Read The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within Online

Authors: Stephen Fry

Tags: #Poetry

The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (32 page)

Or there’s Wallace Casalingua’s ‘The Day My Trousers Fell’, which has even more syllables to contend with:

Now I
trust
that your
ears
you’ll be
lend
ing,

To this
tale
of our
dec
adent
times
;

There’s a be
gin
ning, a
mid
dle and an
end
ing

And for the
most
part there’s
rhyth
ms and
verses
and
rhymes
.

My
name
, you must
know
, is John
West
on,

Though to my
friends
I’m
Jack
ie or
Jack
;

I’ve a
place
on the
out
skirts of
Prest
on,

The tiniest
scrap
of a garden with a
shed
and a
hamm
ock
round’t
back
.

I was
giv
ing the
fish
girl her
pay
ment,

The
cod
were
nine
ty a
pound
–

When, with a
snap
and a rustle of
rai
ment

My
trous
ers, they
dropped
to the
ground
. Con-ster-nation.

Border
ballads, like ‘Barbara Allen’ and those of Walter Scott, became a popular genre in their own right, often like
broadsheet
ballads expressing political grievances, spreading news and celebrating the exploits of highwaymen and other popular rebels, rogues and heroes: subgenres like the
murder
ballad still exist,
⁶often told from the murderer’s point of view, full of grim detail and a sardonic acknowledgement of the inevitability of tragedy.

Frankie and Johnny were lovers,

O Lordy, how they could love;

They swore to be true to each other,

Just as true as the stars above.

He was her man but he done her wrong
.

Robert Service, the English-born Canadian poet, wrote very popular rough’n’tough ballads mostly set around the Klondike Gold Rush; you will really enjoy reading this out, don’t be afraid (if alone) to try a North American accent–and it should be
fast
:

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,

And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and glare,

There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.

He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,

Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.

There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;

But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

To observe the regularity of the caesuras in this ballad would be like complimenting an eagle on its intellectual grasp of the principles of aerodynamics, but I am sure you can see that ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’ could as easily be laid out with line breaks after ‘up’ and ‘box’ in the first two lines, ‘drink’ in the last and as the commas indicate elsewhere, to give it a standard four-three structure. We remember this layout from our examination of Kipling’s ballad in fourteeners, ‘Tommy’. A. E. Housman’s ‘The Colour of his Hair’,
⁷a bitter tirade against the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, is also cast in fourteeners. I can’t resist quoting it in full.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists?

And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;

In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;

Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair

For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid

To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;

But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,

And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,

And the quarry-gang on portland in the cold and in the heat,

And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare

He can curse the god that made him for the colour of his hair.

There is also a strong tradition of
rural
ballad, one of the best-known examples being the strangely macabre ‘John Barleycorn’:

There were three men come out of the West

Their fortunes for to try,

And these three men made a solemn vow:

John Barleycorn should die!

They plowed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,

Threw clods upon his head,

And these three men made a solemn vow:

John Barleycorn was dead!

They let him lie for a very long time

’Til the rain from Heaven did fall,

Then Little Sir John sprung up his head,

And so amazed them all.

After being scythed, threshed, pounded, malted and mashed, John Barleycorn (not a man of course, but a crop) ends his cycle in alcoholic form:

Here’s Little Sir John in a nut-brown bowl,

And brandy in a glass!

And Little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl

Proved the stronger man at last!

For the huntsman he can't hunt the fox

Nor loudly blow his horn,

And the tinker can’t mend kettles nor pots

Without John Barleycorn!

There are ballad
operas
(John Gay’s
The Beggar’s Opera
being the best known),
jazz
ballads and pop ballads culminating in that revolting genre, the
power
ballad–but here we are leaking into popular music where the word has come to mean nothing much more than a slow love song, often (in the case of the American diva’s power ballad) repulsively vain and self-regarding, all the authentic guts, vibrancy, self-deprecation and lively good humour bleached out and replaced by the fraudulent intensity of grossly artificial climaxing. I acquit country music of these vices. American ballads,
cowboy
ballads,
frontier
ballads and so on, were extensively collected by the Lomax family, much in the same way that Cecil Sharpe had done for rural and border ballads and other native British genres of folk and community music. Shel Silverstein came up with the ever-popular ‘A Boy Named Sue’ for Johnny Cash, who also wrote and performed his own superb examples, I would especially recommend the ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ if you don’t already know it.

One of the great strengths of the ballad in its more
literary
incarnations is that its rousing folk and comic associations can be subverted or ironically countered. Its sense of being somehow traditional, communal and authorless contrasts with that individuality and strong authorial presence we expect from the modern poet, often so alone, angst-ridden and disconnected. Both John Betjeman and W. H. Auden used this contrast to their advantage. The strong ballad structure of Betjeman’s ‘Death in Leamington’ counters the grim, grey hopelessness of suburban lives with a characteristically mournful irony:

She died in the upstairs bedroom

By the light of the evening star

That shone through the plate glass window

From over Leamington Spa.

[…]

Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,

At the grey, decaying face,

As the calm of a Leamington evening

Drifted into the place.

She moved the table of bottles

Away from the bed to the wall;

And tiptoeing gently over the stairs

Turned down the gas in the hall.

While Auden does much the same with the less genteel ‘Miss Gee’:

Let me tell you a little story

About Miss Edith Gee;

She lived in Clevedon Terrace

At Number 83.

…

She bicycled down to the doctor,

And rang the surgery bell;

‘O doctor, I’ve a pain inside me,

And I don’t feel very well.’

Doctor Thomas looked her over,

And then he looked some more;

Walked over to his wash-basin,

Said, ‘Why didn’t you come before?’

Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,

Though his wife was waiting to ring,

Rolling his bread into pellets;

Said, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing.’

…

They laid her on the table,

The students began to laugh;

And Mr Rose the surgeon

He cut Miss Gee in half.

Casting such lost lives as ballad heroes certainly provides an ironic contrast with which to mock the arid futility of much twentieth-century life. To use the rhythms of the greenwood and the yardarm for the cloying refinement of Leamington or the grimness of Miss Gee’s forlorn little world can indeed point up the chasm between the sterile present and the rich past, but such a mismatch also works in the
opposite
direction, it raises the lonely spinsters out of their ordinariness and connects them to the tradition and richness of history, it mythologises them, if you like. When an artist paints a prostitute in the manner of a Renaissance Madonna he is simultaneously marking an ironic distinction
and
forging an affirmative connection. The artists Gilbert and George have done much the same with their skinheads in stained-glass. These are strategies that only work because of the nature of form and genre.

Poetry Exercise 12

A poet can be rough and flexible with the ballad, it is the beat and the narrative drive that sustains. Your exercise is to finish the one that I started a few pages ago.

Now gather round and let me tell

The tale of Danny Wise:

And how his sweet wife Annabelle

Did suck out both his eyes.

And if I tell the story true

And if I tell it clear

There’s not a mortal one of you

Won’t shriek in mortal fear.

Don’t worry about metre or syllable-count–this is a ballad. I have used an
a
rhyme, by all means drop it from time to time, but do stick to the four-line structure. Enjoy yourself. One thing I can guarantee you: after you have written just one or two stanzas, you’ll be chanting ballad lines to yourself as you make coffee, nip to the loo, walk to the shops and brush your teeth. The ballad has a certain flow, a rhythmic swing and a beat; it makes no difference where you go, you’re sure to tap your feet–well, hush my mouth…

Heroic Verse