Prose in theory, poetry in practice

Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire

Emotions finding thoughts, thoughts finding words

Prose hasn’t always been my thing.

At school, I studied Drama and even in my English lessons, I tended to work on scripts when I was given a choice.

At university, during my aptly named BA ‘English and American Literature and Creative Writing’, I actually wrote very little prose.

I wrote poetry.

In fact, my best grades were for my poetry portfolios.

Even my literature options tended towards poetry: maybe it was my young adult mind wanting the instant gratification, but I fell in love with all sorts of poetry, from Aphra Behn to Ezra Pound. I loved the Romantics (Coleridge over Wordsworth and Shelley over Byron) and the likes of Frank O’Hara and Langston Hughes still have my heart.

The Impact of Imagism

The Modernists were it for me, especially the Imagists. Their evocation of such specific ideas and the pioneering of the stream of consciousness (along with breaking down form) were fascinating to me, especially when I started to see these principles being transferred into prose.

James Joyce’s work is a great example of this, as is Virginia Woolf’s. While the effect is more subtle with Woolf, if you compare her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) to her later works, you can see a clear shift from a very traditional style of prose to a dreamier yet more urgent approach which also plays with time: like Joyce’s Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway occurs over one day, while The Waves has a significant time-skip and Orlando transcends literal centuries.

So while I was always more comfortable with scriptwriting (dialogue really has always come easier to me) and poetry, I could see the connection between these disciplines and prose.

And the fact is, I always knew that the story of the Wildes was a story in prose, so I’d just have to spend years learning how to write a good book.

But in honour of my poetic origins, I’ve written a villanelle especially for Coldharbour, which I think captures the atmosphere.

The Villanelle

No, it has no relation to Villanelle from Killing Eve.

The villanelle is a fascinating poetic form, which dates back to the early Seventeenth Century. It has nineteen lines divided into five tercets (aka triplets) and a final quatrain (four lines). The rhyme scheme is where it gets complicated, though. It goes ABA x 5 and ABAA except…

The two A lines of the first tercet are repeated as the final line in each of the following tercets, with both getting their time to shine at the end of the quatrain.

So the structure is actually:

A1bA2 / abA1 / abA2 / abA1 / abA2 / abA1A2

There’s no set meter, although they tend to be written in trimeter (six syllables), tetrameter (eight, which is what my villanelle below is), or pentameter (ten, in which most modern villanelles are written).

But why use a villanelle form rather than say, a sonnet?

To put it succinctly, the repetition gives a slightly unhinged feeling that has been described as a “degree of obsession”. Two famous examples of a modern villanelle are Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, which implores his father to cling onto life, and ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ by Sylvia Plath (title self-explanatory)

As I’ve said before, Coldharbour deals with some big emotions and intense ideas and I’ve worked extremely hard on crafting a very particular atmosphere, which is why I think the villanelle is a great form to at least begin to convey just a hint of it all.

A villanelle for Coldharbour

Waves whisper on their wind-chilled breath

Hands tangle under cold moonlight

A gothic tale of love and death

The ‘hello’ still trapped in her chest

Please break the promise not to bite

Waves whisper on their wind-chilled breath

Ghosts refuse to be laid to rest

Floorboards creak in the dead of night

A gothic tale of love and death

Can dreams survive test after test

When fears are those they have to fight?

Waves whisper on their wind-chilled breath

A shadow hiding in the depths

Another secret just out of sight

A gothic tale of love and death

If left is right, then right is left

There’ll always be another side

Waves whisper on their wind-chilled breath

A gothic tale of love and death