The Kubla Khan Crescendo

Yesterday, I wrote a rather puerile parody of the last section of Kubla Khan. The original contains one of the greatest crescendos in English poetry, which is all down to meter. It goes like this:

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The crescendo to which I refer is in the lines

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,

The trick is in the trimeter.

Most of Kubla Khan is in tetrameters, that there are four beats to each line.

te-TUM te-TUM te-TUM te-TUM

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw
It was an Abysinnian maid
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora.

But then Coleridge very cleverly drops down to the trimeter. He starts by merely missing off that last stressed syllable:

Could I revive within me,

'Ooh,' feels the reader, 'There's something missing here.' And then Coleridge cuts off the last unstressed syllable.

Her symphony and song.

We're down to three beats and only six syllables. We are noticeably short. And the reader, whether or not he can explain why, feels a frustration and a desire to break back into the proper rhythm. It is all much too short, too compressed, too stuffy and claustrophobic. Will we never be set free? Will the line never get its last syllable back? Yes, it will. Ready for the release? Here goes!

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,

Not only do you get back to the four-beat tetrameter, but you have beautiful release of a whole extra unstressed syllable. The dam has been broken, the torrent is flowing freely again. The compression was necessarily followed by an explosion, and the famine by a feast.

That with music loud and long...

Now, we're back to the tetrameter, and perhaps something should be said about the meaning of the words rather than just the rhythm. The change in meter has not happened alone. For starters it's been bound into one sentence. This means that the reader can't think to himself that the differing line-lengths signify different sections of the poem. This is reinforced by the fact that the rhyme scheme runs straight over the metrical variation. Moreover, the two trimeter lines have been part of one conditional clause. And here's the beautiful thing: in terms of meaning he's talking about what he'd like to do and can't (revive within me), in terms of grammar he's talking about a hypothetical condition that can't be fulfilled, and in terms of meter he's nearly getting to the end of the tetrameter, but no quite.

Then he gets into a hypothetical success, a subjunctive reality and a metrical release.

All at once.

Clever, isn't it?

And the lovely thing is that, though not everybody can write Kubla Khan, the metrical trick is infinitely reusable.

If I could only finish
My posts a little quicker,
Your interest would not diminish
Nor would your eyelids start to flicker.

Hail muse etc.

The Inky Fool's main drain

Worrywart

I have just this second been sent an e-mail containing a word I'd never hear before: worrywart. Isn't that a lovely word? It means exactly what you'd think it means: somebody who frets too much*. It's beautifully alliterative and the OED says that it's been around since 1956, and I've just found it in a magazine from 1937. So far as I can tell, the only reason that I've never heard of worry-wart before is that it's an Americanism, but such a beautiful one.

I was told last night that worriers live longer. I'm such a carefree and debonair sort of fellow that this threw me into a panic.

Worry, by the way, originally meant to strangle, but its meaning has slowly weakened over the years until throttling has become a mere irritant. Mind you, my tie still worries me.

Which reminds me of a concrete poem by Guillaume Appolonaire. The idea of a concrete poem is simply that you write it in the shape of the subject. The following translates approximately as: The painful tie that you wear so smartly, take it off, civilised one, if you want to breathe easily.

*And I don't mean a guitarist, although guitars are highly strung.

Honeymoon

Just one more.

A honeymoon is so-called because the honey-sweet and mellifluous part of a marriage is traditionally meant to last for one month, after which it all goes to pot in a handcart. As Huloet put it in his bestselling Abecedarium Anglico Latinum:

Hony mone, a terme prouerbially applied to such as be newe maried, whiche wyll not fall out at the fyrste, but thone loueth the other at the beginnynge excedyngly, the likelyhode of theyr exceadynge loue appearing to aswage, ye which time the vulgar people cal the hony mone*.

The OED's first citation for honeymoon comes from Heywood's Proverbs (1546) and it rather charmed me because it is, I assume accidentally, a perfect acephalous iambic tetrameter or POM-dee-POM-dee-POM-dee-POM, which is my favourite verse form.

It was yet but honeymoon

Last week's post on verse form produced such fine results that I shall invite you, dear reader, to turn that into the first line of a quatrain, and slip the result gently into the comments section.

P.S. If you trying to remember where you've heard of the Abecedarium Anlglico Latinum before, it was the source of my post on the word wamblecropt.


*However, there are folk remedies involving the hide of a waterbuffalo.

