The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (44 page)

Those last two words, of course,
writ large
, have entered the language.

In the nineteenth century the poet and novelist George Meredith developed a form of sixteen line sonnet with four sets of envelope rhymes
abba cddc effe ghhg
.

There are traditions in the writing of
SONNET SEQUENCES
, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s forty-four
Sonnets from the Portuguese
and Meredith’s sequence ‘Modern Love’ (in his own Meredithian sixteen-line form). Christina Rossetti’s
Monna Innominata
, being a sequence of fourteen sonnets, is known as a S
ONNET OF
S
ONNETS
. More complex sequences exist, such as one of indeterminate length in which each new sonnet opens with the last line of the previous until you reach the final sonnet which terminates with the opening line of the first. This is called a

CORONA SEQUENCE
. John Donne wrote such a sequence in seven sonnets, called ‘La Corona’. More complex variations on that include the
SONNET REDOUBLÉ
, a corona sequence of fourteen sonnets terminating with a fifteenth which is wholly composed of each linking line of the corona in sequence. If there is no good reason for such complexity it will look like showing off, I feel. Donne’s corona had a purposeful religious structure, to make a crown of poetry to match Christ’s crown of thorns.

There are two very well-known examples of S
ONNET
C
OMPETITIONS
which reveal, among other things, the form’s special place in poetry. The ability to write them fluently was, and to some extent still is, considered the true mark of the poet.

On the evening of 30 December 1816, John Keats and his friend Leigh Hunt challenged each other to write a sonnet on the subject of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’. Legend has it that they each took just fifteen minutes to write the following. I shall not tell you straight away who wrote which. All I ask is that you decide which you prefer:

1

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,

Catching your heart up at the feel of June,

Sole voice that’s heard amidst the lazy noon,

When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;

And you, warm little housekeeper, who class

With those who think the candles come too soon,

Loving the fire, and with your trick some tune

Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;

Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong

At your clear hearts; and both were sent on earth

To sing in thoughtful ears this natural song:

Indoors and out, summer and winter,–Mirth.

2

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the Grasshopper’s–he takes the lead

In summer luxury,–he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Our second two sonnets share the subject of an inscription on the great statue of Rameses II (Greek name Ozymandias): one is by Percy Byssche Shelley and the other by his friend Horace Smith. Shelley’s is more than a little well known, but which ‘Ozymandias’ do you like best?

1

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said–‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

2

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:–

‘I am great
OZYMANDIAS
,’ saith the stone,

‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

The wonders of my hand.’–The City’s gone,–

Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,–and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chase,

He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Of ‘The Grasshopper and the Cricket’ pair, the first is by Leigh Hunt and the second by Keats. In a recent Internet poll (for what it is worth) seventy-five per cent preferred the Leigh Hunt and only a quarter went for the Keats. As a matter of fact Keats would have agreed with them; he thought Leigh Hunt’s clearly the superior poem. One the other hand, ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’ is one of the finest opening lines imaginable. If you have read Keats before, ‘one in drowsiness half lost’ would be a dead giveaway as to authorship. Leigh Hunt’s sonnet scores, we feel, as a whole poem; even if it doesn’t contain such moments of perfect music, the progression of ideas (which is so much of what a sonnet is there to exhibit) seems clearer and more satisfactory. They are both Petrarchan, and both have clear voltas at the beginning of their ninth lines. The Leigh Hunt sestet rhymes
cdcdcd
, while Keats sticks to the more traditional
cdecde
.

Of the next pair, Shelley’s is the first, Smith’s second, as I’m sure you guessed even if you didn’t already know. They were both published in
The Examiner
in 1818 and are both entitled ‘Ozymandias’. They each, as you can see, tell the same story–the opening descriptions being, in their basic outlines, identical. There all similarity ends. There is something dreadfully comic about ‘In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,/Stands a gigantic Leg…’. If Shelley’s sonnet outlasts even the ancient monument it commemorates, Smith’s will be fortunate to endure as a curiosity. His is not a
terrible
poem, but immensely ordinary by comparison. Perhaps you disagree? Shelley and Smith, as you may have noticed if you have been a good and attentive girl or a boy, have both dreamt up their own rhyme schemes.

