The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The most obvious example of a poem with an if then structure is of course Kipling’s poem ‘If’, regularly voted ‘the nation’s favourite’. It is written in strict iambic pentameter, but with alternating feminine and masculine line endings throughout. He does this with absolute regularity throughout the poem: switching between lines of weak (eleven syllable) and strong (ten syllable) endings, which gives a characteristic swing to the verse. Try reading out loud each stanza (or verse) below, exaggerating the tenth syllable in each line as you read, tapping the table (or your thigh) and really emphasising the last beat. Do you see how this metrical alternation precisely suggests a kind of dialectical structure?If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt youBut make allowance for their doubting too,If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd meet those two impostors just the same;And meet those two impostors just the same;If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

What’s actually happening is that the wider line structures echo the metrical structure: just as the feet go weak-strong, so the lines go weak-strong.

You might put the thought into iambic pentameters:The weaker ending forms a kind of question

The stronger ending gives you your reply.

The finality of downstroke achieved by a strong ending seems to answer the lightness of a weak one. After all, the most famous weak ending there is just happens to be the very word ‘question’ itself…To be, or not to be: that is the question.

It is not a rule, the very phrase ‘question-and-answer’ is only an approximation of what we mean by ‘dialectic’ and, naturally, there is a great deal more to it than I have suggested. Through French poetry we have inherited a long tradition of alternating strong-weak line endings, which we will come to when we look at verse forms and rhyme. The point I am anxious to make, however, is that metre is more than just a ti-tum ti-tum: its very regularity and the consequent variations available within it can yield a structure that EXPRESSES MEANING QUITE AS MUCH AS THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO.

Which is not to say that eleven syllable lines only offer questions: sometimes they are simply a variation available to the poet and result in no particular extra meaning or effect. Kipling does demonstrate though, in his hoary old favourite, that when used deliberately and regularly, alternate measures can do more. The metrist Timothy Steele¹²has pointed out how Shakespeare, in his twentieth sonnet ‘A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted’ uses only weak endings throughout the poem: every line is eleven syllables. Shakespeare’s conceit in the poem (his image, or overarching concept) is that his beloved, a boy, has all the feminine graces. The proliferation of feminine endings is therefore a kind of metrical pun.

Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is another celebrated example of iambic pentameter ending with that extra or hypermetrical unstressed syllable. Note, incidentally, that while you would not normally choose to emphasise a word like ‘and’ in a line of poetry, the beauty of Shakespeare’s iambs here is that the rhythm calls for the actor playing Macbeth to hit those ‘ands’ harder than one would in a line like:I want some jam and tea and toast today

With Shakespeare’s line…Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

…the futility and tedium of the succession of tomorrows is all the more manifest because of the metrical position of those ‘ands’. Which of us hasn’t stressed them in sentences like ‘I’ve got to mow the lawn and pick up the kids from school and do the tax returns and write a thank you letter and cancel the theatre tickets and ring the office…’?

An eleven-syllable line was more the rule than the exception in Italian poetry, for the obvious reason that an iambic hendecasyllabic line must have a weak ending, like-a almost-a ever-y word-a in Italian-o. Dante’s Inferno is written in iambic endecasíllabo.Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

An English translation might go, in iambic pentameter:Midway upon the journey through our life

There would be no special reason to use hendecasyllables in translating the Inferno: in fact, it would be rather difficult. English, unlike Italian, is full of words that end with a stressed syllable. The very nature of the iamb is its light-heavy progression, it seems to be a deeply embedded feature of English utterance: to throw that away in the pursuit of imitating the metrics of another language would be foolish.