Thank you! If you have not been immediately put off by that title, and you are still reading, then many thanks for staying with me.

If you were to wake me up in the middle of the night, shine a light in my face, and ask me: ‘What is your profession?’, I would say two things. First, I would say: ‘Excuse me, I really have to go to the toilet’, and then, when I got back, I would say: ‘English teacher’. And this is despite the fact that, in the last 34 years, I have spent what is the equivalent of less than one year teaching. For over 18 of those 36 years, I worked as a technical writer; I enjoyed the work, rose to its challenges, and developed professionally over that period, but ask me what my profession is, and the answer has to be teacher – in much the same way as, however long I live in Israel, I will always, sadly, be an Ilford boy, and however much pop music I listen to, I will still, thankfully, prefer Bach. (This last is, as I am sure you realise, purely hypothetical: Bernice and I celebrated our wedding anniversary last night at a Jerusalem restaurant – we believe in living on the edge! – and the accompanying soundtrack included Hotel California. Even Bernice, who has known me for 55 years and been sharing a home with me for 48, found it hard to believe that, to the best of my knowledge, that is the first time I have heard the song all the way through, and certainly the first time I have listened to it…and the last, since you ask.

So, I am going to crave your indulgence this week. I really miss teaching poetry, and I’d like to do a bit of that today. Nothing else is coming up, so, if poetry doesn’t push your buzzer or tick your boxes, please feel free to give me up as a bad job this week…but please do me one favour before you go. When I started this blog, last November, and decided that I would post every week (more precisely, every Tuesday morning), I didn’t really think it through. As I believe I have mentioned before, deprived of trips to Portugal, and with things developing steadily but slowly with the kids there, I don’t have a lot to say about life in Portugal. Every Sunday for the past few weeks I have stared at a blank screen and wondered what might be well-received this week. I can keep waffling on about the subjects that push my boxes and tick my buzzer, but I am never sure whether that’s what you want to hear about. So, if you can help make my Saturday-night sleep less sweat-drenched and nightmare-riddled, by suggesting topics you might like me to cover, I would be very grateful. You can email me directly, at davidbr6211@gmail.com. Of course, the management reserves the right to totally ignore every suggestion (thereby, in all probability, alienating my entire readership and saving me the trouble of having to write a post every week). It’s a win-win situation for me, really.

So, poetry. First, a confession: I’m a formalist. I firmly believe that all art has to have a shape, a pattern (indeed, I think that is what makes art art). Freeform art of any kind rarely moves me. What engages me intellectually, and also heightens and sharpens my emotional involvement with art, is the tension between form and content. This sounds very highbrow, but it is equally true for popular culture. When, aged 7, I settled down at ten to five every Saturday afternoon to watch The Lone Ranger, part of my mind knew that all conflicts would be resolved, and all wrongs righted, just before quarter past five, that Clayton Moore would end the episode by riding off in search of next week’s 25-minute conflict resolution, and that, just before the end, one of the characters (who clearly did not own a television) would ask: ‘Who was that masked man?’ And yet, at the same time, another part of my brain worried whether virtue would triumph and evil be vanquished this week, or whether something would go horribly wrong. A third part of my brain (I’m starting to feel rather like Sally Field juggling her multiple personalities in Sybil) was intrigued to know just how the impossible would be achieved in the seven-and-a-half minutes remaining.

If The Lone Ranger sits at one end of a spectrum, then, for me, the sonnets of Shakespeare and John Donne sit at the other. But they are undeniably on the same spectrum. While I was mulling over how I wanted to approach the topic of this week’s post, I had another serendipitous moment. (They have, incidentally, been coming thick and fast over the last couple of months), I came across the following very effective description in a book I am currently reading called First You Write a Sentence. Subtitled The Elements of Reading, Writing…and Life, the book is both a sort of guide to, and a celebration of, good writing, which the author Joe Moran firmly believes is rooted in the humble sentence. It’s a fascinating little book….if reading and writing are your thing. If they’re not, I’m wondering just how you got this far down the screen.

Anyway, last week, I came to the following paragraph:

Only bad poets think that rules cramp their style. The good ones know that rules are the road to invention, that a cramped little corner with just enough legroom may be the best spot to consider the universe. Rules force us to plumb our brain’s depths for the word that will fit the shape it needs to fit. They let us say things that are just beyond our imaginative reach and write over our own heads before we know quite what we are saying.

A disproportionately large number of my favourite poems are sonnets. I am convinced that the apparent constraints of the form focus the mind and drive poets to find the finest way to craft what they want to express in verse.

This is, to say the least, initially counter-intuitive. The sonnet, in all its various forms, is one of the most proscribed of poetic forms. Take, for example, one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, written around 1625.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The whole shape of the unfolding argument of the poem was dictated to Donne by his choosing the sonnet form. He had to work his meaning within the confines of the following rigid form:

* 14 lines, each of 10 syllables, in the pattern of unstressed-stressed (Ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum).

* A rhyme scheme in which: lines 1, 4, 5, 8 rhyme with each other; lines 2, 3, 6, 7 rhyme with each other; lines 9, 12 rhyme with each other; lines 10, 11 rhyme with each other; lines 13, 14 rhyme with each other. Using a different letter for each rhyme sound, the pattern is abba abba cddc ee. We can see how this divides the poem into four units, with a major break after line 12, a lesser break after line 8, and a minor break after line 4.

I have droned on at this length merely to illustrate that the rules for writing a sonnet sound remarkably like the instructions for assembling one of those Airfix model aircraft kits that I remember from my youth: all those fiddly little pieces that only fit together in one way. It seems ridiculous that something so restrictive should be so liberating, and yet…

Moving on from form, let’s look now at content. Donne’s argument (deeply rooted in his Christian faith) can be expressed, very crudely, as follows.

Lines 1-4: Death has no reason to be proud, because it has no power to kill me.

Lines 5-8: Death is just an intense sleep; since sleep is pleasurable, death must be more so.

Lines 9-12: Death is a slave to human killers; drugs can induce a death-like coma; death keeps very bad company. All this proves that there is no justification for death to be proud.

Lines 13-14: Death leads to an eternal afterlife, which completely obliterates death.

In the first 12 lines, Donne seems to be playing with an intellectual concept that is counter-intuitive: the powerlessness of death. His arguments in the first 12 lines are clever, rather than convincing. These arguments are, however, only ‘setting us up’ for the telling argument of the final two lines, which, for anyone who believes in an afterlife, is irrefutable proof of death’s ultimate powerlessness.

Now look at how this logical development, this thought process, is shaped by the rhyme-scheme of the poem. As I said above, the rhyme scheme divides the poem into four units, with a minor break after line 4, a lesser break after line 8, and a major break after line 12. Donne pours his argument into this shape, so that the position and relative strength of these breaks are matched exactly by the development of his argument. The form of the sonnet makes us pause and take stock after line 4, then more strongly after line 8, then even more strongly after line 12, intensifying the impact and conclusiveness of the final two lines.

I want to draw your attention to one more tension in the poem. There is no perfect match between the metre of the poem and the rhythm of the spoken text. The metre is, as I said, ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (pause) ti-tum ti-tum…..and so on.

However, the rhythm is very different. Look at lines 1 and 2, for example. Donne’s rhythm goes against the metre in the following ways. ‘Death be’ and ‘Mighty’ are both tum-ti, going against the metre of ti-tum. In addition, the first line runs on into the second, with no pause at the end of the first line.

The effect of such conflicts is to draw more attention to the syllable, word or phrase that goes against the metre. Donne makes us notice, and stress more, ‘Mighty and dreadful’, which are very powerful in the line. When the line shifts from going against the metre to going with the metre, at the comma, this emphasizes the importance of the last five words in the line, which are Donne’s first statement of denial of death’s power: ‘for thou art not so’.

It is much easier to sense the tension between form and content when reading a poem, or hearing it read, aloud. (All poetry should be heard and not just read with the eye – and I mean that to sound as dogmatic as it does!) I invite you to listen to John Gielgud’s reading of this poem. Someone once remarked (and I’m afraid I can’t remember who) that he would willingly pay to hear Gielgud read the London telephone directory. In contrast to some other readers on YouTube, Gielgud does full justice to both the form and the content of this poem.

And, if we’re talking about poetry, here’s some in motion. (Is there any topic I can’t segue out of into a look at Tao?)