Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse (review)
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Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse (review)
W. A. Davenport
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 33, 2011, pp. 346-349 (Review)
Published by The New Chaucer Society
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2011.0011
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/463633
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER
presentation,’’ Hanna suggests, differs from its ‘‘likely metrical perform-
ance’’ (lxxv). While traditionally textual-critical, such disjunction be-
tween manuscript witnesses and some underlying deep structure seems
difficult to maintain for a poem as sprawling and adaptable as the Specu-
lum. The notion that in the late fourteenth century in the north, inflec-
tional -e can optionally appear for metrical reasons, one of the means by
which ‘‘metrical performance’’ is demonstrated, likewise gives pause, as
does a claim that in a poem like this emendations might be based on
the grounds that a word or syllable can ever be ‘‘metrically otiose’’ (546,
passim). Looked at another way, one might say that the many three-
and even two-stress lines in the poem poorly justify claims for a predom-
inant four-stress metrical pattern.
While works like the Speculum clarify late medieval England’s literary
geography, they also raise additional questions. If literary culture pro-
ceeded at times in regional rather than national directions, for example,
to what extent were regional cultures self-aware and to what extent
simply matters of convenience? That is, did the author of the Speculum
intrude material from Rolle because he wished for the production of a
distinctly regional Yorkshire literature or simply because, being in the
north, he had easy access to Rolle’s works? And in another vein, pre-
cisely how did works like the Speculum, the Cursor, and the Northern En-
glish Homily Cycle contribute to literary culture? Each is lengthy, shows
signs of revision and therefore ongoing interest, and survives in numer-
ous manuscripts. All dynamically coexist with lyrics that either supple-
ment or are extracted from them. In measurable ways like these, all
three might be regarded as having more medieval vitality than Troilus
and Criseyde, and yet the title of this journal remains Studies in the Age of
Chaucer, not Studies in the Age of Rolle. As we sort through such issues of
medieval literary geography, volumes like Hanna’s careful and thorough
edition of the Speculum will become all the more necessary.
Tim William Machan
Marquette University
Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter, eds. Approaches to the Metres of Al-
literative Verse. Leeds: Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series 17,
2009. Pp. 311. £40.00; $65.00 paper.
It is difficult to make a completely satisfying book from a set of confer-
ence papers, and the editors’ choice of title for this collection (emanating
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from a 2005 conference in Bristol) highlights the differences of perspec-
tive in the thirteen essays; they do not even claim that the contributors
are discussing a single meter, though they have provided a unified bibli-
ography (but not an index). So, although a significant number of essays
take as their starting point the existence of ‘‘rules’’ for the composition
of the alliterative long line, following Hoyt Duggan and others, and
attempt further definition of the patterns of lifts and dips, the con-
straints that operate in the two half-lines, the presence or absence of
pronounced final -e, the hierarchies of allowable alliterating words, and
so on, usually by subjecting chunks of poetic text to statistical processes,
others return to basic questions about linguistic history and how allitera-
tion works, and to the consideration of individual poems.
In my youth, before computers, I served a two-year apprenticeship to
the scholarly alliterative trade by analyzing the syntax of every sentence
of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and from close study of J. P. Oak-
den’s monumental Alliterative Poetry in Middle English developed, along-
side interest in the subject, a fair dose of skepticism about the rum-ram-
ruffery of it all. How did discussion of alliterative meter get stuck in
‘‘lifts and dips’’ when the ear tells us that strong stresses go down, not
up? Why not hops and skips, thumps and flutters, landings and scur-
ries? Noriko Inoue takes the nine manuscript versions of The Siege of
Jerusalem as the coal-face from which to chisel evidence that preference
for for to Ⳮ infinitive over to Ⳮ infinitive is always a metrically deter-
mined choice in b-verses and that, therefore, its use in a-verses is proof
that the requirement for a long medial dip is stricter than the need to
observe the aa/ax pattern. But I cannot help wondering why one should
trust in matters metrical a poet who is such an indifferent performer in
matters narrative. Working alongside are Nikolay Yakovlev, who chal-
lenges the view that final -e had disappeared in northern dialects by the
end of the fourteenth century by examining all the b-verses in Sir Ga-
wain; Donka Minkova, who uses the b-verses of Winner and Waster and
The Parliament of the Three Ages to demonstrate constraints on metricality
with an impressive display of statistics, tables and code words; Geoffrey
Russom, who compares Beowulf and Sir Gawain in terms of the classes
of words that may bear alliteration, to demonstrate patterns of allitera-
tive usage and the contrasts between a-verses and b-verses; and Gilbert
Youmans, who examines syntactic inversions in the alliterative Morte
Arthure in order to rank the poet’s metrical principles in order of strict-
ness, with observance of the ax pattern in the b-verse scoring highest,
followed by the avoidance of unstressed words at the line ending. All
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these bear witness to a good deal of meticulous labor and are within the
boundaries of the modern orthodoxies of rules and constraints; yet they
have a quaint look about their methodology—Youmans almost made
me nostalgic for my own unreadable M.A. thesis of fifty years ago by
using some familiar examples of noun/adjective inversion such as ‘‘on a
stede ryche.’’
