Writing and Reading Poetry, II: The Age of Lead

II

Let's start with the one piece submitted in response to my challenge.  This comes from my former managing editor, Kate Dalton Boyer, who is still harboring some dark feelings about her former boss's sloppy office.

Doggerel for TF

I know a man named Thomas,

his desk will give you pause.

If one inquires the reason:

"Tace!" he'll say.  "Because."

Beneath a Mac his thesis

(of Grecian poetry)

is propping up his keyboard

and in danger from his tea.

The office door won't open

--review books in the way--

it seems another forty-two

have just arrived today.

The lamp's a little dusty,

the window is ajar,

the yellow haze a product

of his afternoon cigar.

But if I come for galleys,

or a quote from Take My Stand,

Tom never cannot find it,

'cause everything's to hand.

So here we have the lesson

that I learned at Fleming's knee:

there can be rhyme and reason

in our bent toward entropy.

Here is what the poetess has to say for herself:

I decided to take up your poetry challenge.    One four foot line (because it sounds better there than a three foot/weak ending), and several forced stresses, but real doggerel demands the latter.

The forced stresses are not extreme, but I reject the "sounds better" argument for the four-stressed line.  I hereby revoke this poetic license!  It is a good line--"It seems another forty two"-- but replacing "It seems" with "since"--though a bit weaker--would be a makeshift but I am sure Kate and her readers can come up with better alternatives.

*******************************

Now, back to our story.

If accentual verse is the fall-back for English poetry, that door was closed s long time ago, at least so far as higher forms of verse, by the decision to imitate French and Italian verses that limit the number of syllables.  Students of French literature will think mainly of the 12-syllable lines of Racine and later French poets.  Here are the first lines of Phedre:

Le dessein en est pris: je pars, cher Théramène,

Et quitte le séjour de l’aimable Trézène.

Dans le doute mortel dont je suis agité,

Je commence à rougir de mon oisiveté.

Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père,

J’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère ;

J’ignore jusqu’aux lieux qui le peuvent cacher.

You will note that the unaccented “e” vowels are pronounced except when they occur in hiatus with another word beginning with a vowel.

However, French poets can employ lines of different lengths, as in these 10-syllable lines of La Chanson de Roland.  Here is Oliver imploring Roland to “blow the damn horn!”:

Dist Oliver: «N'ai cure de parler.

Vostre olifan ne deignastes suner,

Ne de Carlun mie vos n'en avez.

Il n'en set mot, n'i ad culpes li bers.

Cil ki la sunt ne funt mie a blasmer.

This is, more or less, the French line that enters into English poetry and takes over.

Dante uses a similar line, but since very few words in Italian end with an accented syllable or even a consonant, his 5-beat line has 11 syllables, the last being an unaccented vowel:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Before going on to English, we should take note of the fact that both French and Italian lend themselves more easily to what we think of as poetry than English does.

First, the rhymes are easy when so many words end in vowels.  Finding effective rhymes is the plague of English formal verse, but it is a challenge that sometimes forces the poet to work a bit harder.

Second, French and Italian follow Greek and Latin in avoiding hiatus—the clash produced when a word ending in a vowel is followed by one that begins in a vowel.  In the last line of Dante I quoted above, via and era are run together, not only in poetry but in everyday speech.  In English we sometimes do this naturally, but the stronger tendency is to introduce a sort of “glide”—a consonant “y”.  We rarely say the apple as two distinct words but slide into thee-yapple.   As we go on, such things will become important for the standard practice on elision—that is, the blending together of vowel sounds.

Let’s go back to the hapless Surrey.

The soote  season, that bud and bloom forth brings, 

  With green hath clad the hill, and eke  the vale. 

  The nightingale with feathers new she sings ; 

  The turtle  to her make  hath told her tale. 

  Summer is come, for every spray now springs, 

  The hart  hath hung his old head  on the pale; 

  The buck in brake his winter coat he slings ; 

  The fishes flete  with new repairèd scale ; 

  The adder all her slough away she slings ; 

  The swift swallow pursueth the fliës smale ;

  The busy bee her honey now she mings ;

  Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.

