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Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

14 October 2022

Freedom is to be found in the constraints of form, says Malcolm Guite

SOMEONE asked me the other day why it is, that, in an age of “free verse”, I submit, contra mundum, to the constraints of form; why I impose on myself the task of weighing words, ordering stress and accent into metrical pattern, finding rhyme.

There are many answers to that question. One is quite simply that form is beautiful in itself, that the patterning of language into sonnet and sestina summons the music of language itself, and that I am seeking to recover the lost music of English poetry, the music that sounded so richly and harmoniously in the poetry of Keats and Tennyson. I want to sound that music again, but with a contemporary voice.

But there is more to it than that. The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel, who influenced Shakespeare and many later poets, wrote the fine Defense of Rhyme, in which he speaks of the musicality of language itself: “Every language hath her proper number or measure fitted to use and delight, which, Custom entertaining by the allowance of the Ear, doth indenize, and make natural. All verse is but a frame of words confined within certain measure; differing from the ordinary speech, and introduced, the better to express men’s conceits, both for delight and memory.”

But he goes on to say something even more significant about the poet’s actual experience of composing verse in this way — about the central paradox that these self-imposed restraints in fact introduce new freedoms and new possibilities: “Rhyme is no impediment to his [the Poet’s] conceit, but rather gives him wings to mount, and carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a far happier flight. All excellences being sold us at the hard price of labour, it follows, where we bestow most thereof, we buy the best success: and Rhyme, being far more laborious than loose measures (whatsoever is objected) must needs, meeting with wit and industry, breed greater and worthier effects in our language.”

I could not agree more, and I love the implicit metaphor, in the phrase “give him wings to mount”, of the muse as Pegasus, the winged steed, whose footprint on Mount Parnassus loosed the stream of Helicon, the archetypal fount of inspiration.

There is something of the same allusion in Yeats’s fascinating and difficult poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”. In that poem, as he wrestles with the sheer drudgery and difficulty of writing his plays for the Abbey Theatre, he realises that, although Pegasus is Olympian, sky-born, and magical, there are times when riding him is also a matter of drudgery and management:


There’s something ails our colt

That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal.


If poets who have chosen the constraint and form, ultimately finding that such service is also perfect freedom, have sometimes still to “strain, sweat and jolt’”, then such experience may also be true of those other vocations that cannot simply indulge in self-expression, but must submit to a discipline, follow a form, and serve an art or a community that is more than themselves.

The priest who serves the liturgy, the pastor serving their flock, the teacher working within the constraints of classroom and curriculum — all of them submit to constraints that sometimes seem impossible and yet, “meeting with wit and industry”, produce something “greater and worthier” than unconstrained and possibly self-indulgent self-expression could ever do.

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