The major form of
English strong stress verse is Anglo-Saxon prosody in which the oldest European
epic written in a vernacular tongue (as distinguished from the classical
tongues of Greek and Latin), Beowulf,
was written, not to mention such later poems as The Vision of Piers Plowman and Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight.
Anglo-Saxon prosody has continued to be written fitfully over the
centuries, even in contemporary times, as for instance “Junk” and “The Lilacs”
by Richard Wilbur, and there are other, more modern strong stress forms, such
as Gerard Manley Hopkins' variable accentual "sprung rhythm" system
and William Carlos Williams' triversen stanza. The basis for accentual verse is
the counting of stressed (accented) syllables in a line of verse, paying no
attention to the number of unstressed syllables. Scansion is the process of isolating the accented or unaccented
syllables in language. These are The
Rules of Scansion in English:
1. In every word of the English language of two
or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress. If one cannot at first hear the stressing,
then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.
2. Important single-syllable words, particularly
verbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.
3. Unimportant single-syllable words in the
sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except
demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses through promotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line
of verse.
4. In any series of three unstressed syllables
in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will be counted as a stressed syllable.
5. In any series of three stressed syllables in
a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will be counted as an unstressed syllable.
6.
Any syllable may be rhetorically stressed
by means of italics or some other typographical ploy.
The features of
Anglo-Saxon prosody are these: each line (called a stich) of verse) contains four stresses; two or three of these
syllables are overstressed by means
of alliteration. This term means that the first syllable of a
word is accented, first, by means of pronunciation
(that is, the way in which we ordinarily pronounce the word — with the accent
on the first syllable, like cowboy), and, second, by means of
the repetition of consonant sounds (that is, in two or
more words the stressed first syllable begins with a sound of the alphabet
other than the vowels a, e, i, o, or
u).
Besides the four
strong stresses in the stich and the alliterations, each stich is broken in
half by a pause called a caesura. This pause is built into the poem in one way
or another. In this excerpt from Beowulf, which is too long to include here in
its entirety, the champion of the Geats learns of the monster Grendel who
terrorizes Denmark, and he sails to help King Hrothgar:
From THE EPIC OF BEOWULF
In Geatland
Beowulf, Higlac’s hallmate,
Greatest of the
Geats, greater and stronger
Than any other anywhere
else,
Heard that Grendel
turned the halls
Of distant Heorot
to scenes of horror.
He ordered a ship
be readied to sail
Over the ocean, for
he would help
Hrothgar the Dane
in his hour of need.
The wise elders of
the gathered Geats
Did not object, for
the portents promised
Success for their
hero in far Heorot,
They said farewell
as he fared forth
With a chosen band
of brave brothers.
Fourteen of the
finest that could be found
Among the Geats who
boarded their boat
And set sail on the
wild waves,
Pointing their prow
to distant Denmark
Far from their
fjords, their familiar fields,
Coursing the
currents beneath the cliffs,
Eager to find what
would befall them
And their longboat
laden with armor,
Lined with shields
along the gunwales,
Their oaken hearts
in their oaken vessel
Beating strongly as
the wild wind
Hurled them beyond
the foaming breakers
Until at last they
saw in the sea,
Rising out of the
furling froth,
Hills lifting their
green heads
On the horizon, and
soon they stood
Under those cliffs
where their cruise ended.
—
Anonymous Anglo-Saxon author (version by Wesli Court}
In English lines of
four beats or longer, a natural caesura
— only a brief hesitation — occurs very often after the second or third
stressed syllable:
/ /
· / /
Alone I am driven · each day by dawn
Qualitative caesura is caused by the manipulation of
measures; that is, by changing up the rhythm of the stich (. = an unstressed
syllable):
/ . / . · . / /
Fasten darkness · in deep moods
If we analyze this
stich, we see that the first half has two "falling rhythms" — ¢È ¢È (we would call them trochees if we were doing accentual-syllabic prosody), and we can
see that the second half of the stich reverses this rhythm Ȣ (we would call this an iamb).
There is a pause at the point of rhythmic change in the stich.
