Blessed are the children and happy the spouses
Lucky the neighbours who every day meet
Mothers in Leather trousers

Pushing their buggies in T-shirts or blouses
Swish-swash hear them shimmying down the street
Blessed are the children and happy the spouses

THE FIRST TWO VERSES FROM a poem called M.I.L.T., inspired by a group of young mums waiting outside the school gates one afternoon in early summer. The form I chose was the villanelle, whose strict form (five three- line stanzas and a closing quatrain that uses only two rhymes throughout) serves as a counterpoint to the playfulness of the subject. The pleasure in composing such a poem is in overcoming the difficulty of finding 14 different words with the same two rhymes, in the case of my effort, eet and ouzes.

Close at hand I have a 30-year-old copy of Frances Stillman’s The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary that I bought to impress myself, as well as The Songwriter’s Rhyming Dictionary by Sammy Cahn, bought in the vain hope that I would be commissioned to write the lyrics for a dazzle of West End and Broadway musicals. (I’m waiting, Andrew, I’m waiting.) Although the Stillman book shows signs of much wear and tear, it’s the opening section, the “Manual”, dealing with verse forms and metre, the nuts and bolts of prosody, that is my usual port of call.

As for the rhyming dictionary — the new edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Rhymes has just landed on my desk — although it can provide the poet with a breather when he’s stuck for a rhyme, it rarely lists a word not already considered.

Back to those mothers gathered outside the schoolgates, waiting impatiently for me to find enough rhymes to match their trousers. The other rhyme street is easy — meet, compete, treat, petite, heat — but finding a word that chimes with trousers and moves the poem along is the challenge. Spouses, houses and blouses come swiftly to mind, so what else does the dictionary offer? Drowses, dowses, browses, rouses, touses, carouses — none of which meet with the mothers’ approval. Arouses appeals, but that’s probably a route they don’t want to go down. Eventually the two favourite rhymes I came up with would not be found in any rhyming dictionary worth its salt: scousers and cows is. Of course, those gentle readers with finely tuned inner ears will bristle and mutter darkly that scousers does not rhyme with spouses, and they would be correct, but this is my poem and I saw the ladies first:

South Kensington ladies, Brummies and Scousers
Sisterhood of bottoms large or petite
Blessed are the children and happy the spouses

What a soft and beautiful skin the cow’s is
Especially when softened and buffed up a treat
By Mothers in Leather Trousers

I can never quite understand guests of Sue Lawley who would choose to take a novel with them on that desert island, when they could take a vocabulary, an encyclopedia or an atlas of the night skies. How about a rhyming dictionary? Seized by inspiration, you have produced a bamboo penny whistle, a set of coconut shell maracas and an oil-can guitar, and three months later Desert Island Discs — The Musical.

Forget narrative, poets are infatuated with language, the tools of the trade, the power and playfulness of words, and close to hand I have a choice of dictionaries, my indispensible Roget’s Thesaurus, as well as shelf upon shelf of books about linguistics, of quotations, euphemisms, phrase and fable, curious and interesting words, and none gathers dust.

They are seldom referred to when I’m writing a poem, but it’s reassuring to know that there’s a garage close by should the engine fail. People who point out that Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and a galaxy of others managed very nicely without the aid of a rhyming dictionary, that somehow, using one is tantamount to cheating, fail to see the point. Tut, tut, I hear that Sylvia Plath used a thesaurus? Well that explains how she found all those interesting words to put in her poems.

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