The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (33 page)

The mode continued in this lofty style

Until–with manic laugh and mocking smile New modes emerged, a kind of fractured, mad Enjambment turned up. Pauses. Something had Gone wrong…or right? The stops and starts of human Speech burst through. Now, once formal lines assume an Unforced, casual air, but nonetheless

Obey the rigid rules of metre, stress

And rhyming. Gradually another change

Takes place. New poets start to rearrange

The form, unpick the close-knit weave, make room For looser threads of consonantal rhyme.

The modern age with all its angst and doubt Arrives, picks up the tab and pays its debt

To history, precedent and every voice

That did its bit to mould heroic verse.

And still today we grudgingly affirm

There’s life in the old dog; our mangy form

Still bites, still barks, still chases cats and birds,

Still wags its tail, still pens and shepherds words,

And, taken off her leash, this bitch on heat

Will walk you off your pentametric feet.

H
EROIC
V
ERSE
is far from dead. Since its Chaucerian beginnings it has been endlessly revivified: after a playful Elizabethan reshaping it acquired marmoreal elegance in the eighteenth century, only to undergo a complex reworking under John Keats, Robert Browning and Wilfred Owen until it emerged blinking into the light of modern day. At first glance it seems remarkably simple, too simple, perhaps, even to deserve the appellation ‘form’: it is as open as they come, neither laid out in regular stanzas, nor fixed by any scheme beyond the simple
aabbccdd
of the rhyming couplet. New paragraph presentation is possible either with line breaks or indentation as I have offered above, but in general the verse is presented in one unbroken block. Only the occasional braced triplet will relieve the procession of couplets. To the modern eye this can be forbidding; we like everything in our world to come in handy bite-sized chunks. Yet you might say that handy bite-sized chunks is what heroic verse is best remembered for: Pope’s
Essays on Man
and
on Criticism
are veritable vending machines of aphorism.

A little learning is dangerous thing;

Not to go back, is somehow to advance,

And men must walk at least before they dance.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole.

One truth is clear. Whatever is, is right.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

That last apothegm might be the motto of this book. John Dryden, in my estimation, was the absolute master of the heroic couplet; his use of it seems more natural, more assured, more fluid even than Pope’s:

Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.

Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.

For those whom God to ruin hath design’d,

He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.

Errors, like straw, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

Beware the fury of a patient man

By education most have been misled;

So they believe, because they so were bred.

The priest continues what the nurse began,

And thus the child imposes on the man.

But these were poets from a time when poems, like architecture and garden design, were formal, elegant and assured: this was the Age of Reason, of Certitude, Sense, Wit, Discernment, Judgement, Taste, Harmony–of ‘Capital Letter Moralists’ as T. E. Hulme called them. The voice and manner of these Augustans can sound altogether too
de haut en bas
for our ears, from lofty to lowly, as if delivered from Olympus.

Their taste and proportion is akin to that of the architecture of the period; by the time of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s
Lyrical Ballads
their course seemed run, the profusion of nature and the agony of self seemed to become a more proper study of poets, just as the Gothic and picturesque began to entice the architects. Run your eye down the Index of First Lines in an edition of Pope and then of any Romantic poet and compare the number of entries in each which begin with the word ‘I’. The ‘egotistical sublime’ had landed. It would be a pity if, in our instinctive veneration for all things post-classical, Romantic, post-Romantic, Decadent, Modernist and Postmodernist we overlooked the virtues of late-seventeenth-and eighteenth-century verse. After all, most of us aspire to live in houses of that period, fill them with eclectic fittings and furniture from later eras as we may. The neoclassical harmony and elegance of construction remains our ideal for housing. I think it can be so with verse too. Naturally the discourse and diction, the detail and decor as it were, are of our age, but the rationality and harmony of the Augustans is not to be despised.

Keats did not abandon the form, but contributed to its development with a new freedom of run-ons and syntactical complexity. This extract from ‘Lamia’ shows how close to dramatic blank verse it becomes, the enjambments almost disguising the rhymes.

Pale grew her immortality, for woe

Of all these lovers, and she grieved so

I took compassion on her, bade her steep

Her hair in weïrd syrops that would keep

Her loveliness invisible, yet free

To wander as she loves, in liberty.