Punctuational caesura is caused by punctuation occurring
somewhere in the center of the line because of phrasing:
To wake and
wander, [·] to cry my cares.
Compensatory caesura occurs when the caesura compensates
for a missing unstressed syllable in the line:
/ . / [.] / . . /
Winter-drear[y],
over the wave.
In this stich
falling rhythms are set up in the beginning of each hemistich; the mind's ear
wants to hear /. /. /. /, but the fourth syllable is missing, so we
hear a pause at that point to compensate for that unstressed syllable,
/. / [.] · / . /.
xx x[x] · xx xx
A word about this
following anonymous poem which is probably a fragment — information is missing
internally. For instance, in the third
strophe the translation by Michael
Alexander in his book, The Earliest
English Poems, (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1966) reads, "Then
his kinsmen ganged, began to think / thoughts they did not speak, of splitting
the wedlock," but in the antepenultimate (third-to-last; the penultimate
is the second-to-last) strophe the wife speaks of "that young man" as
the cause of her woes. For consistency's
sake, line three of strophe three is rendered here, "Then a kinsman began
to scheme," and so forth.
Also in strophe
three the order of the two couplets of which it is made is reversed so that the
chronological sequence of events in the wife's life makes more sense: in the
original the kinsmen first began to scheme, and then the wife complained about
being marooned. The rest of the poem makes it clear she was first marooned, and
then the relative(s) schemed.
The most interesting
thing about this poem, perhaps, is that it is probably the first in English
literature that is identifiably written from the woman's viewpoint; we may
assume, then, that the poet was a female.
The stichs of the first stanza show the stressing and the accentuation;
the boldface letters show the alliterations; note that the accent mark (ictus) is always placed over the vowel;
a secondary accent is shown by a dot, also always placed over the vowel (but secondary stresses do not count in the
scheme of Anglo-Saxon prosody or other strong-stress verse, only the
overstressed syllables); a space shows the caesurae
(caesuras, pauses).
Note in the first
line that "wrought" and "awry" are not alliterations, nor
are "fresh" and "befretting" in line six: they are examples
of consonantal echo: the repetition
of stressed or unstressed consonant sounds anywhere in two or more words. Assonance can sometimes be used instead of
alliteration: the repetition in two or more words of stressed vowel sounds —
these may be anywhere in the words; they need not appear in the first syllable,
as alliteration does. Vocalic echo is
the repetition of vowel sounds anywhere in the words, whether the syllables are
stressed or unstressed.
THE WIFE'S COMPLAINT
/ / / /
I have wrought
these words from a life awry,
My heart's
tally, telling the beads
Of griefs
suffered since my girlhood —
Old griefs and
new, the worst now:
Never have I
not known sorrow,
Some fresh
befretting in the endless fray.
First my lord left
his folk
For the wave's
weird, whither I wondered,
[fate]
Knew not where, and
wakened saddened.
I fared afield,
outcast and friendless,
Served as I might
to stanch loneness.
Enisled and
estranged, he and I
Lived apart — heavy
my longing!
Then a kinsman
began to scheme,
In cold silence, to
cleave the wedlock.
His return was
harsh, his heart torn,
His eyes bitter,
his mind bound.
My match-mate was
moody-browed, [husband]
Louring and
mourning. He brooded murder.
He sent me here to
this stern place
Where few are
friendly, few trustful.
Our lips once took
oath hourly
That naught should
twine us save the knell — [sever]
Nothing less. Now all is lost,
As though our past
had never passed
In fond
friendship. I feel in the wind
That my darling has
come at last to loathe me.
Now in this knotted
knoll of the wood
I dwell in a den
under the oaks:
The chill of this
earth eats at my heart.
Thorns thrive in
the thick copse
On the banks that
darken these black dales:
A joyless
home. Husbandless grief
Preys upon me. Some earthly pairs
Live in love, lie
in warmth
When day dawns; I
tread, forlorn,
Among these caverns
under the oak.