      And thus I see among these pleasant things 

      Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs !

Note the rather mechanically repetitious shape of the lines, every one of which has a misnamed “caesura” after the fourth syllable.  I say misnamed, because in Greek and Latin, this word for “cutting” does not coincide with the foot or metron, while in these lines of Surrey they do.

Let us throw into the mix a poem by Surrey’s more original contemporary, Thomas Wyatt, whose verses have a knottier and thornier edge:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek 

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. 

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, 

That now are wild and do not remember 

That sometime they put themself in danger 

To take bread at my hand; and now they range, 

Busily seeking with a continual change. 

I know pronunciation has changed, but I cannot quite scan these lines without doing a bit of violence.

Just note the following characteristics.

First, in a ten syllable line both almost invariably break the line after the fourth syllable, where there is typically a light break in sense, but the major syntactical break is at the end of each line.  Such lines are often called “end-stopped” for the obvious reason.  Lines in which the sense flows across the verse-end barrier display what is known as enjambement.

Most of the lines are a monotonously regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.  In the case of occasional exceptions, I do not know if they were not meant to be read with a regular ictus, e.g.

“The soote seasón..”

The final stress would have been normal in the French “saison,” though in Shakespeare “Season” is accented as it is today:

So cares and joys abound, as seasons fleet.

My best guess is that Surrey was not varying the stress pattern but simply cheating.  The strictness of the meter encourages both cheating and the rather artificial word order that both Wyatt and Surrey constantly engage in:

The nightingale with feathers new she sings

and the frequent use of one-syllable fillers to make the meter work:

Summer is come, for every spray now springs

The busy bee her honey now she mings

Some of the clumsiness derives from a simplistic attempt to force English into the forms and rhymes of Romance languages, which are naturally more mellifluous and where rhymes are easy.

Blank Verse

Now, down to brass tacks.  Blank verse is the easiest verse to write in English but perhaps the hardest to write well.  Surrey is often claimed to be the first to have used it, but he is certainly no master.  Here are some lines from his translation of Aeneid II.  Aeneas, who is describing the events leading up to the capture of Troy, tells the famous story of the unhappy Laocoon.

Us caitiffs then a far more dreadful chance

Befel, that troubled our unarmed breasts.

Whiles Laocoon, that chosen was by lot

Neptunus' priest, did sacrifice a bull

Before the holy altar; suddenly

From Tenedon, behold! in circles great

By the calm seas come fleeting adders twain,

Which plied towards the shore (I loathe to tell)

With reared breast lift up above the seas:

Whose bloody crests aloft the waves were seen;

The hinder part swam hidden in the flood.

Their grisly backs were linked manifold.

With sound of broken waves they gat the strand,

With glowing eyen, tainted with blood and fire;

Whose waltring¹ tongues did lick their hissing mouths.

We fled away; our face the blood forsook:

But they with gait² direct to Lacon ran.

And first of all each serpent doth enwrap

The bodies small of his two tender sons;

Whose wretched limbs they bit, and fed thereon.  

The verse is very similar to his rhyming verse, though the diction is a bit less stilted because of the lack of rhyme.  Note that he includes as syllables many unaccented syllables in modern English, particularly participles ending in -ed.  I believe that was still standard in his day.  Occasionally, Surrey breaks the line after the fifth syllable and even runs over the sense.

Before the holy altar; suddenly

From Tenedon, 

The effect of the enjambement, however, is clumsy because no attempt is made to vary the weight or speed of the line or to alter the rhythm.  The result can be a bit like the monotony of perpetual motion.

The homework, then, will be to turn the first lines of the Iliad into four-square monotonous blank verse.  Be as artificial as you like:

O goddess sing for us Achilles’ wrath

that sent so many woes unto the Greeks

and cast brave souls into the depths of hell…

Next week we shall move forward both in time and technique and consider some examples from Sidney and Marlowe.

Next week we shall move forward both in time and technique and consider some examples from Sidney and Marlowe.