Whether you choose to write Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets in blank, full or slant-rhyme, or adapt or reinvent as many poets have, the form is there for you to explore. I find it hard to imagine anyone calling themselves a poet who has not at least experimented with the sonnet and, like Wordsworth, found–

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

So now it is your turn.

Poetry Exercise 19

• Write a Petrarchan Sonnet on
  Electoral Apathy
  . Use the octave to complain about how lazy and uninterested voters are and then, at the volta, decide that apathy is probably the best response.
  
• Now write a Shakespearean Sonnet on exactly the same subject. Use the first four lines for a description of apathy, the second four for a complaint against it, the third for an admission of your own apathy and then, in the final couplet express the concluding thought that, what the hell, it makes no difference anyway.
  

If you don’t like this subject, do write your own sonnet anyway. I think it would be a big mistake to leave this chapter without having tried to write at least one of each major form.

XI

Shaped Verse

Pattern poems–concrete poetry: a few words concerning Imagism–gamesome forms–rictameter, rhopalics, lipograms–silly syllabic forms–tetractys and nonet–acrostics and more

P
ATTERN
P
OEMS

the

QUEEN

can do

almost

what

ever

she

wishes

up down

side to side

the world is hers

but

a

small

PAWN

gets

the

chance

to be a king

The idea of shaping your poem on the page to make a picture, symbol or pattern is a very old one. The best-known example in English verse is George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ which, rotated ninety degrees, takes on the shape of two angels’ wings:

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more

Till he became

Most poore:

With Thee

O let me rise

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne;

And still with wickedness and shame

Thou didst so punish sinne,

That I became

Most thin.

With Thee

Let me combine

And feel this day thy victorie;

For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Another of Herbert’s pattern poems, ‘The Altar’, reveals the shape of its title, an altar table.

When I was small I remember endlessly looking through my parents’ copy of the collected poems of e e cummings and being fascinated and appalled by the things he did with punctuation, his blithe disregard for majuscules and spaces and the general appearance of childish illiteracy his work presented. My teachers, I felt, would never allow me to get away with such liberties and yet there he was, sharing shelf-space with Robert Browning and John Keats. The collection included this poem; I found the slippage of the ‘l’ from ‘loneliness’ unbearably sad.

1(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

It is, incidentally, the only poem I know of whose title contains all the words of the poem:
1(a…(a leaf falls on loneliness)
, yet of course the poem is not the words, it is the sum of the words
and
their layout, a truth in all poetry but one most obviously declared in this kind of patterned or shaped verse. cummings was a Cubist painter as well as a poet: ‘The symbol of all art is the Prism,’ he wrote. ‘The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains.’ I am not sure how one would categorise such a work as the famous ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’:

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

who

a)s w(e loo)k

upnowgath

PPEGORHRASS

eringint(o-

aThe):l

eA

!p:

S a

(r

rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)

to

rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly

, grasshopper;

Unscrambled, the words reveal ‘the grasshopper, who, as we look now upgathering into [himself], leaps, arriving to become, rearrangingly, a grasshopper’. Those may be the words, but the poem attempts to embody the movement, complexity, camouflage, wind-up and release, the whole
whatness
of a grasshopper’s leap. It is not meant visually to imitate the appearance of a grasshopper on the page, rather to force the reader to slow down and look and feel and think and unpick all the dynamics of a grasshopper’s launch and spring. A conventional poem can use words and all their qualities descriptively and sonorously, a painting can freeze a moment in time, a sculpture can imitate texture, density and mass, music can reproduce sound and shape, but what cummings has done is to create a mechanism whose moving parts are operated by the reader in the act of reading. A verbal sculpture, if you like, containing a potential energy which releases its kinetic force only at the moment of the reader’s engagement. Some of you may find this either a pretentious game or a stultifying dead end. I am sorry if this is so. I would agree, however, that as with much modern conceptual art the very specificity of the work’s originality allows little opportunity for development by others. cummings has had that idea, it is now ticked off in the box of high concepts and anything else in that line would look like cheap imitation. This is what separates such works from
forms
. The sonnet and the villanelle are certainly not played out, such poetic self-release mechanisms probably are.