Here I must sit as
summer wanes,
Here bewail the
outcast's woes,
The hardships
heaped upon a heart
That shall not sail
into still waters
And find the tarn
that drowns yearning. [mountain lake]
My bitter grief
grythe the brow
[tremble]
Of my youthful
foe! May fever fret
His grinning
face! May a flock of sorrows
Choke his
chest! His leer would change
Should he be loned
in the land of the banished,
Far from his folk.
Where my man broods
Hoar encrusts the
crumbling cliff, [frost]
The grim tide
grinds the shingle.
[stones]
Wit cannot bear, in
such barrenness,
A deal of bane. [poison]
One dwells too
often
On gentler
surroundings. Sorrow engulfs
This bleak abiding of the banished.
— Anonymous, ( v. Wesli Court)
"Match-mate"
above is a kenning, an epithetic compound made of two terms
that equal a brief metaphorical synonym for another word. In this case, the "match" means the
marriage match that was worked out by the families of the bride and groom, and
of course, "mate" means what it still means.
Following is
another anonymous Old English poem in Anglo-Saxon prosody written from the
distaff angle, and it is also a fragment.
A few liberties have been taken here to give it the appearance of
completeness; that is, Eadwacer's name has been inserted into strophe three,
where it did not appear in the original, and the refrain — the repeated
hemistich or half-line — has been repeated at the end of the poem where, it
seems likely, it ought to have reappeared with greatly increased dramatic
irony. The refrain is an unusual feature
of early British verse:
WULF AND EADWACER
The carls of my
clan would catch him like prey;
[men]
Should he come to
camp, they will slay him quickly.
We are undone!
Wulf is enisled, as
I am elsewhere.
My isle is a
fastness girdled by fens,
Defended by the
fiercest of folk.
Should he come to
camp they will kill him surely.
We are undone!
It was wet weather;
I wept at the hearth,
Wondering of Wulf
and his wandering afar;
Eadwacer, a chief,
chafed and embraced me —
He made me glad,
but I grieved as well.
Wulf, my Wulf, my
wanting you
Made me heartsick,
your seldom coming,
The cave of my
breast, not thigh-hunger!
[lust]
Do you hearken,
Eadwacer? — our whelp Wulf
Shall take to the
forest! What was never fettered
Is soon untwined,
our loins together!
We are undone!
— Anonymous, (v. Wesli Court)
The Old English "Hymn to the
Creator" is attributed to Caedmon (d. 690?), the first Anglo-Saxon poet
whose name is known. The form, as in the
original, is Anglo-Saxon prosody. The
stichs are broken here into hemistichs at the caesurae and stepped.
HYMN TO THE CREATOR
Now must we glorify
The
guardian of Heaven,
The mood of our Maker,
The
might of His marvels,
Warder of all;
How
He, of all wonders
Ever Eldlord,
Formed
the origin.
First he made
For
the children of men
Heaven's hall —
Our
holy Author!
Then Midgard,
This
guardian of mortals —
Eldlord ever,
Framed
afterward:
This Earth for man,
our
almighty Maker!
—
Caedmon
Although the term
"pod" in Latin means "foot," and there are no verse feet
involved in strong stress prosody, nevertheless "pod" traditionally
means "strong accent." The
standard metrical prefixes (mono, 1; di, 2; tri, 3; tetra, 4; penta, 5;
hexa, 6; hepta, 7; octa, 8; nona, 9; deca, 10; hendeca, 11) attached to podic will indicate the
number of stresses in the stich. For
instance, in the refrain above there are two stresses, on “we” and the second
syllable of “undone,” so the meter of the refrain is dipodic.
One would assume
that, because there are four stresses this meter would be “tetrapodic,” but not
so: Because of the medial caesura that splits the stich, the meter is
dipodic. If there were no caesura in the
stich, then it would be tetrapodic. For further examples of Anglo-Saxon
prosody, see The Book of Forms: A Handbook of
Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England
(www.UPNE.com)
, 2012 • 384 pp.
3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference &
Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.
