|
 In
the first of these articles we looked at why you wanted to be a
poet, so here is the beginning. You have chosen to write poetry
rather than prose. You have a reason for this, and as part of that
you must know who your audience is. You must make sense - even if
you then rise above it! You will be judged not only by your audience,
but by the "poet over your shoulder" - and by the different poet
who is yourself at a future time.
Ready? OK,
then. In this article, we are going to look at the mechanics of
poetry, the formal structures, if you will. Now, remember that without
exception, none of the rules I will describe here are compulsory.
Great works exist which break all of them. However, in my view it
is best to start off having at least a general idea of the rules,
since if you choose to break them or totally ignore them you should
do so deliberately, to achieve an effect. We will look at meter,
rhythm, to rhyme or not to rhyme; and some of the general principles
concerning the choice of words. Most of the examples will be from
relatively short poems: as I said in the first of these articles,
there are great long poems, and eventually I will say something
about these - but if you are reading this article, it is probably
best to start your own career with short poems. We will also look
here at fairly traditional forms - our next article will look at
more modern poetry, but again I think it helps to be aware of how
the great traditionalists (including perhaps the greatest of them
all - Anon!) achieved their results.
Meter -
and Scanning!
Stravinsky discusses the distinction between meter and rhythm in
music. Meter is what the metronome is doing; rhythm is what the
composer or the performer actually does: the interplay between the
two is the dynamic of the piece. Where the performer simply follows
the meter, the effect is boredom: the excitement comes in the tension
developed between the ticking of the metronome and the struggle
of the performer, seemingly to escape, but actually to return again
and again to the mastery of the meter.
Approximately
70% of English language poetry is written in iambic pentameters.
The iamb is a unit which is sometimes called the 'trough and crest'
- a two-syllable unit in which the first syllable is unstressed
and the second stressed: "to love"; "destroy". Or, "de DAH"! Pentameter
means a line composed of five of these. A four-line stanza (that
means 'verse') in iambic pentameter is thus:
de Dah de DAH de DAH de DAH de DAH,
de DAH de DAH de DAH de DAH de DUM;
de DAH de DAH, de DAH de DAH, de DAH
de DAH. de DAH de DAH de DAH, de DUM.
Or,
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
 The
opening stanza from The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam as freely translated by Edward FitzGerald
(1809-1883), published in 1859. The poem dates from the latter part
of the eleventh century; Khayyam was born in 1048 and died in 1131.
The ruba'i is a Persian verse form; a quatrain (four line stanza)
with a rhyme scheme aaba.
This works
because the average well-educated English speaker speaks in iambic
pentameters much of the time - it is the meter of the language!
The unit of the iamb is called a 'foot'; and Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia
of Literature defines a foot as: "The basic unit of verse meter
consisting of any of various fixed combinations or groups of stressed
and unstressed or long and short syllables". There are altogether
nineteen different feet; in addition to the iamb, the three most
common are the trochee (DAH de); the anapest (de de DAH); and the
dactyl (DAH de de). I would add to these the spondee (DAH DAH),
and perhaps the pyrrhic (de de), not least because these are used
fairly frequently by Shakespeare.
However, as
your eyes are glazing over, let me say that this kind of analysis
is really only useful to discover how the really good poet plays
against the basic meter by introducing other feet to allow the flow
of meaning or to introduce tensions and from this to learn how to
achieve these results yourself.
Apart from
the iamb, the most interesting of these feet from our point of view
is the anapest. The 'triple foot' of the anapest can convey urgency
and excitement:
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears were like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee
This is the
first stanza (verse) of The
Destruction of Sennacherib by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824).
(This is a great poem - perhaps we could persuade The Editor to
use it as the Poem of the Day some time!). [Nag, nag - Ed.]
Here is another
example of the use of a triple foot:
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
'Good speed!' cried the watch, as the gatebolts undrew;
'Speed!' echoed the wall to us galloping through;
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest,
And into the midnight we galloped abreast.
This is the opening
verse from How They
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix by Robert Browning (1812-1889).
The popularity
of the waltz and the lyrics used for them is an illustration of
how the other three-syllable foot - the dactyl - fits with our modern
ear:
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,
Brown paper packages tied up with string,
These are a few of my favorite things.
This from The
Sound of Music, and the lyric is by Oscar Hammerstein.
The amphibrach
(de DAH de) is also interesting, because it is often the meter of
the limerick:
There was a young lady of Wantage
Of whom the Town Clerk took advantage.
The Borough Surveyor
Said, "You'll have to pay her,
'Cause you've totally altered her frontage".
Or, somewhat
less interestingly,
de DAH de de DAH de de DAH de
de DAH de de DAH de de DAH de
de DAH de de DAH de
de DAH de de DAH de
de de DAH de de DAH de de DAH de
"Scanning"
is a term used to describe the consistency of the meter used in
a poem, and the formal analysis is called scansion. The uneasiness
we feel when we read a poem by a bad poet is often because of failures
in the scanning:
There was a young man of Japan,
Whose limericks never would scan.
