Metre and Rhyme

This essay was originally published on 29 December 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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At least a decade ago, I was travelling down to London and found myself sitting next to a poet with whom I chatted pretty much the whole way. She revealed her profession shortly into the journey and at some stage I produced a copy of my own collection, Presbyopia, to show her the narrative poem I’m going to examine in this essay, “Zarathustra’s Last Interview”. Initially she seemed to like it, but after a bit something clicked and she cried, “Oh but this is traditional! There’s a metre.” She returned it as though it could have been contagious. There are two important points here: first that while metre is immediately clear when we listen to poetry, it is not when we’re reading it, and second that metre has been more or less banned in some circles of English poetry for a very long time (when I use the word “English” here, I’m always referring to the language and not where it is written, which is of no significance).

She was a very likeable person and, I’m sure, a very conscientious poet, and her attitude was and still is fairly typical. I accepted this prejudice as inevitable, though not justified. Only when I heard on the Italian radio that metre and rhyme are coming back into fashion, did I feel that the time had come to challenge it.

I once heard a musicologist state that nineteenth-century composers had all been either trying to develop Beethoven’s achievements or trying to defy them. The reality of this – which composers were the former and who the latter – is something that escapes me entirely, as I have no understanding of music beyond what gives me pleasure and what doesn’t. However I can see an analogy with attitudes to metre, because we are defining ourselves in relation to it (some are still doggedly developing it further, and some look on it as something akin to the penny-farthing as perceived by a modern cyclist. We are unable to see it for what it is, because some kind of literary ideology stands in our way. Milton dismissed rhyme, but considered metre to be essential to Modern English which emerged as our language in the late fifteenth century. Perhaps we should listen to him because someone else (it may have been Philip Pullman) said that no one understood the poetic potential of the English language better than Milton.

In other words, blank verse lends itself to the structure of the English language, which has so few rhymes that we have rhyming dictionaries, which wouldn’t have been necessary for Middle English because like Italian it has a vowel at the end of most words and therefore generates an almost infinite number of rhymes that the poet can use at will. Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist argues that the natural poetic form in English is what he calls the five-bar line of four feet and a pause. This is Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and I understand where he is coming from but I’m not a fan. I prefer a longer line and more variety, and I think that rhyme and other techniques should be used not to straightjacket the prosodic form but to break it up and avoid the repetitiousness of some “traditional” forms.

“Promise me this,” he said,
“Stay not the onward movement of your mind
And hold your course when barren talk
Pervades, and has no scope or sense
That drives and makes unconscious conscious thought”

This is the opening verse to my poem in which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and thus Nietzsche himself attempts to explain his behaviour. I have always said that Marx was right about the big issues but not the small, and Nietzsche was right about the small issues and not the big, always supposing that we can separate them out. We can agree, I think, that Nietzsche was wrong about women, war and the demos. Some may try to excuse him on the first count because of the influence that the arch-misogynist Schopenhauer had over him, but for a man who prided himself on his independence of thought this is no excuse. On war, he was undoubtedly responsible for convincing more than one generation of the cleansing effects of war. Given that during the Franco-Prussian War he was always in the rearguard where he contracted syphilis, he was a fool to repeat this folly again and again. War is obscene, and the evils it inflicts survive for generations. And yet his writings are full of wisdoms that we would be fools to turn our backs on, such as his assertion that the weak are the cruellest because cruelty momentarily makes them feel strong. There is humanity in the writings of the Calvinist pastor’s son whose intellect failed him permanently when he saw a carter beating a horse, and as the carter ignored his protestations, Nietzsche then embraced the horse around its neck and fell to the ground weeping. Nietzsche/Zarathustra is the “he” in this poem (in other words he becomes my character, just as Zarathustra does in one of his most famous works) and he starts by urging the interviewer to think and write independently. Conscious thought uses our language or languages, but most thought occurs in the unconscious. As writers have to think about words, most of their unconscious thoughts are about conscious thought. I had an audience member at an event who got very angry about what he considered to be an oxymoron (“make unconscious conscious thought”), which it is not, and I just shrugged and said nothing because he had decided that it made no sense simply because it wasn’t immediately understandable to him. Next:

He stood, and waving wide the circle of his hand,
he lifted up his spear. “The huddled dwellings on the hill
are not a home to change; and when the fighters fall upon the plain,
the dullards shudder in their beds and weep their fears,
as though the gods could care a damn
about the frightened witless fools who fail to flee
the wrathful ruthless horde – the company of the strong.”

Here we have the demos and Nietzsche’s contempt for them, which identifies him as a right-wing thinker (in spite of Walter Kaufman’s defence of him, which in the main is absolutely correct), and yet his greatest contempt he reserved for anti-Semites, which was one of the reasons for his rift with Wagner. The strong are the powerful with whom he identifies in a very obscure and frankly vague manner. In this poem, they simply kill him but in reality they, with the help of his sister, actually killed his reputation for a while through a rank misrepresentation of his philosophy, reducing him for some time to a proto-fascist, which he was not. There are 144 lines in this poem, which are too much for us here, so I’ll skip to when the interviewer really does produce a rush of oxymorons:

“I heard the clamour of your words in little Europe’s agora, and felt
the textured smoothness and the heavy lightness of their weave,
their troubled truths, alluring lies, and clever, clever talk. You do
speak true when speaking of the little things, but not the big:
who are the strong who, unlike you, must travel in a pack?
And like a flood, a plague, a horde of certitudes go cutting down
the lives of industry and industry itself. What do you gain?”

