Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
Refrigerator
The haiku is limited to three lines. The clerihew is limited to four. Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) invented the form in 1905 as a whimsical slice of biography in verse. This was his first effort:
Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having invented sodium.
These are four of his most famous:
Edward the Confessor
Slept under the dresser.
When that began to pall,
He slept in the hall.
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men.
‘If anyone calls
‘Say I am designing St. Paul’s.’
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy.’
The poet W. H. Auden (1907–83) loved clerihews and liked to compose them in bed when sleep eluded him. Here are three of my Auden favourites:
Lord Byron
Once succumbed to a Siren:
His flesh was weak,
Hers Greek.
Oscar Wilde
Was greatly beguiled,
When into the Café Royal walked Bosie
Wearing a tea-cosy.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced, ‘I am She!’
I like this one by Louis Phillips (born 1942):
Robert de Niro
Is a screen hero.
Only a slob
Would call him Bob.
And this, by Michael Shepherd, is pretty neat:
Mick Jagger a-
pparently doesn’t need Viagra
and might view as malice
an Xmas gift of Cialis …
As a schoolboy, I listened to The Goon Show on the radio, but I did not find it very funny. That said, in 1963, for two shillings, I bought a book, The Little Pot Boiler, by the principal Goon, Spike Milligan (1918–2002), and committed a number of his short poems to memory:
The Herring is a lucky fish,
From all disease inured.
Should he be ill when caught at sea;
Immediately – he’s cured!
Things that go bump in the night
Should not really give one a fright.
It’s the hole in each ear
That lets in the fear,
That, and the absence of light!
This was my Milligan favourite:
Return to Sorrento (3rd Class)
I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and sky,
I left my vest and socks there,
I wonder if they’re dry?
In my book, the modern mistress of short, memorable poetry is Wendy Cope (born 1945):
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
It was a dream I had last week
And some kind of record seemed vital.
I knew it wouldn’t be much of a poem
But I love the title.
And the modern master is Roger McGough (born 1937):
Survivor
Everyday
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.
It helps keep my mind off things.
In the late 1960s, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University was Roy Fuller (1912–91). He was a serious poet, though he did not always write serious poems, nor take himself too seriously:
What is that blood-stained thing –
Hairy, as if it were frayed –
Stretching itself along
The slippery bath’s steep side?
I approach it, ready to kill,
Or run away, aghast;
And find I have to deal
With a used elastoplast.
Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was also a serious poet – and actor, director, playwright and Nobel Laureate – and he did seem to take himself and his poetry quite seriously. Famously a cricket enthusiast, he was especially proud of this two-line effort:
I saw Len Hutton in his prime
Another time, another time
Having completed the poem, and rather pleased with it, Pinter sent it by fax and post to an assortment of his friends. A while later, not having had any response, he rang one of them, the playwright Simon Gray, to ask what he thought of it. Gray’s reply? ‘Sorry, Harold, I haven’t finished it yet.’
Another actor and playwright is my friend Simon Williams (born 1946). This short verse is about the challenge facing the actor who is cast as a corpse.
Lying doggo
Actors have a dread
Of having to play dead.
If you are poisoned, stabbed or shot,
You’d better find a comfy spot.
What’s really best to go for
Is a death behind the sofa,
Where you can blink,
Or breathe or think,
Hidden from the stalls,
At least until the curtain falls.
Here, arranged in chronological order, are fourteen short poems by serious poets. None is longer than a dozen lines. The first one isn’t even a poem. It’s a prose meditation, but so poetic and so memorable it’s often presented as a piece of poetry. This is the work of a variety of British, American and Canadian poets, born across four centuries. I reckon the pieces are deeper than they look, but learning them should be easy. You can master the four-liners in a couple of days. At two lines a day, you could have the John Donne – some of the most powerful words in the English language – off by heart in under a week.
Meditation XVII
by John Donne
(1572–1631)
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main;
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s,
Or of thine own were;
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know
For whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Rondeau
by Leigh Hunt
(1784–1859)
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
Pippa’s Song from Pippa Passes
by Robert Browning
(1812–89)
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
I’m Nobody! Who Are You?
by Emily Dickinson
(1830–86)
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
If I can stop one heart from breaking
by Emily Dickinson
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain
I stood upon a high place
by Stephen Crane
(1871–1900)
I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
and carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, ‘Comrade! Brother!’
This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams
(1883–1963)
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The Optimist
by D. H. Lawrence
(1885–1930)
The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell
and paints the inside walls sky-blue
and blocks up the door
and says he’s in heaven.
And the days are not full enough
by Ezra Pound
(1885–1972)
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
Trees
by (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer
(1886–1918)
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
First Fig
by Edna St Vincent Millay
(1892–1950)
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!
J. P. Donleavy’s Dublin
by Derek Mahon
(born 1941)
‘When you stop to consider
the days spent dreaming of a future
and say then, that was my life’ –
for the days are long:
from the first milk van
to the last shout in the night
an eternity. But the weeks go by
like birds; and the years, the years
fly past anticlockwise
like clock hands in a bar mirror.
