The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (30 page)

Terza Rima

Tercets, three-line stanzas, can be independent entities rhyming
aba cdc
and so on, or they might demand a special kind of interlocking scheme such as can be found in
TERZA RIMA
, the form in which Dante wrote
Inferno, Purgatorio
and
Paradiso
.

The
TERZA RIMA
mode is very fine,

Great Dante used it for his famous text;

It rhymes the words in every other line

With each thought drawing you towards the next:

A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C-D…

This middle rhyme is sequently annexed

To form the outer rhymes of Stanza Three

And thus we make an interlocking
rhyme
:

This subtle trick explains, at least to me,

Just why this form has stood the test of
time.

As you can see, this linked rhyming can go on for ever, the middle line of each stanza forming the outer rhymes of the one that follows it. When you come to the end of a thought, thread or section, you add a fourth line to that stanza and use up the rhyme that would otherwise have gone with the next. I have done this with ‘rhyme’ and appended the (indented) stop-line ‘Just why this form has stood the test of time’. A young Hopkins used a stop-
couplet
to end his early terza rima poem, ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’:

I see long reefs of violets

In beryl-covered ferns so dim,

A gold-water Pactolus frets

Its brindled wharves and yellow brim,

The waxen colours weep and run,

And slendering to his burning rim

Into the flat blue mist the sun

Drops out and the day is done.

Chaucer, under Dante’s influence, wrote the first English terza rima poem, ‘A Complaint to his Lady’, but the best-known example in English is probably Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,

Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

It does not matter how you lay out your verse (Shelley used five fourteen-line stanzas) or in what metre (Hopkins wrote in iambic tetrameter and Shelley in pentameter): it is the
rhyme-scheme
that defines the form.

In order of ascending line length, the
QUATRAIN
comes next.

The Quatrain

The
QUATRAIN
is
HEROIC
and profound

And glories in the deeds of noble days:

Pentameters of grave and mighty sound,

Like rolling cadences of brass, give praise.

Alas! its
ELEGIAC
counterpart

Bemoans with baleful woe this world of strife:

In graveyards and in tears it plies its art

Lamenting how devoid of hope is life.

In equal form the
COMIC QUATRAIN
’s made,

But free to say exactly what it thinks;

It’s brave enough to call a spade a spade

And dig for truth however much it stinks.

There is, of course, no
formal
difference between those three samples, they are merely produced to show you that quatrains in
abab
have been used for all kinds of purposes in English poetry. Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is probably the best-known
elegiac
use quatrains have been put to. Its lines have given the world classic book and film titles (
Far from the Madding Crowd
and
Paths of Glory
) as well as providing some memorably stirring phrases:

Forbade to wade
⁴
through slaughter to a throne,

And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;

A cross-rhymed quatrain (perhaps obviously) allows for fuller development of an image or conceit than can be achieved with couplets:

Full many a gem of purest ray
serene

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean
bear
;

Full many a flower is born to blush un
seen
,

And waste its sweetness on the desert
air
.

(Gray’s repetition of ‘Full many’ is an example of a rhetorical trope called
anaphora
, in case you are interested, in case you care, in case you didn’t already know, in case of too much anaphora, break glass. Actually, that was
epanaphora
.)

The Rubai

From Persia comes a quatrain form called the
RUBAI
(plural
ruba’iat
or
ruba’iyat
), rhyming
aaba, ccdc, eefe
etc.

In ancient Persia and Islamic lands,

The price of heresy was both your hands:

Indeed the cost could even be your
head

(Or burial up to it in the sands).

The wiser heads would write a
RUBAI
down

And pass it quietly round from town to town,

Anonymous, subversive and direct–

The best examples garnered great renown.

Collections of these odes, or
RUBA’IYAT

Showed sultans where progressive thought was at;

Distributed by dissidents and wits,

Like early forms of Russian samizdat.

The Ruba’iyat of Omar, called Khayyam,

Are quatrains of expansive, boozy charm.

