The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (36 page)

I hope you can see from this layout that the form is actually not as convoluted as it sounds. Describing how a villanelle works is a great deal more linguistically challenging than writing one. Mahon, by the way, as is permissible, has slightly altered the refrain line, in his case turning the direct speech of the first refrain. There are no rules as to metre or length of measure, but the rhyming is important. Slant-rhyme versions exist but for my money the shape, the revolving gavotte of the refrains and their final coupling, is compromised by partial rhyming. The form is thought to have evolved from Sicilian round songs, of the ‘London Bridge is falling down’ variety. In the anthologies you will find villanelles culled from the era of their invention, the sixteenth century, especially translations of the work of the man who really got the form going, the French poet Jean Passerat: after these examples there seems to be a notable lacuna until the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde wrote ‘Theocritus’, a rather mannered neo-classical venture–‘O singer of Persephone!/Dost thou remember Sicily?’ (I think it best to refer to villanelles by their refrain lines), while Ernest Dowson, Wilde’s friend and fellow
Yellow Book
contributor, came up with the ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ which is a much bouncier attempt, very Tudor in flavour: ‘I took her dainty eyes as well/And so I made a Villanelle.’

But it is, perhaps surprisingly, during the twentieth century that the villanelle grows in popularity; besides those we have seen by Mahon and Dylan Thomas, there are memorable examples you may like to try to get hold of by Roethke, Auden, Empson, Heaney, Donald Justice, Wendy Cope and a delightful comic one candidly wrestling with the fiendish nature of the form itself entitled ‘Villanelle of Ye Young Poet's First Villanelle to his Ladye and Ye Difficulties Thereof’ by the playwright Eugene O’Neill: ‘To sing the charms of Rosabelle,/I tried to write this villanelle.’ But for a reason I cannot quite fathom it is
female
poets who seem to have made the most of the form in the last fifty years or so. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ is especially poignant, given what we know about the poet’s unhappy end: ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead./(I think I made you up inside my head)’. The American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’ is as fine a modern villanelle as I know and Marilyn Hacker has also written two superbly ambiguous love villanelles. Carolyn Beard Whitlow’s ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’ shows how a medieval Mediterranean pastoral form can adapt to the twentieth-century African American experience. I like the
Porgy and Bess
-style rhythms:

Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line,

Night wind blowin’ against sweet, yellow thighs,

Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

Man smell of honey, dark like coffee grind;

Countin’ on his fingers since last July.

Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.

Mister Jacobs say he be colorblind,

But got to tighten belts and loosen ties.

Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

Winter becoming angry, rent behind.

Strapping spring sun needed to make mud pies.

Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.

Looked in the mirror, Bessie's face I find.

I be so down low, my man be so high.

Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

Policeman’s found him; damn near lost my mind.

Can’t afford no flowers; can’t even cry.

Cake in the oven, clothes out on the line.

Two-eyed woman rockin’ a man stone blind.

A form that seemed so dead in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought back to rude and glistening health in the twentieth and twenty-first. Why? The villanelle has been called ‘an acoustic chamber for words’ and a structure that lends itself to ‘duality, dichotomy, and debate’, this last assertion from ‘Modern Versions of the Villanelle’ by Philip Jason, who goes on to suggest:

there is even the potential for the two repeating lines to form a paradigm for schizophrenia…the mind may not fully know itself or its subject, may not be in full control, and yet it still tries, still festers and broods in a closed room towards a resolution that is at least pretended by the final couplet linking of the refrain lines.

Hm. It is a form that certainly seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves such. Among the poets we have looked at as authors of villanelles we find an African American lesbian, a Jewish lesbian, a lesbian whose father died when she was four and whose mother was committed into a mental institution four years later, two gay men, two alcoholics who drank themselves to death and a deeply unstable and unhappy neurotic who committed suicide. Perhaps this is coincidence, perhaps not. Once again I am forced to wonder if it is ironic interplay that might make the most convincing explanation. As I suggested earlier, sometimes the rules of form can be as powerfully modern a response to chaos, moral uncertainty and relativism as open freedom can be. The more marginalised, chaotic, alienated and psychically damaged a life, the greater the impulse to find structure and certainty, surely? The playful artifice of a villanelle, preposterous as it may appear at first glance, can embody defiant gestures and attitudes of vengeful endurance. It suits a rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or of fatalism. We mustn’t exaggerate that characteristic of the form, however: Heaney’s ‘Anniversary Villanelle’ and some very funny examples by Wendy Cope demonstrate that it need not be always down in the dumps.

