The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

And Wilfred Owen’s two lines could become: If you could hear, at every jolt,The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

This arrangement would enable us to end-stop in our heads or out loud as we read the verse. Surely that’s a better way of organising things? That is the sense after all, so why not therefore break the lines accordingly? This is the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

NO, DAMN YOU, NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!

THE ORGANISING PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE VERSE IS NOT THE

SENSE BUT THE METRE.

Metre is the primary rhythm, the organised background against which the secondary rhythms of sense and feeling are played out. This is a crucial point. You may think that the idea of feeling and thought being subservient to metre is a loopy one. Why should poets build themselves a prison? If they’ve got something to say, why don’t they get on and say it in the most direct manner possible? Well, painters paint within a canvas and composers within a structure. It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. Poets sometimes squeeze their forms to breaking point, this is what energises much verse, but if the forms were not there in the first place the verse would be listless to the point of anomie. Without gravity all would float free: the ballet leaps of the poet’s language would lose almost all their power. ‘Souls who have felt too much liberty’, as Wordsworth said, welcome form: ‘In truth the prison, into which we doom/Ourselves, no prison is.’⁸

Back to our caesuras and enjambments. We may not consciously be aware as we listen or read on the page, but the five beats, even when paused or run through, predominate in the inner ear. The fact that the sense runs through, doesn’t mean the lines shouldn’t end where they do.If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Although there is run-on, consider in your mind and your poet’s ear the different value that is given to ‘blood’ in the example above and in this:If you could hear, at every jolt,The blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

READ THEM BOTH ALOUD and note how much more stress is placed on ‘blood’ in the proper, pentametric layout. I’m sure you agree that Owen knew what he was doing and that the line structure should stay.

There will always be a tiny sense of visual or aural end-stopping at the end of a line no matter how much its sense runs on.

Shakespeare, as you would expect, in the blank (unrhymed) verse of his plays, uses caesura and enjambment a great deal. They are keys that unlock the dramatic potential of iambic pentameter. Look at this speech from the first scene of The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, crazed by jealousy, believes his wife to have cuckolded him (that she’s slept with another man). Here he is with their small son, Mamillius. Don’t forget to recite or move your lips!Go play, boy, play. ¶ Thy mother plays, and I Play too; ¶ but so disgraced a part, ¶ whose issueWill hiss me to my grave. ¶ Contempt and clamour Will be my knell. ¶ Go play, boy, play. ¶ There have been,Or I am much deceived, ¶ cuckolds ere now,And many a man there is, ¶ even at this present,Now, ¶ while I speak this, ¶ holds his wife by th’arm That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence,And his pond fished by his next neighbour, ¶ by Sir Smile, his neighbour. ¶ Nay there’s comfort in’t,Whiles other men have gates, ¶ and those gates opened,As mine, against their will. ¶ Should all despair That have revolted wives, ¶ the tenth of mankind Would hang themselves. ¶ Physic for’t there’s none.

Fourteen lines, but sixteen caesuras and seven enjambments: the verse in its stop-start jerking is as pathological and possessed as the mind of the man speaking. Compare it to another fourteen lines, the fourteen lines of the famous Eighteenth sonnet: out loud, please, or as near as dammit:Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed,And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shadeWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this, ¶ and this gives life to thee.