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The
British author, actor, and comedian Stephen Fry has had a
distinguished creative career. Cambridge educated, he has
appeared in more than 90 films and TV shows, has written five
novels and an autobiography, and has written and directed
the 2003 film Bright Young Things. In England, he is
most loved for his appearances on the goofy Blackadder
and Jeeves and Wooster TV shows. Maybe that's why he
begins The Ode Less Travelled with this unusual line:
"I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry."
Having
already come forward with the information that he's gay, is
bipolar and once served three months in prison for credit
card fraud, he must be pulling our legs to think that his
poetry habit will scandalize the public. More likely, this
witty book will bring a new appreciation of the finer points
of poetry from someone who has obviously spent a lot of time
thinking about it. At the very least, this book will help
students through a college literature class taught by a persnickety
professor who insists that everyone know when a trochaic substitution
has interrupted an iambic pentameter.
Fry begins
with rules on how to read poetry: Take your time, read them
aloud, don't be afraid and keep a notebook to jot any thoughts
and reactions. Then, he methodically explores the things that
give poems structure: meter, rhyme, form and diction. He quaintly
assumes every reader is burning with passion to master them
all and commit pen to paper. As a way into this task, Fry
offers 20 exercises. Here is one: Picture someone who has
gotten high and is trying to explain to a police officer why
he has some marijuana. Another: Imagine being Britain's Poet
Laureate in 1854, charged with writing a commemorative poem
after 600 soldiers died in a disaster in the Ukraine (an event
which resulted in Alfred Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade,"
from which came the memorable lines, "theirs not to reason
why/ Theirs but to do or die.")
The
book is peppered with his own poems, which illustrate the
various techniques and approaches he describes. Fry demonstrates
"rhyme royal" with his own seven-line stanza:
Rhyme
Royal has a noble history
From Geoffrey Chaucer to the present day
Its secret is no hidden mystery
Iambic feet, the classic English way
With b and b to follow a b a.
This closing couplet, like a funeral hearse,
Drives to its end the body of the verse.
The author's
tone is reminiscent of Giles, the proper English librarian
who was always ready with some arcane bit of knowledge when
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was faced with a new demon. Fry is
apt to scold readers for reading too quickly and for not reading
aloud. At one point he quotes from the Ruba'iat of Omar Khayyam:
Tis
all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays;
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
The
Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Right or Left, as strikes the Player goes;
And he that toss'd Thee down into the Field,
He knows about it all—He Knows—HE knows!
The
Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Fry cautions
the reader, "If that kind of poetry doesn't make your bosom
heave, then I fear we shall never be friends."
As the
title indicates, Fry's hope is to get all his readers to write
some poetry, not by listening to emo music and jotting some
anguished words in a journal, but by studying the craft and
strategies of some of the greatest poetic geniuses of the
English language. It is wonderful to see Fry's homage to so
many masters, from Emily Dickinson to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
He makes the insightful observation, "Poets, like painters,
look hard for the exact nature of things and feelings, what
they really, really are."
He later
commiserates with frustrated writers, "How many times will
you, as a poet, look at a fly, watch a tap dripping, examine
an inner feeling, listen to the wind and grow immensely frustrated
at the inability of language exactly to capture it, to become
it?"
The book
is dense and might come across as overly academic to some,
but the poetic selections are inspiring and can certainly
help a writer through a dry spell.
(September,
2007)
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