Free The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within by Stephen Fry Page B

to fit.
    F OUR B EATS TO THE L INE
    Wordsworth wrote ‘Daffodils’ in straight four-beat tetrameters.
I wand er’d lone ly as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd ,
A host , of gold en daff o dils ;
    Tetrameter, the four-stress line, is immensely popular in English verse. If iambic pentameter, the Heroic Line, may be described as the great joint of beef, then tetrameters are the sandwiches–the everyday form if you like, and no less capable of greatness. If you ask someone to write a poetic ditty on a Valentine’s card or something similar, nine times out of ten they will write tetrameters, whether they do so consciously or not: the four-beat instinct is deep within us, much as in music the four/four time signature is so standard as to be the default: you don’t have to write it in the score, just a letter C for Common Time.
    Four stresses also mark the base length of a form we will meet later called the ballad , where they usually alternate with three-stress lines, as in the anonymous seventeenth-century ‘Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens’:
And many was the feather-bed
That fluttered on the foam;
And many was the good lord’s son
That never more came home.
    Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
    and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’:
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
    In each of these ballad verses the first and third lines have four stresses (eight syllables) and the second and fourth lines have three (six syllables):

    It might have struck you that all three extracts could have come from the same poem, despite their each being separated by roughly a hundred years. We will hold that thought until we come to look at the ballad later. You will remember, I hope, that the Earl of Oxford’s duff heptameters and Kipling’s rather better managed ones seemed to beg to be split into a similar arrangement:
My life through lingering long is lodged,
In lair of loathsome ways,
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms
That guard you while you sleep
    Tetrameters, even if they follow ballad form and alternate with trimeters, don’t need to have the swing and narrative drive of a ballad: they can be used in more lyrical and contemplative poetry too, as we have already seen with Wordsworth’s use of them for his daffodils. Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is perhaps the poet who most completely mastered the reflective aspect of the four-beat/three-beat measure. Almost none of her poetry is in lines of longer than four feet, yet its atmosphere of depth, privacy and (often sad) thoughtfulness is a world away from lusty narrative ballads.
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Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
1612
The Auctioneer of Parting
His ‘Going, going, gone’
Shouts even from the Crucifix,
And brings his Hammer down–
He only sells the Wilderness,
The prices of Despair
Range from a single human Heart
To Two–not any more–
    Lord Byron shows that pure four-beat tetrameters can be blissfully lyrical: note the initial trochaic substitution in the last line.
She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.
    While Humbert Wolfe demonstrates here their appropriateness for comic satire:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
    The above examples are of course in iambic four-beats.

    Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke’s metrical version of Psalm 71 is written in trochaic tetrameters:

Lord , on thee my trust is ground ed:
Leave me not with shame con found ed
    As is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha :

Oft en stopped and gazed im plor ing
At