Square Poems

Only Lewis Carroll would think of writing this:

I've been trying to come up with my own version and it's a lot harder than one might think. It's impossible to prove linguistically, but I imagine that the complication increases exponentially with the number of words in the square. There will be an imaginary prize for anyone who can post one in the comments.

I am
Am I?

She has eyes
Has she sense
Eyes sense me

I suppose I have a blog
Suppose I should
I should
Have
A
Blog

Damn. And he made it rhyme.

Clever clogs

Antanaclasic Verse

There's a Chinese poem called Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi. The reason for the title should be obvious if you read the poem in Westernised script:

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

Which translates as:

In a stone den was a poet named Shi, who loved to eat lions, and had resolved to eat ten.
He often went to the market to hunt for lions.
At exactly ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that moment, Shi had just arrived at the market too.
Seeing those lions, he shot them with his arrows.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp, so he had his servant clean it.
After the stone den was cleaned, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized the corpses were in fact ten stone lions.
Try to explain this matter.

It was written by a linguist called Chao Yuen Ren to demonstrate how inflection and the use of tone could alter the sense of Chinese words. In Chinese the same word can have different meanings when pronounced at a different pitch.

It's an exercise in what the ancient and rhetorical Greeks called antanaclasis, the repetition of a word in different senses. As Benjamin Franklin said: 'Your argument is sound. All sound.' Or Shakespeare's:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will,
And will to boot, and will in over-plus...
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me, for my name is will.

(These verse are often ignored by the Shakespeare-was-all-written-by-Walter-Raleigh-dressed-as-Queen-Elizabeth brigade.)

Shī Shì shí shī shǐ, put me to pondering whether it was a possible to write something slightly similar in English. I started with: She's chi-chi, sews so-so tutus too. And then turned to: Right, write which witch ate eight bare bears, but got bored. So instead I shall give you the much looser poem below as a Sunday punishment. You are invited, dear inventive reader, to write your own antanaclasic rhyme over Christmas and to post it in the comments.

House Rules


Don’t meddle with medals
And don’t peddle pedals
And don’t throw your beer on the bier.
Don’t ever stalk storks
And don’t hawk those hawks,
Don’t peer at that peer on the pier.


Don’t fiddle with fiddles
Or riddle me riddles
Or wail about whales in Wales.
Well, well, you’re not well
Since you fell down that fell;
And - Alas! - that’s the tail of my tale.


So reader so dear to my heart, be as a deer to my hart, and write your own. I am not averse to a verse that is short, nor long for one that is long. Come to the waters of creativity, lower your can into the well and do as well as you can.

Very chi-chi

P.S. For the translation, and indeed the name of the author, of Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi I am indebted to this article.

A Preposterous Puzzle

The idea of the Internet is that it should bring people together. Perverts are a good example. In 1990 a haddock fetishist was a lonely fellow who thought that nobody else in all the world would ever understand him. Now, twenty years later, he has online forums, chatrooms, Wikipedia entries and pornographic, subaquatic films only a mouse's click away.

The same principle applies to paranoiacs, terrorists and knitting enthusiasts. Nobody is alone any more, except me. For nobody in all the world is quite as pointlessly interested in verse form as I am, or at least not that I've discovered.

Anyway, in the interests of locating someone as boring as me, here is a puzzle. I have taken a famous - but metrically fiendish - poem. I have transcribed it using "x" to denote a stressed syllable and "-" to denote a soft one.

I have also added in all the rhymes. But because many of the rhymes are internal I can't mark it up as simple ABAB. Instead I have replaced the "x" with another letter. I have also used capital letters for feminine rhymes, which therefore carry over to the following dash.

So can you guess the poem?

Can you be bothered to guess the poem?

Are you there my dull, dull brother?

Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!


x - - x - - a
- B -
x - - x - - a
- - C - - - C -
- - x - - C -
- - d - d - - x - - d
- - e – x - - - f
- - g - - g - - x - - g
x - - e - - x - - B -
x - - x - - A
- B -
x - - x - - A


- - g - - g - - x - - g
- x – x - H -
- - x x - H -
- - x - - - x - - x
- - x - i
- - i
- - x - - j - - j
- - j - - K -
K -
K -
x - - - K -
l - - - l - - - a
- - a
- - x - x - - - f
x - - x - - a
- B -
x - - x - - a

- - m
- B -
- - m
x - - x - m
- x - - - x - - - m
- n
- - o - - o - o
- p
- - x - - p - - n
- n
- - q
- - x - - x - q

For all those who can't be arsed, you can get the answer (as well as a really weird recital) by following this link.