Technically the trick of it seems to be to find a refrain pair that is capable of run-ons, ambiguity and ironic reversal. I think you should try one yourself.

Poetry Exercise 14

Any subject, naturally. The skill is to find refrain lines that are open ended enough to create opportunities for enjambment between both lines and stanzas. This is not essential, of course, your refrain line can be closed and contained if you prefer, but you will gain variety, contrast and surprise if run-ons are possible.

Don’t hurry the process of chewing over suitable refrains. Naturally the middle lines have to furnish six
b
rhymes, so words like ‘plinth’ and ‘orange’ are not going to be very useful…enjoy.

The Sestina

Let fair S
ESTINA
start with this first
LINE
,

So far from pretty, perfect or in
SPIRED
.

Its six-fold unrhymed structure marks the
FORM
. The art is
carefully
to choose your
WORDS

Especially those you use at each line’s
END
, If not you’ll find your effort’s all in
VAIN
.

Look up: that final hero word was ‘
VAIN
’

And so it ends this stanza’s opening
LINE
.

We use up all our heroes till the
END

And trust that somehow we will be in
SPIRED
To find a fitting place for all our
WORDS

And satisfy the dictates of the
FORM
.

It’s simple, once you get the hang, to
FORM

Your verse in sections like a weather-
VANE
: The secret lies in finding six good
WORDS

That seem to suit the ending of a
LINE
.

Your pattern of ideas should be in
SPIRED

By heroes who will see you to the
END
.

Their cyclic repetition to that
END

Ensures your poem will at least con
FORM

To all the rules. From time to time in
SPIRED
Solutions will occur. Write in this
VEIN
,

Just interweaving neatly line by
LINE

Until you’ve used your stock of six good
WORDS.

Composing in this form is
knitting
WORDS
:

You cast off, purl and knit and purl to
END

Each row, then cast off for another
LINE

Until a woolly poem starts to
FORM
.

You may believe sestinas are a
VAIN
,

Indulgent, showy, frankly unin
SPIRED

Idea. Yet many modern poets have con
SPIRED
,

To weave away and knit their scarf of
WORDS
.

I’ll not feel
my
attempt has been in
VAIN

If by the time this chapter’s reached its
END

Just one of you has learned to love this
FORM

And taught your hero words to toe the
LINE
.

Envoi

I
NSPIRED
by fair S
ESTINA
now I
END

This run of
WORDS
. I hope that you will
FORM
–

And not in
VAIN
–a poem in this
LINE
.

This is a
bitch
to explain but a joy to make. There is no set metre to the modern English sestina, but traditionally it has been cast in iambics. The form comprises six sixains followed by a three line
envoi
, a kind of summation or coda. So, thirty-nine lines in all. We can best see how it works by concocting a new one together. Let’s begin:

A silly slab of verse, but never mind. It is just a lash-up, a cardboard prototype, but it has its uses. You will notice that I have capitalised and numbered my
end-words
. They are
ONE, TOO, FREE, FOR, THRIVE
and
STICKS
cunningly chosen to sound as much like the numbers 1–6 as I can contrive. These end-words are the
heroes
of a sestina. Instead of being rhymed, they are reused in a set pattern: this technique is known as
lexical repetition
. So let us compose
Stanza 2
. The method is to shuttle up and down the previous stanza starting at the bottom. The end word there is
STICKS
. I’ll write a line that ends with
STICKS
, then:

But you should know that triumph
STICKS

Then we go up to the top:
ONE.

Like post-it notes and every
ONE

Now we go back to the bottom: we’ve used up
STICKS
, so the next free end-word is
THRIVE
:

Will soon forget. The kind who
THRIVE

The next unused end-word at the top is
TOO
:

Are those who show compassion
TO

Back down now and the next spare is
FOR:

The slow, who claim their victory
FOR

Only one unused end-word left,
FREE
:

The weak. I’ll tell you this for
FREE

So we shuttled from bottom to top, bottom to top, bottom to top taking
STICKS
,
ONE
,
THRIVE
,
TO
,
FOR
and
FREE
. In real digits that would be 6,1,5,2,4,3. This string of numbers is our
formula
.
Stanza 2
now looks like this:

But you should know that triumph
STICKS

Like post-it notes and every
ONE

Will soon forget. The kind who
THRIVE

Are those who show compassion
TO

The slow, who claim their victory
FOR

The weak. I’ll tell you this for
FREE
,

Now
Stanza 3
will take the sixth line from
Stanza 2
, then the first, then the fifth and so on, according to that formula, and build itself accordingly. The sixth line of
Stanza 3
is now
FREE
: