The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

What Auden manages, which other workers in this field often do not, is to imbue the verse with a sense of the modern and the living. He uses enjambment (something very rarely done by Old English and medieval poets) to help create a sense of flow. A grim failing when writing in alliterative four-stress lines is to overdo the Saxon and produce verse that is the poetic equivalent of morris dancing or Hobbit-speak.³⁴ When reading such verse out loud you feel the urge to put a finger to your ear and chant nasally like a bad folk singer. This unpleasantness can be aggravated by an over-reliance on a trope known as a kenning. Kennings are found in great profusion in Anglo-Saxon, Old German and especially Norse poetry. They are a kind of compound metonym (a metaphoric trope, see the glossary) used to represent a single object, person or concept: thus a ship becomes an oar steed, the sea is the whale road or the gannet’s bath (hron-rade or ganotes-bae?,) and din of spears would stand for ‘battle’. My favourite is brow-stars for eyes. Eddic and Icelandic bards were very fond of these devices: I suppose modern equivalents would be iron horse for train, chalk face for the classroom, fleapit for cinema, bunfight for party, devil’s dandruff for cocaine and Hershey highway for…well, ask your mother.

Modern prosodists and teachers (perhaps in a tragic and doomed attempt to get young people interested) have described alliterative-accentual verse of this kind as a sort of Old English forerunner of hip-hop. There is no doubt that hip-hop will often favour the four-beat line, as the Blazin’ Squad remind us…Me and the boys, we’ll be blazin’ it up

And certainly MC Hammer’s ‘Let’s Get It Started’ can be said to be formed in perfect hemistichs, two beats to each. Nobody knows how a rapper really feelsA mind full of rhymes, and a tongue of steelJust put on the Hammer, and you will be rewardedMy beat is ever boomin, and you know I get it started

To scan such lyrics in the classical manner would clearly be even more absurd than comparing them to Anglo-Saxon hemistichs, but somewhere between sociology, anthropology, prosody and neuro-linguistics there could be found an answer as to why a four-beat line divided in two has continued to have such resonance for well over a millennium. For our purposes, it can do no harm to be familiar with the feel of the Anglo-Saxon split line. To that end, we come to…

Poetry Exercise 7

Write a piece of verse following the rules above: each half-line to contain two beats, all four following the bang, bang, bang–crash rule (in other words alliteration on the first three beats).

To make it easier, I would suggest finding something very specific to write about. Poetry comes much more easily when concrete thoughts and images are brought to mind. For the sake of this exercise, since it is getting on for lunchtime and I am hungry, I suggest eighteen or twenty lines on the subject of what you would like, and wouldn’t like, to eat right this minute.

Once again, I have scribbled down some drivel to show you that quality is not the point here, just the flexing of your new accentual-alliterative muscles. I have not been able to resist rhyming the last two lines, something entirely unnecessary and, frankly, unacceptable. You will do much better, I know.Figs are too fussy and fish too dullI’m quite fond of quince, but I question its point.Most sushi is salty and somehow too rawI can’t abide bagels and beans make me fartThere’s something so sad about salmon and dillAnd goose eggs and gherkins are ghastlier still.But cheese smeared with chutney is cheerful enoughSo I’ll settle for sandwiches, sliced very thick The brownest of bread, buttered with love.A plate of ploughman’s will pleasure me well,I’ll lunch like a lord, then labour till fourWhen teacakes and toast will tempt me once more.

Sprung RhythmStress is the life of it.GMH–letter to Robert Bridges

One single name rises above all others when considering the influence of Anglo-Saxon modalities on modern poetry. Well–three single names, come to think of it…

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

It is possible that you came across this mysterious Jesuit priest’s verse at school and that someone had the dreadful task of trying to explain to you how sprung rhythm worked. Relax: it is like Palmerston and the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Only three people in the world understand it, one is dead, the other has gone mad and the third is me, and I have forgotten.