The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (13 page)

Six feet give us a
hexameter
, the line of choice in most classical verse:

As a single line it works fine. The experience of writing whole poems in hexameters, in six footers, is that they turn out to be a bit cumbersome in English. The pentameter seems to fit the human breath perfectly (which is why it was used, not just by Shakespeare, but by just about all English verse dramatists). French poets and playwrights like Racine did use the hexameter or
alexandrine
²⁰
all the time, in English verse it is rare. What’s so different about French, then? I think the most important reason is, as I made clear earlier, that French words tend not to be so varied in their accentuation as English. Why is this relevant? Well, it means that French poetry, since so many words are equally stressed, relies more on what is known as ‘quantitative measure’–divisions based on the temporal duration of long and short vowels.
²¹
This is how classical Greek and Latin poetry was constructed. Most English verse–as I hope we have discovered–is metred by
syllabic accentuation
, the rises and falls of stress.

You can certainly try to write whole English poems composed of iambic hexameter, but I suspect you’ll find, in common with English language poets who experimented with it on and off for the best part of a thousand years, that it yields rather clumsy results. Its best use is as a closing line to stanzas, as in Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the
Titanic
)’:

And consummation comes and jars two hemispheres.

Keats ends each stanza of ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ with an alexandrine in a style derived from the verse of Edmund Spenser.

She sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.

Alexander Pope in his (otherwise) pentametric
An Essay on Criticism
was harsh on these Spenserian mannerisms and included this self-descriptive hexameter:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

There are very few examples of
eight-beat
lines in English verse. Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ is a rare successful example of a
trochaic octameter
:

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the Robin’s breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;

In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Another very familiar example is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

You will notice Poe chooses to end the even-numbered lines strongly, docking the final weak syllable, as Tennyson does for every line of ‘Locksley Hall’. You might also notice how in reading, one tends to break up these line lengths into two manageable four-stress half-lines: Poe’s lines have very clear and unmistakable caesuras, while Tennyson’s are less forceful. The four-stress impulse in English verse is very strong, as we shall see. Nabokov, in his
Notes on Prosody
, suggests that the hexameter is a limit ‘beyond which the metrical line is no longer felt as a line and breaks in two’.

Heptameters
, seven-stress lines, are possible, and certainly do tend to ‘break in two’. They are known in the trade as ‘fourteeners’, referring to the usual syllable count. Here’s a line from Hardy’s ‘The Lacking Sense’.

Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may

As you can see, it is perfectly iambic (though one could suggest demoting the fourth foot to a pyrrhic):

Actually, fourteeners were very popular in the sixteenth century, although Shakespeare disdained their use, a fact which has been adduced by some to damn the claims of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the real author of the Shakespearean canon, for Oxford loved them:

My life through lingering long is lodged, in lair of loathsome ways,

My death delayed to keep from life, the harm of hapless days.

This preposterously over-alliterated couplet hardly seems Shakespearean–in fact, Shakespeare mocked precisely such bombastic nonsense in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and the other unlettered ‘rude mechanicals’ in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, having great fun at the expense of Oxfordian fourteeners and their vulgar alliterations:

But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight, What dreadful dole is here?

Eyes, do you see? How can it be? O dainty duck, O dear.

You may notice that Hardy’s example is a ‘true’ heptameter, whereas Oxford’s lines (and Shakespeare’s parody of them) are in effect so broken by the caesuras after the fourth foot that they could be written thus:

My life through lingering long is lodged,

In lair of loathsome ways,

My death delayed to keep from life,

The harm of hapless days.

But stay: O spite! But Mark, poor knight,

What dreadful dole is here?

Eyes, do you see? How can it be?

O dainty duck, O dear.

We can do the same thing with Kipling’s popular ‘Tommy’, which he laid out in fourteeners:

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;

An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit

Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms

That guard you while you sleep

Is cheaper than them uniforms,

An’ they’re starvation cheap;

An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers

When they’re goin’ large a bit

Is five times better business

Than paradin’ in full kit.

What we have there are verses in lines footed in alternating fours and threes:
tetrameters
and
trimeters
, a metrical scheme you will see again and again in English poetry. Such four and three beat lines are also common in verse designed for singing which, after all, uses up more breath than speech. It would be rather difficult to sing a whole heptametric line without turning purple.

The long and winding road

and

You are the sunshine of my life

could
be called (by an ass) iambic trimeters and tetrameters respectively, while

That’s the way I like it

and

I can’t get no satisfaction

are trochaic trimeter and tetrameter. Of course, it is fundamentally daffy to scan lyrics (a word derived from the Greek
lyre
, the harp-like instrument used to accompany song) since it is the musical beat that determines emphasis, not the metrical stress. You could never guess the very particular emphasis on ‘get no’ just by reading the lyrics of ‘Satisfaction’ unless you knew the tune and rhythm it was written to fit.

F
OUR
B
EATS TO THE
L
INE

Wordsworth wrote ‘Daffodils’ in straight four-beat tetrameters.

I
wand
er’d
lone
ly
as
a
cloud

That
floats
on
high
o’er
vales
and
hills

When
all
at
once
I
saw
a
crowd
,

A
host
, of
gold
en
daff
o
dils
;

Tetrameter, the four-stress line, is immensely popular in English verse. If iambic pentameter, the Heroic Line, may be described as the great joint of beef, then tetrameters are the sandwiches–the everyday form if you like, and no less capable of greatness. If you ask someone to write a poetic ditty on a Valentine’s card or something similar, nine times out of ten they will write tetrameters, whether they do so consciously or not: the four-beat instinct is deep within us, much as in music the four/four time signature is so standard as to be the default: you don’t have to write it in the score, just a letter C for Common Time.

Four stresses also mark the base length of a form we will meet later called the
ballad
, where they usually alternate with three-stress lines, as in the anonymous seventeenth-century ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’:

And many was the feather-bed

That fluttered on the foam;

And many was the good lord’s son

That never more came home.

Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free:

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’:

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky.