Read Online The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within by Stephen Fry - Free Book Online

line, otherwise it disrupts the primary rhythm too much. It is essential too, in order for the metre to keep its pulse, that the pyrrhic foot be followed by a proper iamb. Pyrrhic substitution results, as you can see above, in three unaccented beats in a row, which are resolved by the next accent (in this case own ).
    Check what I’m saying by flicking your eyes up and reading out loud. It can all seem a bit bewildering as I bombard you with references to the third foot and the second unit and so on, but so long as you keep checking and reading it out (writing it down yourself too, if it helps) you can keep track of it all and IT IS WORTH DOING .
    Incidentally, Vladimir Nabokov in his Notes on Prosody is very unkind about calling these effects ‘substitutions’–he prefers to call a pyrhhic substitution a ‘scud’ or ‘false pyrrhic’ and a trochaic substitution a ‘tilted scud’ or ‘false trochee’. I am not sure this is any clearer, to be honest.
    Anyway, you might have spotted that this trick, this trope, this ‘downgrading’ of one accent, has the effect of drawing extra attention to the following one. The next strong iambic beat, the own has all the more emphasis for having followed three unstressed syllables.
    If the demotion were to take place in the fourth foot it would emphasise the last beat of the line, as in this pyrrhic substitution in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which as it happens also begins with a trochaic switch. R EAD IT OUT LOUD:

    Both the excerpts above contain pyrrhic substitution, Shakespeare’s in the third foot, Owen’s in the fourth. Both end with the word ‘eyes’, but can you see how Shakespeare’s use of it in the third foot causes the stress to hammer harder down on the word own and how Owen’s use of it in the fourth really pushes home the emphasis on eyes ? Which, after all, is the point the line is making, not in their hands, but in their eyes . (Incidentally, I think the trochaic substitution in the first foot also helps emphasise ‘hands’. Thus, when read out, the line contrasts hands and eyes with extra emphasis.)
    Owen’s next line repeats the pyrrhic substitution in the same, fourth, foot.
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
    A stressed of would be a horrid example of what’s called a wrenched accent , an unnatural stress forced in order to make the metre work: scudding over the ‘of’ and making the foot pyrrhic does not sacrifice the metre.

    Owen was a poet who, like Shakespeare, really knew what he was doing . These effects are not accidental, the substitutions do not come about by chance or through some carefree inability to adhere to the form and hoping for the best. Owen studied metre and form constantly and obsessively, as did Keats, his hero, as indeed did all the great poets. They would no more be unaware of what they were doing than Rubens could be unaware of what he was doing when he applied an impasto dot of white to give shine to an eye, or than Beethoven could be unaware of what happened when he diminished a seventh or syncopated a beat. The freedom and the ease with which a master can do these things belies immense skill derived from practice.
    Incidentally, when Rubens was a young man he went round Rome feverishly drawing and sketching antique statues and Old Master paintings, lying on his back, standing on ladders, endlessly varying his viewpoint so as to give himself differing angles and perspectives. He wanted to be able to paint or draw any aspect of the human form from any angle, to master foreshortening and moulding and all the other techniques, spending months on rendering hands alone. All the great poets did the equivalent in their notebooks: busying themselves endlessly with different metres, substitutions, line lengths, poetic forms and techniques. They wanted to master their art as Rubens mastered his. They say that the poet Tennyson knew the quantity of every word in the English language except