Holly
Lisle's Vision
Poetry
Anglo-Saxon
Alliterative Epics?
Ouch!
By
Sally Catlin
©
2002, Sally Catlin
If you grew up speaking English,
you probably remember suffering through Beowulf
in school. Being a writer, you may have even enjoyed it, or vaguely recall
something about kennings or caesuras.
There's a lot more to Old English
poetry than Beowulf, though. The verse
form used by the poet of Beowulf,
sometimes misleadingly called alliterative verse, is the only form of
poetry native to the English language. It was a primarily oral form for most of
its history, and so it's very different from the French-influenced forms that
later dominated English poetry.
It's one of my favorite styles,
both for plain poetry and for writing background verse for books. Even though
the English language has changed almost beyond recognition in the past fifteen
hundred years, the old poetry styles still mesh best with its sounds and stress
patterns. Also, because the poems were usually composed while they were being
spoken, it's suited for fast narrative composition. The style is really very
simple. There are only three essential elements: stress pattern, pauses, and
alliteration.
The stress pattern may be the most
important element. Most people may be familiar with the formal patterns like
iambic pentameter, which were inherited through the French. The old English
stress patterns are much simpler. Each line is divided into two half-lines, and
each half-line contains two strongly stressed words. For most purposes, it
doesn't matter how many unstressed syllables there are in each half-line, or
where they are. Some more recent poets, such as Ezra Pound, have re-adopted this
method of patterning stresses. It gives poems dignity and musicality without
risking descent into singsong.
The second important element in
this style of poetry is the way the natural pauses fall in the lines. These
pauses are sometimes referred to as caesuras; they're places where it would be
natural for the poet to take a breath, or where a punctuation mark falls. A
caesura occurs after every two half-lines or every four strong stresses. For
some reason, all modern editions place the caesura in the middle of the line,
with two stresses before and two after. Actually, in the oldest manuscripts,
there are no line breaks at all; only the caesuras are marked by /. It seems
more natural to me to break the lines at the caesuras; it's certainly more
natural to write that way!
So the poem consists of half-lines,
two stresses each, with a natural pause after every two half-lines. The
alliteration is what unifies the poem and pulls the half-lines together, but
it's actually the least important element. There's much more room for poetic
license here. Alliteration is just repetition of the first sound of words; in
Old English poetry there are also a few standard cheats: all vowel sounds
alliterate with each other and with h and y; wh and w match, and so do s and sh.
The only required alliteration is that the last stressed word before the caesura
must alliterate with the first stress after it. If it's convenient, the other
stress in each half-line can also match; but the unstressed syllables don't
alliterate.
There are as many different forms
of alliterative verse as there are of more familiar rhymed verse. Poems can be
any length, from one-line riddles to novel-length epics; a common variation with
shorter form was the use of a repeated refrain, or a recurring pattern of lines
with fewer stresses. Later poets often mixed modern rhymed stanzas with
traditional alliterated ones, which can be very powerful if the balance is
right.
I encourage everyone to take time
to explore a beautiful, versatile, simple style of poetry that does not get
nearly the attention it deserves!
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