"The Blacksmiths," a curse
from the anonymous Middle English, is, like Piers
Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, a late example of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. X. J. Kennedy, in his Tygers of Wrath, says of this version that the translator "has
preserved much of the rhythm and alliterative music of his original, from the
fifteenth-century Arundel manuscript (3227 in the Index of Middle English Verse)." The caesurae here are indicated by line
breaks rather than by spatial stepping.
Listen to Lewis Turco read "The Blacksmiths."
THE BLACKSMITHS
Sooty,
swart smiths, Smattered with smoke,
Drive
me to death With the din of their
dents.
Such
noise at night No men heard, never!
What
knavish cries And clattering of knocks!
The
crooked cretins Call out, "Coal,
coal!"
And
blow their bellows Till their brains
burst:
"Huff,
puff!" says that one; "Haff,
paff!" that other.
They
spit and sprawl And spill many spells;
They
gnaw and gnash, They groan together
And
hold their heat With their hard
hammers.
Of
bullhide are made Their broad aprons;
Their
shanks be shackled For the fiery
flinders;
They've
heavy hammers That are hard-hafted,
Stark
strokes On a steely stump:
LUS,
BUS! LAS, DAS! Rants the row —
So
doleful a dream, The devil destroy it!
The
master lengthens little And labors
less,
Twines
a two And touches a trey:
Tick,
tack! hick, hack! Ticket, tacket! tyke,
take!
LUS,
BUS! LAS, DAS! Such lives they lead,
These
cobblemares: Christ give them grief!
May
none of these waterburners By night
have his rest!
— Anonymous Middle English author (v.
Wesli Court)
In this following
contemporary poem the lines are stepped at the caesura:
FOR A WORDY LADY
Grow lax in your
larynx,
limp in the
tongue,
Madam! Move your
mad lips
much less,
lose noise!
the volume of your
voicebox
is vibrating
eardrums
which hitherto hung
in their
whorls, happily
contemplating the
conundrums
of
cornflowers and bees
busy with bushes,
not bitchy
with words.
Words are a riddle
wrung from
the mind
at best; at worst,
they are
crusts for the buzzards
of gossip and
guilt.
Gusts such
as yours
are a riot and roil
of ruthless
looseness
signifying nil,
nipping
backs
and buttocks with
boldness,
banality and
tooth.
Terseness is wit,
lady,
tension is
thought.
Vent your venom
on
ventilators whose wind
is as constant as
yours
and as
steady as sin,
or on clocks that
course
in constant
cycles:
my time is a treasure.
Trifle with
hours
of your own, woman!
Word your
own woe.
— Lewis Turco
Here
are two contemporary poem in Anglo-Saxon prosody, the second in “sonnet” form:
DRAWING
IN: AUTUMN
Lone leaf a stone turned
lone leaf a brief burning
crisp shine and fine curl
before the edge of hoar frost.
Wild lilt of silt wind,
darkened sky mark the change.
Cat at the door a fur flurry,
mad elf, becomes a homebody.
Ah, old cat with cold paws,
fog cool in your coat eyes remote gold,
lap seeker bleak comforter:
unsing this rain and bring back
bright arrogance expanse of spring
sun, bold in the golden window.
Heavy you lie and leave me
weighted with winter with late thought.
− Ruth
F. Harrison
THREE VISITORS ON
CHRISTMAS EVE
Mist
on moonspill as midnight nears.
Adrift
but not dreaming, our drowsy son
is
covered and kissed. At the kitchen door
our
basset is barking; out back coyotes
are
standing like statues down by the
dogwoods.
Across
the crystal of crusted snow,
they
search for stragglers who startle and
run;
their
vigil reveals no victims this night.
Trash
would be trouble; they trot away
unbothered
by blood-throated baying and growling.
No
star distracts their stealthy march;
the
highway hums. They howl through the
calm,
then
savor new scents that spice their path
in
this world awash in wonder and wrath.
− A.
M. Juster
The English “bob and wheel” is an
accentual-syllabic quintet appended as a tail or coda to a stanza of
Anglo-Saxon prosody in one Medieval romance in particular, Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight. The “bob” is a
one-or-two-foot line running on (enjambed) from the alliterative accentual
stanza, and it is continued by the “wheel,” a quatrain of short lines,
generally of three feet, rhyming baba. The whole quintet “bob and wheel” rhymes ababa, but rhyme does not necessarily
appear anywhere in the part of the stanza that is made of Anglo-Saxon prosody.
