The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (27 page)

The mighty broken engine sleeps

The arctic wind’s remorseless breath

From laughing life to frozen death

So frail the life of mortal man

How fragile seems the human span

How narrow then, how weak its girth–

The bridge between our death and birth

The cable snaps

All hopes collapse

Nothing very original or startling there: ‘human clay’ is a very tired old cliché, as is ‘stress and strain’; ‘girth’ and ‘birth’ don’t seem to be going anywhere, but with some tweaking and whittling a poem could perhaps emerge from beneath our toiling fingers. See now if
you
can come up with four or five couplets, rhyming snatches or phrases of a similar nature: do not try and write in modern English–you are a Victorian, remember. When you have done that we can proceed.

How did you do? Well enough to be driven on to complete a few verses? As it happens and as perhaps you already knew from the moment I mentioned the River Tay, a poem
was
written on this very catastrophe by William McGonagall.
¹⁰
It remains the work for which he is best known: his masterpiece, if you will. I am too kind to you and to his memory to reproduce the entire poem:

The Tay Bridge Disaster

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

’Twas about seven o’clock at night,

And the wind it blew with all its might,

And the rain came pouring down,

And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,

And the Demon of the air seem’d to say–

‘I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.’

When the train left Edinburgh

The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,

But Boreas blew a terrific gale,

Which made their hearts for to quail,

And many of the passengers with fear did say–

‘I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay’

So the train sped on with all its might,

And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,

And the passengers’ hearts felt light,

Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,

With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,

And wish them all a happy New Year.

…

(Burma’s last monarch). Sadly, many believe this was one of many cruel hoaxes perpetrated on the unfortunate poet.

I must now conclude my lay

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,

That your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.

Almost everything that can go wrong with a poem has gone wrong here. One might argue that McGonagall has brilliantly memorialised a doomed and structurally flawed bridge in congruently doomed and structurally flawed verse. His poem is a disaster for a disaster: it
is
the Tay Bridge, crashing hopelessly to its destruction and dragging every innocent word with it. It is not buttressed by metre, rhyme, sense or reason and even as we read it we feel it collapse under the weight of its own absurdity and ineptitude.

I will not linger long on why it fails so spectacularly: it must surely be apparent to you. The metre of course is all over the place. Even if this were
accentually
written like a music hall turn, folk ballad or other non-syllabic rhythmic verse, there is no discernible pattern of three-stress, four-stress or five-stress rhythm at work. The poem is arbitrarily laid out in stanzas of five, six, six, five, six, eight, nine and thirteen lines which create no expectations to fulfil or withhold. This in part contributes to its overall narrative slackness.

We have lots of
Tay
rhymes:
say, midway, dismay, lay, bray
. There are
night, might, sight
and
moonlight; known/blown, down/frown, gale/quail
and
build/killed
.

There is, however, excruciating para-rhyme laid on for our pleasure.
Edinburgh/felt no sorrow
forces a rather American
Edin-borrow
pronunciation, or else
surrer
for
sorrow. Buttresses/confesses
will never be a happy pair, nor is the repeated
seventy-nine
/
time
assonance at all successful. If you are going to assonate, much better to do it
within
the verse, not on the last line of a stanza, as we saw with the Zephaniah poem.

The archaic
expletives
(metrical fillers) and inversions: ‘did say’ and ‘do build’ for ‘said’ and ‘build’ and ‘their hearts for to quail’ are not pleasant; ‘the wind it blew’ is a common enough formulation in ballads trying to get round the problem of the lack of a weak syllable between ‘wind’ and ‘blew’(‘the rain it raineth every day’ and so on), but cannot be considered a satisfactory phrase in a serious poem. Nor do such archaisms as ‘hove’ (for ‘came’) and ‘lay’ (for ‘song’) please the reader. It is, of course, the sheer
banality
that lives longest in the mind and most contributes to our sense of this being such a
tour de farce
. This banality mostly derives from McGonagall’s word choice (what is known as
poetic diction
) and word choice is shown here to be most pitifully at the mercy of
rhyme
. It is not only the rhyming words themselves that are at fault, but the phrases and syntax used in order to reach those rhyme words. Not to mention the accidental and gruesome internal rhyme
Sabbath day
in line 4 of stanza 1. With his rhyming alone McGonagall has already sabotaged his poem. A perfectly fine piece might in other hands have been worked up from the full rhyme pairs he found,
night
/
might
et cetera, and from the perfectly laudable sentiments he expresses, but a committee comprising Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, Frost, Auden and Larkin could do little with those unfortunate para-rhymes.

As it happens Gerard Manley Hopkins had already composed another ‘disaster poem’, his ‘The Wreck of the
Deutschland
’ exactly four years earlier: it was written to commemorate the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who lost their lives at sea in 1875.