When they said it was so,
He replied, "Yes, I know -
"But I always try to get as many words into the last line as ever I possibly can!"
 But
back to the iambic pentameter. For the new English-speaking poet,
this is the basis on which to work. Chaucer is given the credit
for introducing it into English poetry, though for most of us it's
most familiar as the meter which Shakespeare used, not only in his
poetry, but in the blank (that is, unrhymed) verse which was the
language in which his upper-class characters spoke.
Shakespeare
relied more heavily on the syllable count than he did on the stressing
pattern. From the discussion above it's obvious that an iambic pentameter
line contains ten syllables: Shakespeare will occasionally add an
eleventh syllable ("To be or not to be, that is the question"),
but dropping one is very unusual: when it happens, it is most commonly
the absence of the opening unstressed syllable.
Rhythm
The second part is the play of the words against the meter. An easy
way to understand this is the blues. The blues form is three lines:
the first two are essentially repetitions:
Woke up this morning; blues were standing round my bed;
Woke up this morning, blues were standing round my bed.
This followed
by a single line, which rhymes with the first two:
Felt so low down, wished that I was dead.
The meter
is essentially iambic, because the accompanying music is a common
meter, with the first and third beats stressed, and the second and
fourth unstressed; the line typically starts on the last (unstressed)
beat of an introductory bar. In the lines above, the opening (absent)
word is "I". The music has twelve bars (each containing
two feet), so the complete verse has 24 feet. However, typically
there are some pauses, so that the actual words are close to pentameters.
Now, the rhythm adds to this because of the way the words play against
the regularity of the meter. So, the verse above could well be repeated,
against exactly the same twelve four-beat bars as (perhaps):
I said I woke up this morning, and those blues were standing round my bed,
Yes, those blues were standing, I said they were standing all round my bed.
You know I felt so really low down, man I wished that I was dead.
I have used
the musical analogy here, and I will again; but John Frederick Nims
in Western Wind: an Introduction to Poetry writes: "Music
is in the world of chronometric time; the metronome, even though
the performer may tease and worry it now and then, sets the standard.
But the rhythm of poetry exists in the world of psychological time,
the kind of time in which, as Romeo says, "Sad hours seem long,"
or in which happiness, to paraphrase Goethe, can make the day race
by on flashing feathers."
 Rhyme
Then there's rhyme. Many people believe that if it doesn't rhyme,
it isn't poetry, although the introduction of rhyme into English
poetry may perhaps date from as late as the fourteenth century:
The Vision of Piers Plowman, (William Langland, c. 1330 -
1387) which dates from the 1360's is an alliterative poem, while
The Canterbury Tales,
(Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1342 - 1400) which appeared some twenty years
later, is rhymed. However, there are reasons to believe that the
lyrics for songs were rhymed earlier than this, perhaps as early
as the fourth century. Rhyme was uncommon in classical Greek or
Latin poetry, but more commonly used in medieval Latin religious
verse. It is not uncommon for a poet who writes essentially unrhymed
('blank') verse to use rhymed couplets here and there for emphasis:
Shakespeare does this often at the end of scenes: here is the end
of Act III, Scene IV of The
Merchant of Venice:
PORTIA:
Fie, what a question's that,
If thou wert near a lewd interpreter!
But come, I'll tell thee all my whole device
When I am in my coach, which stays for us
At the park-gate, and therefore haste away,
For we must measure twenty miles to-day
There are
several different forms of rhyme, but again this matters more to
the specialist. We may return to it in a future article.
There is also
a variety of rhyme schemes: the simplest consists of a succession
of rhymed couplets, but that can become boring very quickly except
for very short poems.
Rhyme in the
hands of a master is a tool to focus the reader's mind: here, for
example are the first two stanzas of Robert Browning's (1812-1889)
poem In a Year:
Never any more,
While I live,
Need I hope to see his face
As before.
Once his love grown chill,
Mine may strive:
Bitterly we re-embrace,
Single still.
Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
Turn of head?
Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I as little understand
Love's decay.
(Note also
the use of the layout of the poem on the page - we discussed this
in an earlier article). However,
in less skilled hands the desire to rhyme can be stultifying: knowing
that a moon is always in June. Personally, I find this irritating:
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
(and so on……..)
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Poems like
this are made by fools like whoever it was!
However, a
very obvious rhyme scheme can also be used for effect: the lyric
in the musical My Fair Lady which begins, "The rain in Spain
falls mainly on the plain," is then developed into a play on words
using just these very rhymes.