It is refreshing to find some essays that step outside the world of the
alliterative long line, as Thomas Cable does in examining the alliterative
lyrics from the Harley manuscript in terms of Duggan’s theory of alliter-
ative meter and asking whether a native or foreign model lies behind
them. His conclusion that there is no single alliterative meter but vari-
ous meters that use alliteration ‘‘as a cue to metrically stressed syllables,
which in turn establish a rhythm’’ opens a door to the broader discussion
of alliteration as a metrical phenomenon. Allan Gaylord, in a close read-
ing of Pearl, considers its ‘‘peculiar metric,’’ resisting the idea that allit-
eration is merely decorative, seeing it rather as ‘‘a kind of oral italics.’’
Although he stresses the expressiveness of the verse, he does not con-
front Duggan’s claim (in The Companion to the Gawain-Poet) that ‘‘Pearl
is an alliterative poem in only trivial senses of the term.’’ Jeremy Smith
contrasts Old English, where the alternation of stress/unstress defines
the half-line, and where alliteration is a technique of cohesion, and Mid-
dle English, where alliteration, not the stress/unstress pattern, seems to
define a genre. The key to the difference is the change from the basically
trochaic rhythm of Old English (stem Ⳮ inflexion) to the iambic
rhythm of Middle English (article Ⳮ noun, etc.); where the former nat-
urally emphasizes openings, the latter naturally shifts to end-rhyme.
Smith argues that what we are witnessing in Middle English alliterative
poetry is experimentation in a period of linguistic change; old material,
such as a liking for alliteration, mingled with new. Equally broadly,
Elizabeth Solopova identifies the prosodic features that contributed to
the development of alliterative verse in Old English and sees what hap-
pens to them in Middle English. Romance borrowings, consequent vari-
ations in stress patterns, uses of elision, the development of syllabic-
accentual meters, all created conditions less favorable to alliterative
verse, or, as Solopova suggestively restates it, conditions less favorable
for structural alliterative meters but more favorable for varied mixtures,
both within the alliterative long line and in the construction of new
hybrid types of line and stanza. One of the problems from Sir Gawain
that Myra Stokes uses to discuss ‘‘Metre and Emendation’’ illustrates
the point about elision: line 660 is clarified by identification of allitera-
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tion on n (‘‘Withouten [n]ende at any noke’’) which helps one to see
that the disputed reading of the b-verse (‘‘I oquere fynde’’ in Tolkien and
Gordon, rev. Davis) should be emended to include the word ‘‘noquere,’’
though I think ‘‘I noquere fynde’’ better than Stokes’s longer version.
Ron Waldron sticks to the alliterative long line, but thinks of how it
is heard rather than how composed. He argues persuasively that, as
with iambic pentameter, it is full of variation, with two tiers perceived
simultaneously: the underlying metrical scheme and the individual po-
etic line’s modulations of it. Such interplay is the theme in Hoyt Dug-
gan’s own contribution as he steps nimbly across the minefield of
Langland’s metrics. He has substantially revised his 1987 view that Lang-
land adhered to the same rules that governed the other poets of the
period and is now thinking that Skeat was right in 1886 when he said
that ‘‘Langland considered metre of much less importance than the
sense.’’ Actually that is not quite what Duggan demonstrates. His illus-
trations of the ways in which a poet could ignore the defining features
of his meter do not undermine the role the meter plays.
So where does the collection leave us? If one believes that alliterative
poetry was a matter of rules perhaps recoverable by closer and closer
analysis of surviving examples, then it may enable editors to use the
rules to reconstruct lost texts, as Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter argue
interventionist editing could do with the seventeenth-century text of
Death and Life. If, however, the written texts are merely conventional-
ized representations of varying experiments in rhythm and sound, per-
haps the most that may be achieved is a definition of alliterative poetry
that includes not only the metronomically regular aa/ax lines of The
Destruction of Troy but also Pearl, Piers Plowman, and Harley lyrics such
as ‘‘Annot and John.’’
W. A. Davenport
Royal Holloway, University of London
Eileen A. Joy and Myra Seaman, eds. Postmedieval: A Journal of Medie-
val Cultural Studies. Vol 1.1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): ‘‘When Did
We Become Post/human?’’ ed. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 289.
It is a sign of a discipline’s good health that it is not only generating, at
accelerating speed, a raft of high-quality monographs and essay collec-
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