Transatlantic Solidarity on this Day

Click here for new audio clips of reflections from construction site workers rebuilding on the site of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers, posted 8 September 2006



Sestina America

We have dreamed her cowboy deep blue night of stars
Trod Her fields of wheat and medal glory
Lazed beneath Her easy prairie sky
Watched her dreams soar high as towers
And the moon; sung her Deep South melancholy blue
Read her legends of soldier and Indian brave

Sung the heartswell sonorous brave
Fixed our gaze on the stripes and the stars
Pride's palette, red, white and blue
Watched an ocean's waves of glory
Break on our shores and Her high cloud towers
Outstrip our Cathedral's quest for sky

We have seen them strike Her earthly towers
We have seen Terror unleashed from the blue
But she has the mettle of an aeon's stars
The resolve of an imperishable sky
She has despatched new battalions of the brave
Humans who craved no special glory

But the world anoints them with the sword of glory
The Living and the Dead of hate-felled towers
We have watched and heard the sudden brave
Their trail will stand indelible in the blue
No passing vapour in a moment's sky
For them, Eternity, in Time's smithereens of stars

Beyond terrestrial glory, the brave stars
Build their towers in tumultuous sky
Through red and white, on into oblivion's blue.


World Copyright © Emma Decemgero


The 'Sestina' is a strict verse form, invented by a French troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, in the 12th century.

As the Wikipedia entry for 'Sestina' describes, the five end-rhymes of the six five-line stanzas rotate in a strict order. The standard Sestina form dictates the order, each end-rhyme rotating in each consecutive verse according to the following fixed scheme:

a stars
b glory
c sky
d towers
e blue
f brave

f brave
a stars
e blue
b glory
d towers
c sky

c sky
f brave
d towers
a stars
b glory
e blue

e blue
c sky
b glory
f brave
a stars
d towers

d towers
e blue
a stars
c sky
f brave
b glory

b glory
d towers
f brave
e blue
c sky
a stars



The final three line stanza end-rhyme scheme should be either e, c, a or a, c, e. In Sestina America the last three end-rhymes are a, c, e. :) Emma caps the poem by also including the other two end-rhymes, 'glory' and 'towers', within the body of the last three-line verse:

b glory a stars
d towers c sky
e blue

Ezra Pound in his Sestina:Altaforte (1909) only managed three.

A poem must have a musical cadence which is pleasing to the ear, flows easily off the tongue, and ( if it is to communicate to non-intellectuals :) it all has to make sense. The technical skill required to produce a poem compared to others is only one factor to be considered when judging a poem of course. It is the collective judgement of all readers and listeners which decide whether a poem or any artwork becomes famous and for how long, whether history pronounces it to be beautiful or great. Those poems which survive as long as the human race do so because they communicate something important which many people understand and value. They speak to people on an emotional level.

A public vote conducted by the BBC in 1995 found the most popular poem in Britain to be Rudyard Kipling's If, which received over twice as many votes as its nearest rival, Tennyson's Lady of Shallot. If is positive and inspirational, and obviously speaks to many people's hearts. But If is despised by the intelligentsia, the 'poetry establishment', the self-appointed cosy little cultural 'elite' of academics, editors and publishers, who consider the general public to be philistines, their taste being too 'traditional'. The poetry establishment tried persistently throughout the twentieth century to establish free verse as the dominant form of poetry, so that the more stringent forms used by the Great European poets over five thousand years would be seen as out-of-date, passé, 'old hat'. But I believe that the general public, not the critical elite, are the final arbiters of what does and does not constitute quality or greatness in a poem, as they are of any other creative production. Whatever the critics say, if the public don't like a show, it closes. And if, despite whatever damage the critics may do, the public love something, it stays, no question. I am heartened to see that in attempting to supplant the Great Tradition of metre and rhyme in the opinion and reading tastes of the general public,the publishing, editing and critical elite have failed miserably, as successive BBC polls show. The public are the final tribunal, the gatekeepers of History. Quality and Greatness never goes out of style. It just has to be put before them. They have to have the opportunity to see and recognise it. This applies equally to poetry as it does to drama, comedy, music, architecture painting and sculpture.

Whether a poem speaks to the heart of an individual, a generation, a nation or the world, history will decide. There are poets whose verses have made them immortal, about whom we know little else. Being made the subject of a poem have made a few men and women - and even Christopher Smart's cat Jeoffrey :) - immortal, like the mysterious 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnet 130, the world famous poem which begins, My Mistress' Eyes are nothing like the sun.

Maybe it's the influence of tomorrow, and typing my wife's poem above, but my heart is full tonight. I apologise for anyone who may not be interested in the details of the Sestina verse form, or who is already familiar with it. In only one or two generations, the sophisticated literary styles of our cultural tradition, we have seen, can become lost, unreal or unknown to the children of today and tomorrow. As History warns us to that people will forget the most inspiring or appalling events in one or two generations also, if we let them. Let us be vigilant.

