The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

¹ Pitch matters, of course it does. It matters in speech and in poetry, but for the moment we will concentrate on stress

² Unless otherwise stated, I use ‘English’ here and throughout the book to refer to the English language, not the country.

³ ‘Convenient and innocuous nomenclatorial handles,’ as Vladimir Nabokov calls them in his Notes on Prosody.

⁴ He sat up without another word and split the rope in two with his axe.

⁵ From An Essay on Criticism.

⁶ Caesuras have a more ordered and specific role to play in French verse, dramatic or otherwise. French poems, like their geometrically planned gardens, were laid out with much greater formality than ours. They are more like regular rests in musical bars. We need not worry about this formal use.

⁷ Hence too, possibly, caesarean section, though some argue that this is named after Julius Caesar who was delivered that way. Others claim that this was why Julius was called Caesar in the first place, because he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. We needn’t worry about that, either. Incidentally, in America they are spelled ‘cesura’.

⁸ Wordsworth, sonnet: ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.

⁹ There are metrists who would argue that there are more caesuras than that: there may be ‘weak’ breaks in some of the other lines, but my reading stands, so there.

¹⁰ A scholiast is an inkhorn or pedantic grammarian and a poetaster a tediously bad poet–not, as you might think, someone who samples the work of Edgar Allan Poe…

is a schwa, that slack ‘e’ sound, the uh in bigger or written

¹² T. Steele. All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, Ohio University Press.

¹³ ‘Nature so spurs them on that people long to go on pilgrimages.’

¹⁴ Milton, like many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as always to mark ‘heaven’ as the monosyllable ‘heav’n’ whenever it ended a line. Finding two hendecasyllables in a row in Paradise Lost is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican.

¹⁵ Ditto: Pope took great pride in the decasyllabic nature of his rhyming couplets. This is one of only two feminine endings in the whole (over 1,500 line) poem, the other being a rhyme of ‘silly’ with ‘Sir Billy’: it seems it was acceptable to Pope so long as the rhyming words were proper names. Maybe here he hears Cowards as Cards and Howards as Hards…

¹⁶ The Prelude Wordsworth’s hero was, poetically and politically, Milton and W shows the same disdain for weak endings. I’m fairly convinced that for him ‘being’ is actually elided into the monosyllable ‘beeng’!

¹⁷ Many prosodists would argue, as I have said earlier, that there is no such thing as a spondee in English verse, partly because no two contiguous syllables can be pronounced with absolute equal stress and partly because a spondee is really a description not of accent, but of vowel length, an entirely different concept, and one essentially alien to English prosody.

If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I’m afraid I shall have to kill you.

¹⁹ When I wrote this, we had just lost the first Test against Australia and I was pessimistic…

20 Named from a twelfth-century French poem, Le Roman d’Alexandre

²¹ After all, in French (as opposed to Spanish, say), a diacritical mark (a written accent) is not about syllabic emphasis: école is evenly stressed, the accent is just there to modify the vowel sound, not impart extra stress to it.

²² Dickinson’s works remain untitled: the numbers refer to their order in the 1955 Harvard variorum edition.

²³ At first attempt I mistyped that as ‘A Robin Red breast in a Café’, ‘Makes Heaven go all daffy’, I suppose…

²⁴ A common but metrically meaningless convention.

25 Including Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s definitive 1957 edition.

²⁶ It was T. S. Eliot.

²⁷ ‘But that’s just plain silly’ is amphibrachic: these feet can get into your system.

A quintain or cinquain being a five-line verse.

²⁹ But not Oxford Street, which would be more of a dactyl, this is an oddity of English utterance.

³⁰ ‘The repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected’ is how the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, with trademark elegance and concision.

³¹ Pronounced scissor-gee: ‘a pair of connected or corresponding things’.

³² From the C text: shorn of its yoghs and thorns, thanks to Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall’s invaluable edition, published by Edward Arnold for York Medieval Texts.

³³ A work-shy monk, not attached to any monastic order. Like Chaucer, Langland was very down on the species.