Elizabeth Hawksley: When I was Eight

When I was eight, I wrote the following poem. It is called ‘Macbeth’.

  ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’

  This is what the witches sang

Dancing round a great black can.

  Suddenly, they turned around

And a strange observer found.

  He came to ask for their advice,

For he thought them very nice.

  They told him, ‘If you ever should

Look at yon fair Birnam Wood,

  ‘If it should move, one day soon,

Macduff will slay thee by full moon!’

At school, we were taught that poems had to rhyme and to scan, that is, the rhythms and stresses must be regular. I didn’t know that you could write poetry that didn’t  rhyme or scan.

So, I had four rather plodding iambs per line, except for the occasional extra weak stress at the beginning of a line, as in: They told him, ‘If you ever should , which I needed for it to make sense. And it rhymed.

I remember writing it. I struggled to find a rhyme for ‘sang’. Reluctantly, I came up with ‘can’, which I wasn’t happy with. It felt banal – though I didn’t know that word, then. I was also worried about ‘nice’ rhyming with ‘advice’ for the same reason. I really wanted a word which meant ‘scary’ but I couldn’t think of one.

I was proud of the ‘Macduff will slay thee by full moon’ bit, which I thought was both poetic and dramatic (I liked the ‘slay thee’). But the line which really impressed me was ‘And a strange observer found.’

I needed a rhyme for ‘around’ and, in desperation, I showed my poem to my Uncle Freddy and asked for his advice. He suggested, ‘And a strange observer found’. I saw at once that his line was much better; it not only made the line rhyme, it also, somehow, made it more exciting, but it worried me that ‘found’ was in the wrong place.

Uncle Freddy told me that you were allowed to change the word order in poetry. It was a revelation. His explanation taught me something important: that word order can change the emotional colour of what you write. He didn’t laugh at my poem, he took me seriously and he helped me on my way as a writer.

This little piece is my thanks to him.