the Poet Within
Also by Stephen Fry
FICTION
The Liar
The Hippopotamus
Making History
The Stars’ Tennis Balls
NON-FICTION
Paperweight
Moab Is My Washpot
Rescuing the Spectacled Bear
with Hugh Laurie
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
A Bit More Fry and Laurie
Three Bits of Fry and Laurie
Stephen Fry
The Ode Less Travelled
Unlocking the Poet Within
HUTCHINSON
LONDON
Published by Hutchinson in 2005
Copyright © Stephen Fry 2005
Stephen Fry has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in 2005 in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson
H
UTCHINSON
The Random House Group Limited 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London
SWIV 2SA
Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 1-4295-2143-0
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
W
ILLIAM
A
RTHUR
W
ARD
For Rory Stuart, a good, superior and great teacher.
Table of Contents
How to Read this Book. Three Golden Rules
I
How We Speak. Meet Metre. The Great Iamb. The Iambic Pentameter.
Poetry Exercises 1 & 2
III
More Metres: Four Beats to the Line. Mixed Feet.
Poetry Exercise 5
V
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.
Poetry Exercise 7
. Sprung Rhythm.
VI
Syllabic Verse.
Poetry Exercises 8 & 9
: Coleridge’s ‘
Lesson for a Boy
’.
I
The Basic Categories of Rhyme. Partial Rhymes. Feminine and Triple Rhymes. Rich Rhyme.
I
The Stanza. What is Form and Why Bother with It?
III
The Ballad.
Poetry Exercise 12
IV
Heroic Verse.
Poetry Exercise 13
V
The Ode: Sapphic, Pindaric, Horatian, The Lyric Ode, Anacreontics.
IX
Exotic Forms: Haiku, Senryu, Tanka. Ghazal. Luc Bat. Tanaga.
Poetry Exercise 18
XI
Shaped Verse. Pattern Poems. Silly, Silly Forms. Acrostics.
Poetry Exercise 20
I
The Whale. The Cat and the Act. Madeline. Diction. Being Alert to Language.
Foreword
I
HAVE A DARK AND DREADFUL SECRET
. I write poetry. This is an embarrassing confession for an adult to make. In their idle hours Winston Churchill and Noël Coward painted. For fun and relaxation Albert Einstein played the violin. Hemingway hunted, Agatha Christie gardened, James Joyce sang arias and Nabokov chased butterflies. But
poetry
?
I have a friend who drums in the attic, another who has been building a boat for years. An actor I know is prouder of the reproduction eighteenth-century duelling pistols he makes in a small workshop than he is of his knighthood. Britain is a nation of hobbyists–eccentric amateurs, talented part-timers, Pooterish potterers and dedicated autodidacts in every field of human endeavour. But
poetry
?
An adolescent girl may write poetry, so long as it is securely locked up in her pink leatherette five-year diary. Suburban professionals are permitted to enter jolly pastiche competitions in the
Spectator
and
New Statesman
. At a pinch, a young man may be allowed to write a verse or two of dirty doggerel and leave it on a post-it note stuck to the fridge when he has forgotten to buy a Valentine card. But that’s
it
. Any more forays into the world of Poesy and you release the beast that lurks within every British breast–and the name of the beast is Embarrassment.
And yet…
I believe poetry is a primal impulse within us all. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it. I believe our poetic impulse is blocked by the false belief that poetry might on the one hand be academic and technical and on the other formless and random. It seems to many that while there is a clear road to learning music, gardening or watercolours, poetry lies in inaccessible marshland: no pathways, no signposts, just the skeletons of long-dead poets poking through the bog and the unedifying sight of living ones floundering about in apparent confusion and mutual enmity. Behind it all, the dread memory of classrooms swollen into resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to ‘respond’ to a poem.
For me the private act of writing poetry is songwriting, confessional, diary-keeping, speculation, problem-solving, storytelling, therapy, anger management, craftsmanship, relaxation, concentration and spiritual adventure all in one inexpensive package.
Suppose I want to paint but seem to have no obvious talent. Never mind: there are artist supply shops selling paints, papers, pastels, charcoals and crayons. There are ‘How To’ books everywhere. Simple lessons in the rules of proportion and guides to composition and colourmixing can make up for my lack of natural ability and provide painless technical grounding. I am helped by grids and outlines, pantographs and tracing paper; precise instructions guide me in how to prepare a canvas, prime it with paint and wash it into an instant watercolour sky. There are instructional videos available; I can even find channels on cable and satellite television showing gentle hippies painting lakes, carving pine trees with palette knives and dotting them with impasto snow. Mahlsticks, sable, hogs-hair, turpentine and linseed. Viridian, umber, ochre and carmine. Perspective, chiaroscuro,
sfumato
, grisaille, tondo and
morbidezza
. Reserved modes and materials. The tools of the trade. A new jargon to learn. A whole initiation into technique, form and style.