Robert Browning wrestled with the form even more violently. His much anthologised ‘My Last Duchess’ takes the form of a dramatic monologue in heroic verse. It is ‘spoken’ by the Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, who is showing around his palace an ambassador who has come to make the arrangements for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn, as the monologue proceeds, that the Duke had his first wife killed on account of her displeasing over-friendliness. Pointing at her portrait on the wall, the Duke explains how polite, compliant and smiling she was, but to
everyone
:

She had

A heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’t was all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace–all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

In the Duke’s view it was ‘as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift’.

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew: I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive.

In other words, he had her killed. You can see how different this heavily run-on and paused verse is from the restrained fluency of Augustan heroic couplets. But why has Browning not chosen to write in
blank verse
, in the Shakespearean or Jacobean manner, we might wonder? I cannot, of course, second-guess Browning’s motives, but the
effect
is to counter the fluency of everyday speech with the formality of a rhymed structure, creating an ironic contrast between the urbane conversational manner, the psychotic darkness of the story and the elegant solidity of a noble form. The heroic verse is the frame out of which character can leap; it is itself the nobly proportioned, exquisitely tasteful palace in which ignobly misproportioned, foully tasteless deeds are done.

Wilfred Owen’s use of rhyming couplets in the hell of war provides another kind of ironic contrast. In the same way that the employment of ballad form for the dreary and mundane makes both a distinction
and
a connection, so the use of heroic couplets both contrasts and unites in Owen’s verse: the august and decorous form in such ghastly conditions is a sick joke, but the death agonies, mutilations and horrors of the soldiers’ lives are raised to heroic status by their incarnation in heroic couplets. Owen’s ‘A Terre: (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)’ uses Browning-style dramatic monologue in slant-rhymed couplets, casting Owen himself as the visitor to a field hospital where a ruined soldier lies and addresses him.

Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.

Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.

Both arms have mutinied against me,–brutes.

My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.

I tried to peg out soldierly,–no use!

One dies of war like any old disease.

This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.

I have my medals?–Discs to make eyes close.

My glorious ribbons?–Ripped from my own back

In scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)

Laurence Lerner, Thom Gunn and Tony Harrison have all written with distinction in heroic couplets, as did Seamus Heaney in ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ and his superb poem ‘The Outlaw’, which might be regarded as a kind of darkly ironic play on an
eclogue
or
georgic
–Virgilian verse celebrating and philosophically discoursing upon the virtues of agricultural life.

You may find yourself drawn to heroic verse, you may not. Whatever your views, I would recommend practising it: the form has compelling and enduring qualities. Move in: the structure is still sound and spacious enough to accommodate all your contemporary furniture and modern gadgets.

Poetry Exercise 13

Try a short dramatic monologue, à la Browning, in which a young man in police custody, clearly stoned off his head, tries to explain away the half-ounce of cannabis found on his person. Use the natural rhythms of speech, running-on through lines, pausing and running on again, but within rhymed iambic pentameter. You will be amazed what fun you can have with such a simple form. If you don’t like my scenario, choose another one, but do try and make it contemporary in tone.

V

The Ode

Sapphic–Pindaric–Horatian–lyric–anacreontic

Deriving from
odein
, the Greek for to chant, the ode is an open form of lyric verse made Public Monument. In English poetry it was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for ‘poem’.

Partly this is the due to the popularity of John Keats’s four great odes ‘To Autumn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which, together with the odes of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and the rest, turned the form in on itself. Poets today may choose to call their works odes, but rather than suggesting any formal implications this is likely to promise, in the shadow of Keats, a romantic reflection on such themes as nature, beauty, art, the soul and their relationship to the very making of a poem itself.

There are three main genres of classical ode which do have more formal natures or specific functions however–the Sapphic, Pindaric and Horatian, named after the Greeks Sappho and Pindar, and the Latin poet Horace. Of these, the most formally fixed and the most popular today by a dodecametric mile is the S
APPHIC
:

S
APPHIC

Let’s hear it for the
S
APPHIC
O
DE

An oyster bed of gleaming pearls

A finely wrought poetic mode

Not just for girls.

Lesbian Sappho made this form

With neat Adonic final line

Her sex life wasn’t quite the norm

And nor is mine.

Three opening lines of just four feet

Create a style I rather like:

It’s closely cropped and strong yet sweet–

In fact, pure dike.

Actually, the above displays the lineaments of the English
stress-based
imitation as adapted from the classical original, which was made up of four eleven-syllable lines in this metre: