Water from the Well: The Reception of Chaucer's Metric

Water from the Well: The Reception of Chaucer's Metric Peter Groves A n d for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I G o d that non miswryte the, N e the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; (Troilus and Criseyde, 5.1793-96) Chaucer's well-known anxiety that his verse be not 'mismetred' suggest not only that he considered it fully metrical (and not merely rhythmical, or 'cadenced', as some commentators have suggested) but also that he thought the metre novel, or in some other w a y likely to puzzle at least some of his readers: it is hard to imagine a similar concern being expressed by the author of a more traditional piece of versification such as Piers Plowman. His anxiety w a s well-founded: over the last six 1 J.G. Southworth argues that Chaucer's 'early and continuing populari implies that 'his prosodic innovations were not such as would strike a listener as strange' (The Prosody of Chaucer and his Followers (Oxford: Basil Blackw 1962), p. 2), but this is a non sequitur: not only does it over-rate the importa - indeed, the visibility - of metrical form to the kind of audience that makes a poet popular, but it assumes that metrical form is incapable of being misconstrued. 52 Peter Groves centuries his versification has been received and construed in a bewildering variety of ways, and the process of re-invention seems to have begun with his close contemporaries. In this paper I wish to consider, through a number of these re-inventions, some aspects of the process of transmitting metrical systems across cultural, generational and linguistic boundaries. Although the work of Bloom and others has complicated our conceptions of literary influence in general, the mechanism of metrical transmission has not usually been considered problematic, perhaps because w e tend to think of metres as fairly simple abstract patterns that are apprehended directly and reproduced with little difficulty: the concept of the autotelic text as a preserver and transmitter of stable meanings lives on in the assumption that metre is (as in classical Latin) completely inscribed in the text of the verse, and automatically transmitted with i t . Hence the puzzlement that greets what Saintsbury calls 'that curious confusion of poetic tongue', the apparent failure of Chaucer's immediate successors to understand and reproduce his metrical practice. But metrical form, like meaning, can only be experienced if it is mediated through public systems of signification; it is present in a poetic text only in so far as it has been successfully encoded in the relations among three things: the phonological and syntactic structures of the language, the pragmatics of the implied or actual utterance, and the metrical system itself, and is perceived in performance (and 'performance' here includes the reader's o w n subvocalisation of the text) only by those w h o have internalised not only the relevant metrical system but also the phonology in which it is embodied. This is w h y Anglophones, for example, find the metre of French poetry so hard to hear, even w h e n they have an adequate theoretical knowledge of French versification, and w h y they tend to impose a factitious iambic movement upon it. It is true that cross-cultural metrical transmission would be less of a problem if all metres were explicitly coded and available in a textbook like the Latin hexameter or the French alexandrine, but in fact most metrical systems have been preserved and transmitted within cultures without benefit of explicit analysis: w e internalise the phonological code 2 A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. Waterfrom the Well: The Reception of Chaucer's Metric 5 of metre in our native language unconsciously, not unlike the way an infant learns his or her native tongue. Somali oral poetry, for example, has been composed and recited from time immemorial, yet it is only since the late 1970s that Somali scholars have come to understand and encode 3 its elaborate quantitative metric. This unconscious assimilation works even where explicit accounts are available. Finn Thiessen recalls a classmate...