By Christopher Norris
for Tony Harrison, 1937-2025
In an unbroken continuity from the Renaissance to 1900 and beyond, a poem within the metrical tradition identifies itself . . . with polish and reformed manners as against poetry in another metre which can be characterised as rude, homely, and in the modern sense vulgar. Clearly, in the aggressive early days of the struggle for bourgeois hegemony, the pentameter had a novelty and glamour that was long gone in 1900. Now the pentameter is a dead form and its continued use (e.g., by Philip Larkin) is in the strict sense reactionary.
– Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (1983)
The stutter of the scold out of the branks
of condescension, class and counter-class
thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass
Of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks.
Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress
clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,
the looms of owned language smashed apart.
– Tony Harrison, On Not Being Milton
Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each
Rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise
‘mob’ rhubarb-rhubarb to a tribune’s speech
Crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze.
– Harrison, The Rhubarbarians
1
Back then, four decades back, in my
(Not quite) card-carrying post-structuralist days,
I pretty much (not quite, again) agreed
With Antony: what further use was there,
Beyond the ‘passing tribute of a sigh’,
For that old verse-form with its bourgeois ways,
Its modulations exquisitely keyed
To metrics and speech-rhythms they could share,
The poet and his reader, simply by
Joint access to the social code that plays
Gatekeeper to the ranks of those who’ll read
With suitably accredited ‘due care’,
Or else of those who fail to qualify
Since each iambic stumble so betrays
Their not belonging to the higher breed
Of parsers fit for such exclusive fare.
2
Just listen, and your ear should tell you why
Those ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ mourned in Gray’s
Complacent Elegy were guaranteed,
By all that framed those plangent lines, to bear
The lost life-chances he’d at once decry
And, in self-soothing measures, reappraise
As their due share of mankind’s lot, decreed
By God’s or Nature’s law. With which compare
Those super-fluent iambs, how they try
To smooth rough accents, tame the rustic phrase,
State placidly what vulgar tongues may plead,
And – with all due solemnity – declare
To ploughman, peer, or poet, low or high,
That nothing more effectively conveys
Their kinship under God than paying heed
To lines whose scansion grants a common prayer.
3
Yes, Antony, I thought the same as you –
Let’s now regard that antique prosody
That took the ‘classical’ iambic beat,
However variously the stresses fell
From line to line, as long since overdue
For junking, or for using in so free
And scansion-proof a manner that the feet,
The metric units, really might as well
Admit such interlopers from the crew
Of horny-handed logoclasts as he,
Their honey-tongued remembrancer, might treat
To the grave tones of Great St. Mary’s bell,
But in whose ears its tolling might say: ‘you
Disgruntled loiterers, let that curfew be
Your law and poet-talk, however sweet,
Not tempt you to mistake its sovereign knell’.
4
Yet Tony’s rhubarbarians speak true
In punchy rhymed iambics, and if he,
Their sharp-tongued urban churchyard logothete,
Gets that retort across in words that tell
The weary ploughman’s tale in language blue
Enough to spook the local bourgeoisie,
Who’d say that having them, the gentry, eat
Their condescending words, then go to hell
Along with Thomas Gray, must surely do
A full-scale hatchet-job since any spree
Of graveyard desecration poets meet,
As Tony did, should let no accents jell
Iambically but mount a full-scale coup
Such as to have the vandals leap for glee
As spray-can wild barbarians delete
That family-name the rhubarbarians spell.
5
A broken metric’s not the smashed machine
Those Luddites wanted, nor the hate-filled scrawl
Of headstone-daubing yobs who’d take a leak
While taking out their inchoate bitterness
At life-hopes shattered, nor some might-have-been
Brecht, Blake or Juvenal writing out in small-
Hour charnel-house graffiti words that speak
For those who’d borne Gray’s unctuous redress.
Much better the slant rhymes and metered spleen
Of anger management that doesn’t fall
For skinhead rant or turn the other cheek
In well-bred tolerance but’s none the less
A source of verse rejoinders ultra-keen
When protest’s metered pulse, on page or wall,
Contests the elegiast’s winning streak
By means that ploughmen-losers may access.
6
No comfort zone, he says, no in-between,
No verse-line roughened up so as not to pall
For those who find pentameter antique
When fluent iambs brook no shifts of stress,
And whose ideal’s some fancied golden mean
Where any shove that sends the wrecking-ball
Too high or wide soon urges them to seek
Prosodic middle-ground and acquiesce
In small disruptions. Any verse-routine
Has room for that, like Kafka’s ritual
Where the first leopard-visit seems a freak
The first time round, but soon gets to possess,
On each return, the ceremonial mien
Of former times. Not Tony’s way at all
The metric fudge, the have-it-both-ways tweak,
But what those poured-pop glottal glugs profess,
Those ludding morphemes, sounds that contravene
All rules of verse-decorum, yet recall,
Like his demotic take on Ancient Greek,
What house-rules rogue iambics may transgress.
7
His point: you’ll not defeat them by some clean-
Slate-seeking, memory-blanking itch to maul
Fond epitaphs in chucking-out time pique
But, Harrison-style, by letting that lot press
Their case that deprivations so obscene
Find voice in just such words as shock and gall
The more when blessed with such a verse-technique
As frames the curse of those with naught to bless.