Suppose I want to play music but seem to have no obvious talent. Never mind: there are music shops selling instruments, tuning forks, metronomes and ‘How To’ books by the score. And scores by the score. Instructional videos abound. I can buy digital keyboards linked to programmes that plug into my computer and guide me through the rudiments, monitoring my progress and accuracy. I start with scales and move on to chords and arpeggios. There are horsehair, rosin and catgut, reeds, plectrums and mouthpieces. There are diminished sevenths, augmented fifths, relative minors, trills and accidentals. There are riffs and figures, licks and vamps. Sonata, adagio, crescendo, scherzo and twelve-bar blues. Reserved modes and materials. The tools of the trade. A new jargon to learn. A whole initiation into technique, form and style.
To help us further there are evening classes, clubs and groups. Pack up your easel and palette and go into the countryside with a party of like-minded enthusiasts. Sit down with a friend and learn a new chord on the guitar. Join a band. Turn your watercolour view of Lake Windermere into a tablemat or T-shirt. Burn your version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ onto a CD and alarm your friends.
None of these adventures into technique and proficiency will necessarily turn you into a genius or even a proficient craftsman. Your view of
Snow on York Minster
, whether languishing in the loft or forming the basis of this year’s Christmas card doesn’t make you Turner, Constable or Monet. Your version of ‘Für Elise’ on electric piano might not threaten Alfred Brendel, your trumpet blast of ‘Basin Street Blues’ could be so far from Satchmo that it hurts and your take on ‘Lela’ may well stand as an eternal reproach to all those with ears to hear. You may not sell a single picture, be invited even once to deputise for the church organist when she goes down with shingles or have any luck at all when you try out for the local Bay City Rollers tribute band. You are neither Great Artist, sessions professional, illustrator or admired amateur.
So what? You are someone who paints a bit, scratches around on the keyboard for fun, gets a kick out of learning a tune or discovering a new way of rendering the face of your beloved in charcoal. You have another life, you have family, work and friends but this is a hobby, a pastime, FUN. Do you give up the Sunday kick-around because you’ll never be Thierry Henry? Of course not. That would be pathologically vain. We don’t stop talking about how the world might be better just because we have no chance of making it to Prime Minister. We are all politicians. We are all artists. In an open society everything the mind and hands can achieve is our birthright. It is up to us to claim it.
And you know, you
might
be the real thing, or someone with the potential to give as much pleasure to others as you derive yourself. But how you will ever know if you don’t try?
As the above is true of painting and music, so it is true of cookery and photography and gardening and interior decoration and chess and poker and skiing and sailing and carpentry and bridge and wine and knitting and brass-rubbing and line-dancing and the hundreds of other activities that enrich and enliven the daily toil of getting and spending, mortgages and shopping, school and office. There are rules, conventions, techniques, reserved objects, equipment and paraphernalia, time-honoured modes, forms, jargon and tradition. The average practitioner doesn’t expect to win prizes, earn a fortune, become famous or acquire absolute mastery in their art, craft, sport–or as we would say now, their chosen leisure pursuit.
It really is enough to have fun
.
The point remains: it isn’t a burden to learn the difference between acid and alkaline soil or understand how f-stops and exposure times affect your photograph. There’s no drudgery or humiliation in discovering how to knit, purl and cast off, snowplough your skis, deglaze a pan, carve a dovetail or tot up your bridge hand according to Acol. Only an embarrassed adolescent or deranged coward thinks jargon and reserved languages are pretentious and that detail and structure are boring. Sensible people are above simpering at references to colour in music, structure in wine or rhythm in architecture. When you learn to sail you are literally shown the ropes and taught that they are called sheets or painters and that knots are hitches and forward is aft and right is starboard. That is not pseudery or exclusivity, it is precision, it is part of initiating the newcomer into the guild. Learning the lingo is the beginning of our rite of passage.
