The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Tercets, three-line stanzas, can be independent entities rhyming aba cdc and so on, or they might demand a special kind of interlocking scheme such as can be found in TERZA RIMA, the form in which Dante wrote Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.The TERZA RIMA mode is very fine,Great Dante used it for his famous text;It rhymes the words in every other lineWith each thought drawing you towards the next:A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C-D…This middle rhyme is sequently annexedTo form the outer rhymes of Stanza ThreeAnd thus we make an interlocking rhyme:This subtle trick explains, at least to me,Just why this form has stood the test of time.

As you can see, this linked rhyming can go on for ever, the middle line of each stanza forming the outer rhymes of the one that follows it. When you come to the end of a thought, thread or section, you add a fourth line to that stanza and use up the rhyme that would otherwise have gone with the next. I have done this with ‘rhyme’ and appended the (indented) stop-line ‘Just why this form has stood the test of time’. A young Hopkins used a stop-couplet to end his early terza rima poem, ‘Winter with the Gulf Stream’:I see long reefs of violetsIn beryl-covered ferns so dim,A gold-water Pactolus fretsIts brindled wharves and yellow brim,The waxen colours weep and run,And slendering to his burning rimInto the flat blue mist the sunDrops out and the day is done.

Chaucer, under Dante’s influence, wrote the first English terza rima poem, ‘A Complaint to his Lady’, but the best-known example in English is probably Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,Like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;And, by the incantation of this verse,Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearthAshes and sparks, my words among mankind!Be through my lips to unawaken’d earthThe trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

It does not matter how you lay out your verse (Shelley used five fourteen-line stanzas) or in what metre (Hopkins wrote in iambic tetrameter and Shelley in pentameter): it is the rhyme-scheme that defines the form.

In order of ascending line length, the QUATRAIN comes next.

The QuatrainThe QUATRAIN is HEROIC

and profoundAnd glories in the deeds of noble days:Pentameters of grave and mighty sound,Like rolling cadences of brass, give praise.Alas! its ELEGIAC counterpartBemoans with baleful woe this world of strife:In graveyards and in tears it plies its artLamenting how devoid of hope is life.In equal form the COMIC QUATRAIN’s made,But free to say exactly what it thinks;It’s brave enough to call a spade a spadeAnd dig for truth however much it stinks.

There is, of course, no formal difference between those three samples, they are merely produced to show you that quatrains in abab have been used for all kinds of purposes in English poetry. Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is probably the best-known elegiac use quatrains have been put to. Its lines have given the world classic book and film titles (Far from the Madding Crowd and

Paths of Glory) as well as providing some memorably stirring phrases:Forbade to wade⁴ through slaughter to a throne,And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;

A cross-rhymed quatrain (perhaps obviously) allows for fuller development of an image or conceit than can be achieved with couplets:Full many a gem of purest ray sereneThe dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;Full many a flower is born to blush un seen,And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

(Gray’s repetition of ‘Full many’ is an example of a rhetorical trope called anaphora

, in case you are interested, in case you care, in case you didn’t already know, in case of too much anaphora, break glass. Actually, that was epanaphora.)

The Rubai

From Persia comes a quatrain form called the RUBAI (plural ruba’iat or ruba’iyat), rhyming aaba, ccdc, eefe etc.In ancient Persia and Islamic lands,The price of heresy was both your hands:Indeed the cost could even be your head(Or burial up to it in the sands).The wiser heads would write a RUBAI downAnd pass it quietly round from town to town,Anonymous, subversive and direct–The best examples garnered great renown.Collections of these odes, or RUBA’IYATShowed sultans where progressive thought was at;Distributed by dissidents and wits,Like early forms of Russian samizdat.The Ruba’iyat of Omar, called Khayyam,Are quatrains of expansive, boozy charm.As found in Horace, Herrick and Marvell,The message is: ‘Drink! When did wine do harm?Too soon the sun will set upon our tents,Don’t waste your time with pious, false lamentsDrink deep the wine of life, then drink some more’I never heard a poet make more sense.