Poetry like that above, in the English and European Great tradition, poetry which adheres to technically demanding metrical or rhyming schemes, stretches back to the dawn of our civilisation's written history, and even before. The lays of Homer, The Iliad, the great story of the fall of Troy recently made into a film of that name, and The Odyssey, the wanderings of the lost hero Odysseus, were recited from memory.

For centuries, these epic histories of their own ancient past were sung by Greek bards in the royal courts, accompanied by an instrument like a lyre or harp. Before the invention of writing, great poets would make memorising and creatively recitating the stock elements of such epics their life's work. And they would teach them to their successors down through the generations.

When writing, invented by the Phoenicians, sea traders of the Eastern Mediterranean, came to Greece, one or more authors we call Homer wrote down the Iliad and Odyssey,their great Epics, which were the first histories, entertainment and sacred texts of our Civilisation, in the fixed form in which they have come down to us. They are the foundation stones of European literature, running parallel to the Middle Eastern semitic tradition of around the same time, known to us as the Pentateuch or Old Testament of The Holy Bible.

Through most of our history, people viewed the story of the Trojan War as legend or myth, like the British story of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Yet the ancient name of my country, 'Britain', is taken from the Roman Brutus, who old historians like Geoffrey of Monmouth believed to have settled in these islands. Brutus was a descendent of Aeneas, one of the Trojan heroes who survived the war, the hero of Virgil's Aenid. So our Anglo-American and European civilisations are the direct descendents of these ancient peoples. They are our ancestors, and as such we should respect and honour their memory. They help us to remember where we came from, and what we consider just, honourable, right and good. If you have not read the Iliad and Odyssey the originals of which are written in Greek hexameter, in a beautiful verse or prose translation, I highly recommend it.


Homer's ancient Greek epic poems, and those which drew on them, such as the unfinished Aenid of the greatest Roman poet, Virgil, provided our only knowledge of the Trojan War for thousands of years. Only as recently as 1870, Heinrich Schliemann, extending excavations begun by an Englishman, Frank Calvert in 1865, discovered the remains of a city of incredible antiquity, which existed from the early bronze age, between 3000 BC and 400 AD, nine layers deep, at Hisarlik on the coast of what is now modern-day Turkey. The archaelogical excavations revealed a city nine layers deep. As recently as 1988 a team led by Professor Manfred Korfmann found layer seven, of the remains, or 'Troy VII' to be a city of great size, destroyed by fire with evidence of a battle, the dating of which matched the historical estimate for the Trojan War. Evidence from records in the Hittite language independently lead towards the same conclusion (see 'Hittite Evidence' section ). Unfortunately excavations halted with the death of Professor Korfmann (who held the digging permit for the site) on 11 August 2005.

The Anatolian peninsula, modern-day Turkey, was the homeland, from 1700 BC, of an early people, the Hittites, who, like Homer's Trojans, were great lovers of horses (another coincidence) - so much so that they were buried with them. Troy was called in the Hittite language, Wilusa or Wilion, pronounced by the Greeks, Ilion, and by the Romans, Ilium. They founded a city of that name on the ancient site, which survived until after the founding of Constantinople by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine (306-363 AD),

And so History is not lost, merely forgotten for a time, and awaits to be re-discovered by the generations of the future. Those born in the twentieth century may have been brought up to believe that free verse; unrhymed, unmetered cadence, is poetry, like that of the Greats. This, to me, tragic turn of affairs came about because the flower of British poets, men like Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, were killed at an early age in the First World War. This robbed us of the full body of work and influence they would have produced over a life-time, keeping the true flame of English poetry alive.

This fractured the English poetic tradition, continued with any great renown only by the Irish W.B. Yeats, the Welsh Dylan Thomas, and the English Auden, from the safety of America. It was not enough. The fascist Ezra Pound edited a few little volumes of what he called 'Imagist' poetry, free verse that neither rhymed nor scanned. As early as 1912, Pound, then twenty-seven, sent Harriet Monroe, art critic of the Chicago Tribune, six short free verse poems. He wrote in the submission note, 'this is the sort of American stuff that I can show here (London) and in Paris without its being ridiculed.' It was pure blarney/B.S. He wrote to Monroe that he had been 'lucky' to find the poems, but actually he had asked his two closest friends, Hilda Doolitle (yes, that was really her name - not surprising she chose to call herself 'H.D.') to whom he had once been engaged in the States, and Richard Aldington (who were now a couple) to write three poems each for submission to Monroe's U.S. magazine Poetry. The American editor, impressed by Pound's manner, bought his story, as did her readers, and so began the craze for free verse in English. The rest, as they say, is history. Pound's principle U.S. student, T.S. Eliot, brought free verse back across the Atlantic and established it as the norm with his Wasteland (1922), helped no end by his editorship of the premier British poetry publisher, Faber & Faber. Free verse became 'the thing', and has remained so until now.