As found in Horace, Herrick and Marvell,

The message is: ‘Drink! When did wine do harm?

Too soon the sun will set upon our tents,

Don’t waste your time with pious, false laments

Drink deep the wine of life, then drink some more’

I never heard a poet make more sense.

The translation of the
Ruba’iat of Omar Khayyam
by Edward Fitzgerald ranks alongside Burton’s
Arabian Nights
as one of the great achievements of English orientalism:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread,–and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness–

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

…

’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,

But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;

And he that toss’d Thee down into the Field,

He knows about it all–He knows–HE knows!

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

If that kind of poetry doesn’t make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends. Open forms in sixain also exist in English verse. Wordsworth in his ‘Daffodils’ used the stanza form Shakespeare developed in ‘Venus and Adonis’, essentially a cross-rhymed quatrain closing with a couplet,
abab cc
:

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the Daffodils.

Rhyme Royal

R
HYME
R
OYAL
has a noble history

From Geoffrey Chaucer to the present day

Its secret is no hidden mystery:

Iambic feet, the classic English way

With
b
and
b
to follow
a b a
.

This closing couplet, like a funeral hearse,

Drives to its end the body of the verse.

R
HYME
R
OYAL
(or Rime Royal as it is sometimes rendered) is most associated with Geoffrey Chaucer, whose
Troilus and Criseyde
marks the form’s first appearance in English. It was once thought that the name derived from its later use by Henry IV, but this is now, like all pleasing stories (from King Alfred’s Cakes to Mr Gere’s way with gerbils), disputed by scholars. I suppose by rights a seven-line stanza should be called a heptain or septain, but I have never seen either word used. Auden used the
ababbcc
of rhyme royal in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. You would think that he would choose
ottava rima
, the form in which the addressee so conspicuously excelled. Auden apologises to his Lordship for not doing so:

Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper

The proper instrument on which to pay

My compliments, but I should come a cropper;

Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough to play.

But if no classics as in Chaucer’s day,

At least my modern pieces shall be cheery

Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory.

Auden’s reluctance to use
ottava rima
stemmed, one suspects, from its demand for an extra rhyme. I have always loved this form, however, as my sample verse makes clear.

Ottava Rima

O
TTAVA
R
IMA
is a poet’s dream,

The most congenial of forms by far.

It’s quite my favourite prosodic scheme

And Byron’s too, which lends it some éclat.

Much more adaptable than it may seem,

It plays both classical and rock guitar;

It suits romantic lyric inspiration,

But I prefer Byronic-style deflation.

As you can see, O
TTAVA
R
IMA
rhymes
abababcc
and thus presents in eight lines, hence the ottava, as in octave. It is in effect rhyme royal with an extra line, but just as one or more gene in the strand of life can make all the difference, so one or more line in a stanza can quite alter the identity of a form. The origins of ottava rima are to be found in Ariosto’s epic
Orlando Furioso
and it entered English in translations of this and other Italian epics. John Hookham Frere saw its potential for mock-heroic use and it was through his 1817 work
Whistlecraft
that Byron came to use the form, first in
Beppo
and then in his masterpiece of subverted epic and scattergun satire,
Don Juan
.

As Auden remarks, ‘Rhyme-royal’s difficult enough…’. Two pairs of three rhymes and a couplet per verse. Perverse indeed.

Some of W. B. Yeats’s best loved later poems take the form away from scabrous mock-heroics by mixing true rhyme with the sonorous twentieth-century possibilities opened up by the use of slant-rhyme, finding an unexpected lyricism. This is the celebrated last stanza of ‘Among School Children’:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I trust you are still
reading out loud
…

Spenserian Stanza

Nine lines of verse did
E
DMUND
S
PENSER
take

To forge the style that bears his name divine,

A form that weaves and wanders like a snake

With art all supple, subtle, serpentine,

Constructing verse of intricate design