The bob rhymes with lines two and four of the wheel; lines one and three of the
wheel rhyme with each other. Gawain
is thus a clear example of the old alliterative verse system being deliberately
linked to the new accentual-syllabic prosody invented by Chaucer and Gower. It
is thus about as clear a transformational poem as anyone might hope to see
coming out of the Middle Ages and linking with modernity.
Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight
is too long to quote here in its entirety, of course, but this is stanza 25
from the poem in a modern version (the line, “…and of delight” is the “bob”;
the rest of that stanza is the “wheel”):
From SIR GAWAIN AND THE
GREEN KNIGHT
From the deeps of dream Gawain mumbled,
Suffering stounds of sorrow and worry [moments]
That Weird [fate] that day would wield him death
At the Chapel Green where the green man
Would deal him death with a great dunt [knock,
blow].
Anon our knight recalled his wits,
Fought his way from the fens [marshes] of slumber,
Rose fleetly to attend his fate.
The sweet carline [young woman] came laughing,
Kissed his face and fondled him;
Gawain gladly welcomed her kindness,
Admired her garb, her glorious hair,
Faultless features and radiant hue.
Gladness arose out of his heart.
He took her there in rapture rare,
In ecstasies of blissful song
and of delight.
They
shared this happy state
In
loving talk and light!
What
might have been his fate
Had
Mary not kept her knight?
—
The Gawain Poet, (v. Wesli Court)
Here is a modern poem with a bob and
wheel:
THE MAGI CAROL
Sheep of the
fold, fowls of the storm,
In chill the
child, chaste in His manger —
The kings are
coming to crown a King
And here are
we waiting to welcome
them
together:
We
wish you joy again,
Gale,
oak and heather,
Mistletoe
and pine,
In
any winter weather.
Bearing gold, gifts of myrrh,
Of frankincense
— seed of thyme,
Vervaine and
thorn, horn at the Gate —
The Magi move among the snows
together:
We
wish you joy again,
Gale,
oak and heather,
Mistletoe
and pine,
In
any winter weather.
Reap the heart of the hoar oak
With a scythe of
ore, open the Gate
Of the golden
Bough, bend to dream
Before the
stable, the stall of fortune
all
together:
We
wish you joy again,
Gale,
oak and heather,
Mistletoe
and pine,
In
any winter weather.
—
Lewis Turco
Suggested writing
exercise:
Write
a stanza or poem in Anglo-Saxon prosody, with or without a bob and wheel.
Credits:
“The
Blacksmiths” by an anonymous Middle English poet, originally appeared in Song, 5, 1978, and was reprinted in Tygers of Wrath, edited by X. J.
Kennedy, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981, and in World Poetry, An Anthology of Verse from
Antiquity to Our time, edited by Katharine Washburn and John S. Major, New
York: W. W. Norton, 1998;
it was gathered in The
Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004.
“For
a Wordy Lady” by Lewis Turco first appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, ii:2, 1961.
“Hymn
to the Creator” by Caedmon, from the Anglo-Saxon, first appeared in The Davidson
Miscellany, xiv:2, Fall 1978, and was collected in The
Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op.
cit..
"The
Magi Carol” by Lewis Turco appeared in Poetry: An Introduction Through
Writing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., 1973, and was gathered
in The
Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op.
cit.
“Three Visitors on
Christmas Eve” by A. M. Juster is from Filled with Breath: 30 Sonnets by Thirty Poets edited by Mary Meriam, Exot Books 2010.
“The
Wife's Complaint,” by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon author, v. Wesli Court, appeared
in Poetry Newsletter, No. 46, Spring
1978, and was gathered in The
Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op.
cit.
“Wulf
and Eadwacer,” from the anonymous Anglo-Saxon, appeared in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of
Poetics,
Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000, and was gathered
in The
Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op.
cit.
All
rights reserved by the author(s).