Like haiku, free verse is something almost everyone tries their hand at, being so easy. Just chop ordinary prose up into lines of varying length and there you have it - a 'poem'. The musical cadence, which supporters of free verse set so much store by, is successful or not depending on how the writer varies their phrasing and line length. But although they like to 'have a go', the British public are not fooled, and amongst the fourteen volumes of various categories of the 'Nation's Favourite Poems' published since 1996 by the BBC so far, chosen by milllions of public votes, the great majority meet the challenge of traditional English metre and rhyme. Very few are 'free verse'. Who says people don't instinctively recognise Quality, Plato's Areté, Virtue, Excellence, The Good? In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's principle argument, based on his experience as a creative writing teacher - and maintaining his motorcycle! - is that we can. I agree with him. Ordinary readers, after nearly a century of exposure to 'free verse', still overwhelmingly prefer real poetry in the Great English and European tradition of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, that scans and rhymes. This is a source of great satisfaction to me. It is the self-appointed cultural elite - essentially the critics and editors - who have pushed free verse and made it seem the done thing. This comes, I believe, from the high esteem in which continental culture, epitomised by the Louvre, the Vatican and Florence, like the Parisian Left Bank, is held by the critical elite, who wish to be seen as cultured and sophisticated.

But here they have made a great mistake. The French, like the Italians, excel in visual art; painting, architecture and fashion. The Germans have produced most of the great classical Music. But I believe that the original form of free verse, the French vers libre became fashionable in that language because poets writing in French have a much smaller stock of words to draw on when they try to make verses rhyme and scan. Therefore a poem in French, from the Symbolism of Mallarmé to modern vers libre concentrates on becoming more Haiku-like, shorter and more sparse, like Hemingway's prose. The ideal is to suggest a single visual image, or even nothing at all. Pound likened it to creating a word-painting or sculpture. Pound's ideal imagist free verse poem, "Oread" by 'H.D.' (1915):

Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.

is a little gem, like a Japanese haiku. But that's as far as it goes. Without deriding it's miniature beauty, I have to agree with the early estimate of imagist free verse:

It is petty poetry... It can be said in one minute after lunch. Such images should appear by the dozen in poetry. Such reticence denotes either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint.

Harold Monro, 'The Imagists Discussed',The Egotist issue 1, May 1915

Extending such free verse to the length of the major works of Shakespeare or Milton or Homer, a century of polite disdain by the public has confirmed, does not usually produce works most people esteem or want to read, of the literary calibre of the work of those great writers. An exception is Walt Whitman's unique collection Leaves of Grass (1855-1891), a ground-breaking work written well before the acceptance of free verse poetry as the norm on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans and Britons alike were shocked more at the time by the content of Whitman's poetry than its sonorous rolling form. Whitman's poems such as Song of Myself, I sing the Body Electric and Song of the Open Road are now almost universally accepted as being central to the American tradition. Whitman was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln (as am I :) and before his assassination Lincoln read and enjoyed the first addition of Leaves of Grass, remarkably since it was then such a fringe work.

But although there will always be the rare exception which makes an achievement of free verse, it does not require the stringency, the great difficulty, of expressing thought, feeling and cadence through the strict structures of traditional metre and rhyme, yet in a natural and easy manner.

The number of words in the English language far exceeds that of French. English consists of both Romance and Germanic words, with two or more alternatives for almost everything. It facilitates the creativity of a great Poet composing the most structured form of Literature, defined as 'that kind of written composition which has value on account of its qualities of form' (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition). Traditional metre is the most suitable vehicle for matters of great import, and the most revered books of the world, the sacred writings and scriptures of all traditions, from the most ancient Hindu Vedas, Mahabarata and Ramayana, the Buddhist Canons, the Holy Qur'an, and Adi Granth of the Sikhs, to the King James Bible in English, are written in it.

But what of the future? Henry David Thoreau, one of my favourite writers and one of the greatest the American continent has produced, has this to say on this subject:

That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile may we hope to scale heaven at last.

H.D. Thoreau,Walden, Chapter 3 - 'Reading', 1854

I wholeheartedly agree. Why would the writing of the most sophisticated and difficult form of literature, true epic and sacred verse, suddenly cease after a mere five thousand years of human literacy? Surely it must manifest as long as the higher aspirations of the human spirit, being their greatest expression and witness, with our great world teachers. The age of great literature may seem past, but let us lovers and readers of great poetry merely see the last century as an aberration, a century's interregnum, before the re-establishment of the true sovereign form of literature. And I've got news for you. It is about to be reborn.

American friends, we salute your innocent and brave dead this day.