Into the snows she sweeps,

Hurling the haven behind,

The
Deutschland
, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,

For the infinite air is unkind,

And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow

Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

That splendid last line has spawned the popular kenning ‘widowmaker’ to describe the sea, and latterly by extension vessels of the deep, as in the Hollywood movie
K-19: The Widowmaker. Wiry
and
white-fiery
works well as internal rhyme, together with all the usual head rhymes, assonances and consonances we expect from Hopkins. Otherwise he uses the fairly neutral and simple
sweeps/keeps/deeps, blow/snow
and
behind/kind
. He nestles the eye-rhyme
wind
into the
quarter wiry white
alliteration and it doesn’t stand out as too ugly. Mind you, there is some less than comfortable rhyming elsewhere in the poem. Stanza 15 contains this unfortunate internal rhyme:

And frightful the nightfall folded rueful a day

Frightful indeed–to our ears at least: but perhaps ‘frightful’ was not such a trivial word in 1875. Some three and a half decades later the loss of the
Titanic
inspired Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’:

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later destiny,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Says ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

While I yield to none in my admiration of Hardy, I do not believe this to be his finest work. The characteristic obsession with ‘the Spinner of the Years’ (‘The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything’ he calls it in an earlier alexandrine in the same poem, or ‘the President of the Immortals’ in his deathless phrase from
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
) gives the whole an appropriate sense of imminent, inexorable doom, which is of course its very subject as we know from the title. But ‘they were bent/By paths coincident’ is not very happy, nor is ‘being anon twin halves of one august event’. ‘August’ seems an almost comically inappropriate word for such a tragedy and ‘anon’ smells very dated in a poem written just two years before T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and indeed in the very same year that Ezra Pound and others were founding the Imagist movement. All in all it is a surprisingly flawed poem from so fine a poet and it is partly the
rhyming
that makes it so. In stanza VIII the word
hue
is manifestly used only to go with
grew
. The image of the iceberg ‘growing’ was so important to the central idea of the poem that Hardy could not resist the rhyme. But what was so special about the
hue
of the
Titanic
? Its red funnel? You could argue I suppose that in such a monochrome world as the North Atlantic
anything
man-made would seem colourful, but really it is clear that the word is a dud, chosen primarily for its rhyme. Also unattractively primitive is the internal rhyme in the alexandrine ‘In shadowy silent distance
grew
the Iceberg
too
’. In the following stanza the slight wrenching of ‘destiny’ can hardly be counted a wonderful success either. Infelicitous rhyming triplets in stanzas omitted here include
meant/opulent/indifferent
and
sea/vanity/she
. Nonetheless it is clearly a whole continent better as verse than poor old McGonagall’s effort. There is effortless metrical consistency, there is a
scheme
: three-line stanzas (rhyming triplets) the last of which is an alexandrine. The two shorter trimetric lines atop each hexameter look a little like a ship on a wide sea with the roman numeral stanza numbers forming the funnel. That may sound fanciful, but if you squint through half-closed eyes at that last stanza I’m sure you will see what I mean. For all its less than technically superior rhyming (and therefore word choices or
diction
) it is at least memorable, grave and thoroughly thought through.

Now for the second disaster poem that you, the Victorian poet, must write: the year is 1854 and you are Britain’s Poet Laureate. Alfred, Lord Tennyson has just unexpectedly resigned the post so it is now
your
patriotic duty to write a poem about a disastrous British cavalry charge that has just taken place on the peninsula that lies between the Ukraine and the Black Sea. Due to some monstrous error, an officer, Captain Nolan, had galloped down from the Causeway Heights above the Balaclava plain pointing with his sabre at the Russian battery in the valley below, yelling ‘There are your guns, charge them!’ or words to that effect, according at least to the report by W. H. Russell in
The Times
that you, along with the rest of the nation have just read with avid horror. Those were
not
in fact the guns that Lord Cardigan, his commanding officer, had meant at all, the whole thing has been a catastrophic cock-up from start to finish. A cock-up but a gallant one: Disraeli has just told a packed and stunned House of Commons that it was ‘a feat of chivalry, fiery with consummate courage, and bright with flashing courage’. Of the 673 mounted officers and men of the 13th Light Dragoons, 17th Lancers and 11th Hussars–a cavalry troop collectively known as the Light Brigade–157 have lost their lives. Nothing was achieved. A military disaster as traumatic and tragic for the nation as the collapse of the Tay Bridge was to be in twenty-five years’ time.

Your mission, then, is to write up the debacle into a poem that will tell the story, sum up the public mood and stand as a worthy memorial to the brave dead.

What do you do? What sort of preparatory scribbles do you make in your poet’s notebook?

As for metre,
short
lines, you decide. Falling rhythms of dactyls and trochees would be a good choice, echoing the fierceness and rush of the action and suggesting the cadences of a bugle sounding the charge:
Tum
-da-da,
tum
-da-da,
tum
-da-da
dum
-da!
Tum
-dada,
tum
-da-da,
tum
-da-da
dum
! That sort of effect. But as for
rhymes
…