“What do they lose?” he laughed again,
“if losing lets them start once more to build
upon their knowledge of the things this world contains.
They scurry with their social mind and their own minds
are not their own. They worry, as retainers of the rich,
they slave for us, the strong who know the reason
for which we came into this world: good war
which hallows any cause, and more was made from its courageous course
than fretting with one’s neighbour’s fate. The fools!
They value love – its soporific state – and underrate the force of hate.”

We have an internal rhyme in the second of these verses: “They scurry … They worry” and also “neighbour’s fate … underrate … the force of hate”. I feel that these internal rhymes increase the tension. Later we are introduced to the powerful, where the imagery and the techniques thicken:

Down they came, the company of power, and what a motley crew:
one wore a helmet, one a tricorn hat, one dressed as admiral of the fleet,
another was a moghul lord and brandished yataghan, and yet can
these few so much power bring to bear upon the sword-less folk?
And how well they knew the artless and inflated art of being grand!
Cold sneer, sadistic laugh complete with blackened teeth, a scar,
a stare of maddened haughty ice that can browbeat the trodden folk.
And these alone mark out these grander men whose greatness
draws on their disdainful look and looks not at the plainness of
their fateless, surly selves that live in the now and build our hell on earth:
remove our plenty and leave a land of dearth.

Assonances such as “yataghan … and yet can” and finally a “traditional” rhyme, “earth … dearth” at the end of this verse describing the company of the strong. It is worth mentioning that the dyad “strong/weak” dominates Nietzsche’s thought and yet these terms have constantly shifting semantic fields which intentionally manipulate us. The next two verses are the climax, and I go a little over the top with Nietzsche’s servility, which he did not suffer from (but Nietzsche/Zarathustra is my character, or that’s my defence). The captain of the company has raised his scimitar high above his head in the previous verse omitted here:

And down it came and severed air
and rived the wise man’s head of hair.
“Goodbye, old man, you served us well;
I speed you on the road to hell
so you can Dionysian dance the well-marked way
your well-intended stance marked out
when spinning your words to serve us killers
of contempted herds.
His father was a priest, a dogmat of the Christian cult
who straight-backed walked amongst the herd
and joyless confirmed them in their herdish ways
and talked the talk of life to come
and hopes eternal beyond the fierceness of our rule.
He stole their bodies and he stole their souls;
the coarseness of his school left little hope of living life
up to its brim and going beyond the petty part the pawn
plays in my hands,” the chief man roared, while wiping blood
from the blade he’d drawn light-heartedly.

“But what of him, the son who came from those he loved to scorn?”
“He served us well with all his intellectual force and traitored those
who work upon the hill. And set off on his ineffectual course to go
beyond while doing ill to those for whom he should have cared.
As one of us he could not be:
we do no thinking in our bold equestrian crowd.
Proudly we get others to do that paltry thing,
as others do our digging, forests cut
and fill our coffers with their well-gotten gains:
do they not see how we can govern
and leave so little for their enduring pains?”
I wept and kept my distance from their jocund and unruffled wrath;
I buried genius in the sands after placing the spear in both his hands;
I prayed to God for the godless seer and longed for a time
when he could appear harmless for his bold falsehoods.
Dust denoted the diminution of the brutal behemoth
that he so loved.

There’s so much going on here that I’ll not list it all, and the length of the lines has become erratic. In my opinion, all this chaos is held firm by the metre. I’ll draw attention to an assonance “the fierceness of our rule … coarseness of his school” and a complex internal rhyme “his intellectual force … his ineffectual course”. But readers will be able to note several other things.

Finally I’d like to finish with a poem by Eugenio Montale which I have translated into English. You will be able to see his influence on my poetry, but most of all he taught me that some traditional tools can be used to renew poetry, which is of course a constant process.

La casa dei doganieri
Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri
sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera:
desolata t’attende dalla sera
in cui v’entrò lo sciame dei tuoi pensieri
e vi sostò irrequieto.

Libeccio sferza da anni le vecchie mura
e il suono del tuo riso non è più lieto:
la bussola va impazzita all’avventura
e il calcolo dei dadi più non torna.
Tu non ricordi; altro tempo frastorna
la tua memoria; un filo s’addipana.

Ne tengo un capo; ma s’allontana
la casa e in cima al tetto la banderuola
affumicata gira senza pietà.
Ne tengo un capo; ma tu resti sola
né qui respiri nell’oscurità.

Oh l’orizzonte in fuga, dove s’accende
rara la luce della petroliera!
Il varco è qui? (Ripullula il frangente
ancora sulla balza che scoscende ...).
Tu non ricordi la casa di questa
mia sera. Ed io non so chi va e chi resta.