In music, tempo is not the same as rhythm, which is not the same as pulse. There are metronomic indications and time signatures. At some point along the road between picking out a tune with one finger and really playing
we need to know
these distinctions. For some it comes naturally and seems inborn, for most of us the music is buried deep inside but needs a little coaxing and tuition to be got out. So someone shows us, or we progress by video, evening class or book.
Talent is inborn but technique is learned
.
Talent without technique is like an engine without a steering wheel, gears or brakes. It doesn’t matter how thoroughbred and powerful the V12 under the bonnet if it can’t be steered and kept under control. Talented people who do nothing with their gifts often crash and burn. A great truth, so obvious that it is almost a secret, is that most people are embarrassed to the point of shame by their talents. Ashamed of their gifts but proud to bursting of their achievements. Do athletes boast of their hand-eye coordination, grace and natural sense of balance? No, they talk of how hard they trained, the sacrifices they made, the effort they put in.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning’s cry brings us back, at last, to poetry. While it is perfectly possible that you did not learn music at school, or drawing and painting, it is almost certain that you did learn poetry. Not how to do it, almost never how to write your own, but how, God help us, to
appreciate
it.
We have all of us,
all of us
, sat with brows furrowed feeling incredibly dense and dumb as the teacher asks us to respond to an image or line of verse.
What do you think Wordsworth was referring to here?
What does Wilfred Owen achieve by choosing this metaphor?
How does Keats respond to the nightingale?
Why do you think Shakespeare uses the word ‘gentle’ as a verb?
What is Larkin’s attitude to the hotel room?
It brings it all back, doesn’t it? All the red-faced, blood-pounding humiliation and embarrassment of being singled out for comment.
The way poetry was taught at school reminded W. H. Auden of a
Punch
cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A. E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:
T
EACHER
1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird Or but a wandering voice?
T
EACHER
2: State the alternative preferred With reasons for your choice.
Even if some secret part of you might have been privately moved and engaged, you probably went through a stage of loathing those bores Shakespeare, Keats, Owen, Eliot, Larkin and all who came before and after them. You may love them now, you may still hate them or perhaps you feel entirely indifferent to the whole pack of them. But however well or badly we were taught English literature, how many of us have ever been shown how to write our own poems?
Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to rhyme. Don’t bother with metre and verses. Just express yourself. Pour out your feelings.
Suppose you had never played the piano in your life.
Don’t worry, just lift the lid and
express yourself
. Pour out your feelings.
We have all heard children do just that and we have all wanted to treat them with great violence as a result. Yet this is the only instruction we are ever likely to get in the art of writing poetry:
Anything goes.
But that’s how modern poetry
works
, isn’t it? Free verse, don’t they call it?
Vers libre
?
Ye-e-es…And in avant-garde music, John Cage famously wrote a piece of silence called ‘4 Minutes 33 Seconds’ and created other works requiring ball-bearings and chains to be dropped on to prepared pianos. Do music teachers suggest that to children? Do we encourage them to ignore all harmony and rhythm and just make noise? It is important to realise that Cage’s first pieces were written in the Western compositional tradition, in movements with conventional Italian names like lento, vivace and fugato. Picasso’s early paintings are flawless models of figurative accuracy. Listening to music may inspire an extraordinary emotional response, but extraordinary emotions are not enough to make music.
Unlike musical notation, paint or clay, language is inside every one of us. For free. We are all proficient at it. We already have the palette, the paints and the instruments. We don’t have to go and buy any reserved materials. Poetry is made of the same stuff you are reading now, the same stuff you use to order pizza over the phone, the same stuff you yell at your parents and children, whisper in your lover’s ear and shove into an e-mail, text or birthday card. It is common to us all. Is that why we resent being told that there is a technique to its highest expression, poetry? I cannot ski, so I would like to be shown how to. I cannot paint, so I would value some lessons. But I can speak and write, so do not waste my time telling me that I need lessons in poetry, which is, after all, no more than emotional writing, with or without the odd rhyme. Isn’t it?
Jan Schreiber in a review of Timothy Steele’s
Missing Measures
, says this of modern verse:
The writing of poetry has been made laughably easy. There are no technical constraints. Knowledge of the tradition is not necessary, nor is a desire to communicate, this having been supplanted in many practitioners by the more urgent desire to express themselves. Even sophistication in the manipulation of syntax is not sought. Poetry, it seems, need no longer be at least as well written as prose.
Personally, I find writing without form, metre or rhyme not ‘laughably easy’ but fantastically difficult. If you can do it, good luck to you and farewell, this book is not for you: but a word of warning from W.H. Auden before you go.