Who’s Who
by Benjamin Zephaniah
(born 1958)
I used to think nurses
Were women,
I used to think police
Were men,
I used to think poets
Were boring,
Until I became one of them.
And, finally, a little gem from the millennial phenomenon that is Rupi Kaur (born 1992), the Indian-born Canadian poet whose first collection, Milk and Honey, sold more than three million copies around the world and spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list:
loneliness is a sign you are in desperate need of yourself
CHAPTER FIVE
On Westminster BridgeSeventeen sonnets
The Italian word sonetto means ‘little song’, as in:
Just one sonetto,
Give it to me:
Delicious poetry
From Italy!
The sonnet form was pioneered by the Italian scholar Petrarch (known locally as Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74) and fellow Italian Renaissance poets, and adopted and developed by the English from the 1500s onwards. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is rightly regarded as the Elizabethan sonnet maestro.
The traditional sonnet:
has 14 lines
is written in iambic pentameters
has a set rhyming scheme
To give you the jargon, an iambic ‘foot’ is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable:
da DUM
That ‘da DUM’ is the rhythm of the human heartbeat, which is why babies and toddlers respond well to Shakespeare and why Shakespearean verse is easy to learn at any age.
‘Penta’ means ‘five’ in Greek and ‘meter’ comes from the Greek for ‘measure’. A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:
da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM
You can hear the beat clearly in any number of Shakespeare’s opening lines:
When I do count the clock that tells the time
Sonnet 12
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes
Sonnet 141
If music be the food of love, play on
Twelfth Night
Two households both alike in dignity
Romeo and Juliet
As Franco Zeffirelli (who directed the young Judi Dench in Romeo and Juliet in 1960) put it: ‘Shakespeare’s verse goes with the beat of your heart – no wonder he’s captured the hearts of all mankind.’
With the Shakespearean sonnet the rhyming pattern is: abab cdcd efef gg. With the Petrarchan sonnet it is: abba abba cdecde or abba abba cdcdcd.
In the Petrarchan sonnet the sections are broken up into an octave (the first eight lines of the poem) and a sestet (the final six lines). In the Shakespearean sonnet there are three quatrains (three four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet.
In both forms of sonnet there is something known as a volta that marks the transition to the final section of the poem. The original volta was an Italian dance that involved a sudden, quick twist or move. In a sonnet the volta is the turn of thought or argument that comes before the poem ends. In Petrarchan sonnets the volta comes between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean sonnets it comes before the final couplet.
I don’t think you need more of the poetic science than that, but that much should be helpful. For example, it should make it easier to memorize your Shakespeare sonnet if you do your learning bit by bit: first one quatrain, then the next, then the next, then the pay-off in the final couplet.
Given that sonnets always run to fourteen lines, a trick to help trigger each line in your memory is to attach each line to a room in your Memory Palace if you have one (see page 55–6), or do as I did when I was a romantic adolescent living in London and trying to learn Shakespearean sonnets by heart – connect each line of the sonnet with a particular place: it could be a stop on a bus route you know well or, as in my case, a London underground station.
As a teenager, I did the revision for my A-levels travelling round and round the Circle Line. I found the train juddering to a halt every two or three minutes kept me awake and every time the train reached Paddington I got off and allowed myself the treat of a cup of tea and a bun on the station concourse. When learning the sonnets, I travelled on the Bakerloo Line between Waterloo and Queen’s Park. There are fourteen stations along that stretch of underground line and I would associate one line of the sonnet with each station in turn: when the train doors opened at the station, I would start the line and repeat it again and again until I reached the next station, when the doors opening would have me starting off on the next line. And so on.
It worked.
At least, it’s how I learnt Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:
Let me not
to the marriage of true minds
– Waterloo
Admit impediments; love is not love
– Embankment
Which alters when it alteration finds,
– Charing Cross
Or bends with the remover to remove.
– Piccadilly
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
– Oxford Circus
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
– Regent’s Park
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
– Baker Street
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.
– Marylebone
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
– Edgware Road
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
– Paddington
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
– Warwick Avenue
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
– Maida Vale
If this be error and upon me proved,
– Kilburn Park
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
– Queen’s Park
I created additional memory triggers for myself as well. For example, with line three, Charing Cross station was once known as ‘Trafalgar Square’, and the alteration in name reminds me instantly of the line ‘which alters when it alteration finds’; and, in line seven of the sonnet, ‘wand’ring bark’ is almost a classic crossword puzzle clue for ‘Baker Street’ – the b, a, r and k ‘wand’ring’ off to form ‘Baker’, the apostrophe in ‘wand’ring’ indicating the e that will be missing from ‘Baker’ when it becomes ‘bark’.
You may find it simpler simply to memorise the lines two-by-two or four-by-four, but over the years my Bakerloo Line mnemonic has reaped its rewards. Not long ago, I took part in an episode of the television programme, Pointless Celebrities, with Susan Calman as my partner. We won the trophy on the final question because I was able to name a station on the Bakerloo Line that nobody else had thought of: Queen’s Park. As I murmured to Susan at the time: ‘If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.’