Translation:

The Customs House

Do you recall the customs house,
high on the cliff above the rocks and sea?
Lonely, it has awaited your return from that evening
in which your thoughts swarmed in
and restless lingered there.

The salted wind whips against the ancient walls
and your laughter no longer carries carefreeness:
the compass spins and madness calls,
no longer do the dice then add
to a figure where they fall.
You remember not; other times divert,
disturb the unravelling thread of recollection.

I hold the other end; the house moves far away
and on the roof the blackened weather cock
spins in restless disregard.
I hold the other end, but you are alone
nor do I feel your breath within the dark.

Ah, the horizon is in flight to where
the occasional light of a tanker
drills the hard cover of night air.
The breach is here? (the teaming froth
breaks upon the ragged wall of cliff...).
You remember not my evening’s house nor the day’s.
I do not understand who goes and who stays.

So what is verse? It could include this:

Thirty days have September,
April, June and November
All the rest have thirty-one
Excepting February alone,
which has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year

Clearly this is not poetry, but it was never intended as such. It is a mnemonic device which regularly gets us out of a hole, although its practical usefulness may have escaped us when they drummed it into our heads at school. It is also a reminder that even when verse was magically turned into poetry, it was once supposed to be memorised as it could not written down. Poetics and mnemonics went hand in hand. The invention of writing did change things considerably, and the obsessive repetition of epithets disappeared, but it remained something to memorise as well, as the notarial practice of writing down poetry on documents in the Middle Ages showed (see our previous newsletter). Even with the invention of the printing press, poetry continued to be spoken as books were still relatively expensive items, though obviously much cheaper than before. At some stage people stopped reciting poetry and poetry became something to be read, like prose. Poetry has become something else, and that was liberating at the time, but we should not exclude the range of things that poetry can and should be.

Poetry was not conceived as something to be read; it is to be reread and recited often. Complex poetry cannot really be understood on the first reading, but only with the rereading and this comes from its history. Poetry recorded sagas and epics which were familiar to sometimes small communities (in relatively recent time but before the horrors of the last three decades, Somalis used to gather together for competitive recitals of long epic poems). Writing changed that long ago in much of the world, though traces of the ancient oral tradition remain. I’m not saying that the recital has disappeared (the power of T.S. Eliot’s poetry was revealed to me when a lecturer read a passage removed from “The Wasteland” on Pound’s advice). Poetry has expanded in many directions, but some have declared a no-go area where there should be none. I don’t want to overstate this (perhaps I already have), because poetry, like all the arts, is and always will be subject to fashion and fashion gives us something to fight against – a very useful function.

Martin Buber compared the I-Thou relationship with the I-it relationship: essentially the first acknowledged the agency of the interlocutor and the second denied it. We should try to foster the I-Thou, but I feel that I have an It-I relationship with many things concerning computers and the internet, by which I mean that I want to attribute agency to a collection of programmed alphanumerics while denying my own. This extends to mailchimp which allows us to produce these newsletters, so no complaints intended. However when I last opened the account I noticed that it was monitoring our output and giving us marks. Not high marks, and zero marks for “skimmability”, which should mean that no one has read this – but only skimmed it. Maybe. Obviously no one at mailchimp has read any of them; instead the computer has been asked to check on several easily detectable features and then to hand out standard advice consisting of two instructions: “Avoid using large words and long sentences to ensure your audience can easily understand your content,” and “When you're writing your next email, try and use 25 or fewer words per sentence.” Orwell thought that Newspeak would be introduced through oppressive government, but it seems that we may willingly participate in its increasing restrictiveness as we mistake the internet for our superego. I will however continue to use long words and long sentences along with short words and short sentences without discriminating against either, as I believe that they play off each other and need each other.

In case there are any readers of last month’s newsletter who would like to know the second instalment of the investigation of the Nazi spy and the Jewish woman who reported a large number of Jews in hiding to the SS, I will provide a brief update. Elena Heun married an Italian who had become rich by supplying the German army. She was highly intelligent and manipulative (as every spy must be). She used Celeste di Porto who was brutal and much less sophisticated. They both converted to Catholicism, one from Lutheranism and the other from Judaism, and they came under the protection of the Bishop of Assisi. They got involved with the focolarine, the young women who had joined a new Catholic order founded in 1943. They became their mentors! As Elena and her husband reshaped their histories, Celeste eventually turned into an unnecessary encumbrance and disappeared from the scene, and the historians can find no trace of her. Elena went from strength to strength – not without the odd upset along the way – and into the comfortable old age of a pillar of society. Those of us who believe that betrayals and lies have a cost may find some comfort in the fact that “the unending mendacity did become a burden towards the end of her life,” according to the historians. They also say that she suffered from a desire to be loved in spite of all the suffering she had inflicted on others, or possibly because of it.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, December 2021

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Header image: an 1889 oil sketch of Friedrich Nietzsche on his sick bed by Hans Olde.