The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The French, for instance, tend towards equal stress in a word. They pronounce Canada, Can-a-da as opposed to our Canada. We say Bernard, the French say Ber-nard. You may have noticed that when Americans pronounce French they tend to go overboard and hurl the emphasis on to the final syllable, thinking it sounds more authentic, Ber-nard and so on. They are so used to speaking English with its characteristic downward inflection that to American ears French seems to go up at the end. With trademark arrogance, we British keep the English inflection. Hence the American pronunciation clichÉ, the English cliché and the authentic French cli-ché. Take also the two words ‘journal’ and ‘machine’, which English has inherited from French. We pronounce them journal and machine. The French give them their characteristic equal stress: jour-nal and ma-chine. Even words with many syllables are equally stressed in French: we say repetition, they say répétition (ray-pay-tee-see-on).

As you might imagine, this has influenced greatly the different paths that French and English poetry have taken. The rhythms of English poetry are ordered by SYLLABIC ACCENTUATION, those of French more by QUANTITATIVE MEASURE. We won’t worry about those terms or what they portend just yet: it should already be clear that if you’re planning to write French verse then this is not the book for you.

In a paragraph of written prose we pay little attention to how those English accents fall unless, that is, we wish to make an extra emphasis, which is usually rendered by italics, underscoring or CAPITALISATION. In German an emphasised word is s t r e t c h e d. With prose the eye is doing much more than the ear. The inner ear is at work, however, and we can all recognise the rhythms in any piece of writing. It can be spoken out loud, after all, for recitation or for rhetoric, and if it is designed for that purpose, those rhythms will be all the more important.

But prose, rhythmic as it can be, is not poetry. The rhythm is not organised.

Meet Metre

Poetry’s rhythm is organised.

THE LIFE OF A POEM IS MEASURED IN REGULAR HEARTBEATS.

THE NAME FOR THOSE HEARTBEATS IS METRE.

When we want to describe anything technical in English we tend to use Greek. Logic, grammar, physics, mechanics, gynaecology, dynamics, economics, philosophy, therapy, astronomy, politics–Greek gave us all those words. The reservation of Greek for the technical allows us to use those other parts of English, the Latin and especially the Anglo-Saxon, to describe more personal and immediate aspects of life and the world around us. Thus to be anaesthetised by trauma has a more technical, medical connotation than to be numb with shock, although the two phrases mean much the same. In the same way, metre can be reserved precisely to refer to the poetic technique of organising rhythm, while words like ‘beat’ and ‘flow’ and ‘pulse’ can be freed up for less technical, more subjective and personal uses.

PLEASE DO NOT BE PUT OFF by the fact that throughout this section on metre I shall tend to use the conventional Greek names for nearly all the metrical units, devices and techniques that poets employ. In many respects, as I shall explain elsewhere, they are inappropriate to English verse,² but English-language poets and prosodists have used them for the last thousand years. It is useful and pleasurable to have a special vocabulary for a special activity.³Convention, tradition and precision suggest this in most fields of human endeavour, from music and painting to snooker and snow-boarding. It does not make those activities any less rich, individual and varied. So let it be with poetry.

Poetry is a word derived from Greek, as is Ode (from poein, to make and odein, to sing). The majority of words we use to describe the anatomy of a poem are Greek in origin too. Metre (from metron) is simply the Greek for measure, as in metronome, kilometre, biometric and so on. The Americans use the older spelling meter which I prefer, but which my UK English spellcheck refuses to like.

In the beginning, my old cello teacher used to say, was rhythm. Rhythm is simply the Greek for ‘flow’ (we get our word diarrhoea from the same source as it happens). We know what rhythm is in music, we can clap our hands or tap our feet to its beat. In poetry it is much the same:

ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum

Say that out loud. Tap your feet, drum your fingers or clap your hands as you say it. It is a meaningless chant, certainly. But it is a meaningless regular and rhythmic chant.