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

‘scissors’. A word’s quantity is essentially the sum of the duration of its vowels. We shall come to that later. The point is this: poetry is all about concentration , the concentration of mind and the concentration of thought, feeling and language into words within a rhythmic structure. In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, concentrated .
    It may seem strange for us to focus in such detail on something as apparently piffling as a pyrrhic substitution, but I am convinced that a sense, an awareness, a familiarity and finally a mastery of this and all the other techniques we have seen and will see allow us a confidence and touch that the uninformed reading and writing of verse could never bestow. It is a little like changing gear in a car: it can seem cumbersome and tricky at first, but it soon becomes second nature. It is all about developing the poetic equivalent of ‘muscle memory’. With that in mind, here are some more lines featuring these stress demotions or pyrrhic substitutions. I have boxed the first two examples and explained my thinking. Here is one from the Merchant’s Tale:

    You would not say ‘a roaring AND a cry’ unless the sense demanded it. Chaucer, like Owen, shows that a demotion of the fourth beat throws more weight on to the fifth: CRY . Owen demonstrates that it is possible with the second beat too.

    ‘Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’ seems a bit wrenched. The demotion allows the push here on ‘garg’ and ‘froth’ to assume greater power: ‘Come garg ling from the froth -cor rupt ed lungs ’.
    Look at these lines from a poem that every American schoolchild knows: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, by Robert Frost. It is the literary equivalent of ‘The Night Before Christmas’, quoted and misquoted every holiday season in the States:
The woods are love ly, dark , and deep ,
But I have pro mises to keep ,
And miles to go be fore I sleep ,
    To read the phrase ‘ pro mi sés to keep ’ would be an absurd wrench, wouldn’t it? Clearly that’s a pyrrhic substitution too.
    The opening line of Shakespeare’s Richard III has a demoted third beat: note that the first line begins with a trochaic substitution:
Now is the win ter of our dis con tent
    So here is a summary of the six new techniques we’ve learned to enrich the iambic pentameter.
1. End-stopping: how the sense, the thought, can end with the line.
2. Enjambment: how it can run through the end of a line.
3. Caesura: how a line can have a break, a breath, a pause, a gear change.
4. Weak endings: how you can end the line with an extra, weak syllable.
5. Trochaic substitution: how you can invert the iamb to make a trochee.
6. Pyrrhic substitution: how you can downgrade the beat of an interior (second, third or fourth) foot to turn it into a doubly weak or pyrrhic foot.
    Poetry Exercise 4
    You can probably guess what I’m going to ask for here. Sixteen unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The idea is to use pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions (five points for each), weak endings–that extra syllable at the end (two points for each) but all without going overboard and losing the primary iambic rhythm. You can also award yourself two points for every successful enjambment.
    Before you embark upon your own, we are going take a look at and mark my attempt at the exercise. I have sought inspiration, if that is the word, from the headlines on today’s BBC news website and would recommend this as preferable to staring out of the window chewing the end of a pencil awaiting the Muse’s kiss. Four news stories in all.
Policemen, in a shocking poll revealed
They have no time for apprehending felons
Criminals now at last are free to work.
Why can’t the English play the game of cricket?
Inside a tiny wooden urn are buried
The Ashes of a great and sporting nation. 19
Babies are now