Stephen Fry on Meter, Part 5
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 1, Section 5, on non-metered poetry from the Anglo-Saxons.
Instead of meter and feet, the primary technique covered in this chapter is accentual-alliterative poetry, in which alliteration is the primary goal. But it’s not about a full line of alliteration so much as using it within a line in an A-A-A-B pattern, where three stressed syllables have the same letter or sound, and the fourth does not, giving it a bit of a discordant “crash” as Fry describes it. In between those stressed syllables, you can include any number of unstressed syllables.
There’s also an idea of a “hemistich,” which divides the A-A-A-B pattern into two half-lines, each of which has two of the stressed syllables. So the target is two words that alliterate in the first half-line, and then one word that alliterates with those words in the first half-line and one that does not in the second half-line. It all makes a lot more sense when you see examples and try it out.
I found in the writing exercise that even this idea seems to lend itself to a bit of a rhythm to the poetry, even if it’s not meter proper. I liked what I wrote for my exercise for this section, though the last line got a little tricky.
I’ve paused at the plums on the plate in the fridge.
I know they’re not mine, but neither are they his.
If nobody knows what knave put them there,
Can you blame anybody from binging them down?
And yes, it’s a riff on “This is just to say” by William Carlos Williams, because that’s my go-to when someone tells me to write about food in poetry!
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