The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Coleridge wrote the following verse in 1806 to teach his son Derwent the most commonly used metrical feet. Note that he uses the classical ‘long’ ‘short’ appellation where we would now say ‘stressed’ ‘weak’. For your final exercise in this chapter, WHIP OUT YOUR PENCIL and see how in the first stanza he has suited the metre to the description by scanning each line. By all means refer to the ‘Table of Metric Feet’ below. You are not expected to have learned anything off by heart. I have included the second stanza, which does not contain variations of metre, simply because it is so touching in its fatherly affection.

Lesson for a Boy

Trochee trips from long to short;

From long to long in solemn sort

Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able

Ever to come up with Dactyl's trisyllable.

Iambics march from short to long;–

With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng;

One syllable long, with one short at each side,

Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;–

First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer

Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.

If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,

And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;

Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres to show it,

With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet,

May crown him with fame, and must win him the love

Of his father on earth and his Father above.

My dear, dear child!

Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge

See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge…

Table of Metric Feet

BINARY

TERNARY

QUATERNARY

QUATERNARY continued

Now about the metrics: the terminology you use–of amphibrachs, pyrrhics etc.–is obsolete in English. We now speak of these feet only in analyzing choruses from Greek plays–because Greek verse is quantitative […] we have simplified our metrics to five kinds of feet […] trochee, iambus, anapest, dactyl, spondee. We do not need any more.

Edmund Wilson in a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 1 September 1942

CHAPTER TWO

Rhyme

It is the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre.

OSCAR WILDE: ‘The Critic as Artist’

I

Rhyme, a few general thoughts

‘Do you rhyme?’

This is often the first question a poet is asked. Despite the absence of rhyme in Greece and Rome (hence Wilde’s aphorism above), despite the glories of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and all the blank-verse masterpieces of English literature from the Dark Ages to the present day, despite a hundred years of Modernism, rhyming remains for many an almost defining feature of poetry. It ain’t worth a dime if it don’t got that rhyme is how some poets and poetry lovers would sum it up. For others rhyming is formulaic, commonplace and conventional: a feeble badge of predictability, symmetry and bourgeois obedience.

There are very few poets I can call to mind who only used rhyme in their work, but I cannot think of a single one, no matter how free form and experimental, who never rhymed. Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, e e cummings, Crane, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Hughes–not an exception do I know.

There are some stanzaic forms, as we shall find in the next chapter, which seem limp and unfinished without the comfort and assurance that rhyme can bring, especially ballads and other forms that derive from, or tend towards, song. In other modes the verse can seem cheapened by rhyme. It is hard to imagine a rhyming version of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ or Eliot’s Four Quartets, for example. This may of course be a failure of imagination: once a thing is made and done it is hard to picture it made and done in any other way.

The question ‘to rhyme or not to rhyme’ is not one I can answer for you, except to say that it would almost certainly be wrong to answer it with ‘always’ or ‘never’.