The limerick
is generally described as a rhymed form (aabba, in the jargon),
and recently I read a critic who wrote: "One cannot imagine an unrhymed
limerick!" Oh yes one can - here is favorite of mine:
There was a young man of St. Bees,
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp.
When asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't
It's a good job it wasn't a hornet!"
Overall, the
use of rhyme is much less common in modern English-language poetry
than in that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but
it is still the norm in song lyrics. This issue will be discussed
a little more in the next article in this series.
The Standard
Forms of English Poetry
Poetry written in any language traditionally had a limited number
of forms. Easily the best known in English is the sonnet: this has
fourteen lines, typically iambic pentameters. There are various
rhyme schemes: for example, the Shakespearean sonnet consists of
three quatrains (four-line groups) and a couplet; the rhyme scheme
is abab,cdcd,efef,gg.
In the next
article, we will discuss the various common forms, with examples.
 Form
- a Help? A Necessity? A Hinderance?
By 'form' here I mean all that we have discussed or at least mentioned
here: the foot, the line length, the concept of a stanza, the rhyme
scheme, the type of poetic form. The use of highly constrained forms
for poetry present significant problems for poets, and there are
those who believe the constraints harm the creativity without adding
much. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) (a fine hand with the vitriol)
puts it so well when he writes in his poem An
Essay on Criticism (1711):
Where'er you find 'the cooling western breeze'
In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees':
If crystal streams 'with pleasing murmurs creep'
The reader's threaten'd, not in vain, with 'sleep':
Then at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
We'll talk
about Alexandrines in a later article.
In the early
years of the twentieth century, the idea of writing poetry without
being enslaved to these formal structures was introduced; Ezra Pound
(1885-1972), together with his friends, is generally credited with
the new concept. This is often called Free Verse. As Pound put it,
a basic concept was "to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,
not in the sequence of a metronome". However, much earlier Walt
Whitman (1819-1892) was writing without constraints:
After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
We will examine
this issue, and see how today's poets address the issues we presented
at the beginning of the first article.
Pick the
Right Word!
Here's a thought. The best poetry is an extremely precise use of
language. Look at whatever you think is (for you) the very best
poetry you have ever read. How many modifiers are there in it? How
many nouns require adjectives to make the poet's thought clear?
How many verbs need to be modified by adverbs? I believe you will
be impressed at how few there are.
As you write,
think about the modifiers - there is almost certainly a better noun
or verb that needs no manipulation. As you read poetry, look carefully
at the modifiers the poet uses. Of course some are necessary. For
example, if you have in your poem a man who is of advanced years,
English generally requires you to call him an 'old man' because
we lack the Latin 'senex', and the American 'oldster' is still not
read easily. Sometimes, a poet will deliberately use modifiers as
a method of emphasis: here I select at random an early poem by T.
S. Eliot (1888 - 1965):
Morning at the Window
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Spouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
But I suggest
that when you have written your first draft of a poem, you undertake
two steps: first, the 'Death of Adverbs' and second, the 'Death
of Adjectives'. Each modifier has to plead for its life! If the
unmodified word does not have the weight that you want, search diligently
for another word that, unmodified, does. And, as an example of what
you can do with very few adjectives and even fewer adverbs, read
the speech of King
Henry the Fifth before the battle at Agincourt (Act IV, Scene
III) and see how the careful choice of words conveys the message!
Here is W.
H. Auden (1907-1973):
Our Bias
The hour-glass whispers to the lion's roar
The clock-towers tell the gardens day and night,
How many errors Time has patience for,
How wrong they are in always being right.
Yet Time, however loud its chimes or deep,
However fast its falling torrent flows,
Has never put one lion of his leap
Nor shaken the assurance of a rose.
For they, it seems, care only for success:
While we choose words according to their sound
And judge a problem by its awkwardness;
And Time with us was always popular.
When have we not preferred some going round
To going straight to where we are?
Finally
Remember Graves's advice to make sense. Remember Pope's contempt
for the trivial rhyme. Remember what Shakespeare could do with almost
no modifiers. Read the poems you most like as though you were a
critic, and think about how the poet achieved the result that speaks
to you. Think about the reader who you will never know. Think carefully
about why you have chosen poetry as your medium rather than prose.
And, most importantly, remember that your chosen tool is the remarkable
English language.
Next Time...
In the next part, we'll look at the most common forms for poetry;
the concept of the stanza, the designs for complete poems - the
sonnet, the sestina, the ballade, the villanelle, the ode, the epode.
We'll also take a look at the longer poems, and how they are constructed,
as well as at the quite different approaches used in modern poetry,
and the special challenges they present. Then we'll compare how
these challenges are dealt with by poets who successfully have written
both the formal types of poetry we have been discussing, and the
less structured modern forms.
Plus: How
can we distinguish poetry from broken up prose? How can we separate
from the good from the bad? Is it entirely subjective?
And, of course,
how can we find the perfect word?
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