A New Verse Form: The Mope

Once, on a five hour train journey, I developed a brand new verse form. The rule was that every line had to be an anagram of my full name. The result, of course, made no sense but did fit together gramatically. It ran thus:

Signature

Ok, thrash my dwarf, or
Ask for a word rhythm
Worthy of Mark's hard
Harrows of dark myth.
Hark as my word-froth
Arks forward, myth-ho!
Oh dark swarthy form,
Martyr who had forks,
Ask for a word rhythm
Or thrash my dwarf, ok?

Any readers who have much too much time on their hands are invited to post their own in the comments. They don't have to be anagrams of your name, you could choose anything. But they do need to form full, or at least vague, sentences. They should also not contain the original word or phrase, which should be hinted at in the title, thus making the poem a puzzle.

I shall call this new form the Mope, because it is a poem, but anagrammatically so.

P.S. I've claimed to invent new verse forms before and been cruelly informed of my belatedness.

Shakespeare's Working Practices, Lou Reed And Me

This may seem to be a long and meandering post on verse form but it will get somewhere. I believe it will get into Shakespeare's method of writing poetry. However, the post has to be unutterably long, so if you have anything better to do, do it instead.

The other day I was ambling along the street singing quietly to myself. The song I was singing was Berlin by Lou Reed. The words start like this:

The Lullaby Meter

My favourite poetic meter is the acephalous iambic tetrameter. If that opening sentence doesn't have you weeing in your intellectual nappies then click on read more. For the rest of you, here is a link to Topsy and Tim making a picnic.

A New Verse Form

As a little follow up to Monday's post on which were the most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, I have invented a new* verse form. The rules ought to be pretty self-explanatory. You are invited to compose your own, however short, and place it in the comments section. There will be an imaginary prize for the best one and bonus points if they rhyme or bring laughter to my teary cheeks. Here are two examples:

Index of First Lines

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,

She walks in beauty like the night

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

(Just the place for a Snark, the Bellman said).

I think that I shall never see
White founts falling in the courts of the sun
And you, my spent heart’s treasure.

Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

I think that I shall never see
Lars Porsena of Clusium
(He did not wear his scarlet cloak).

I think that I shall never see
Everyone suddenly burst out singing
Beneath the thunders of the upper deep
And many voice marshalled in one hymn:
“Hail muse! et cetera.”


Index of Last Lines

I never writ nor no man ever loved:
That is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned
And that has made all the difference.

The Lady of Shalott
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on
Watched by every human love.

The Lady of Shalott
Will never come back to me,
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

You might as well live
Where ignorant armies clash by night
And the yellow god forever gazes down.

The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine

*Update: It appears that this verse form is not entirely new, although I have been beaten by a mere 1,700 years, which is nothing in geological time. It is called a cento.

Alphonse Allais and the Holorhyme

In 1883 Alphonse Allais exhibited a painting called First Communion of Anaemic Young Girls In The Snow, which was of course a white canvas. I was reminded by of this by the snowy view from my window, of which Persil would be proud. Allais' painting was the companion piece to his Apopleptic Cardinals Picking Tomatos Beside the Red Sea.

Allais also invented the holorhyme, which consists of an entirely homphonous couplet so the two lines sound identical, but mean different things. One of his ran:

Par les bois du djinn où s'entasse de l'effroi,
Parle et bois du gin ou cent tasses de lait froid.

Which means:

By the genie's forest where fear abounds
Talk, drink gin, or a hundred cups of cold milk.

The only example of a holorhyme in English that I know of is by Miles Kington and goes thuslyly:

In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?
Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas!

Perhaps they are easier in French. Here, off the top of my head, is one of my own composition on Napoleon's advance on Moscow.

War, snow, rushin' on.
Was no Russian? Non.

Which may prove my point about the language (I can't quite work out the Gaul/gall pun right now). Anybody with an effort of their own please feel free to post in the comments. It will give you something to do over Christmas other than charades.

Herewith another photograph I took yesterday:

Note the anaemic communicants on the left

Update: Another (two?) holorhymes on the advance on Moscow

There, hoarse as Marshall Ney,

Their horse's martial neigh

And almost:

The steppe galls

The gauls' step.