The Early Thirteen-Line Stanza: Style And Metrics Reconsidered

The Early Thirteen-Line Stanza: Style And Metrics Reconsidered Susanna Greer Fein In a recent essay Ralph Hanna has reassessed the criteria of 'alliterativity' in Middle English verse. In adding to the traditional lists of alliterative works more pieces and fragments that employ heteromorphic stress patterns (many in stanzas rather than long lines), he has also issued a challenge to all w h o would work in the field 'to reexamine the categories by which w e conceptualize this movement' and to evaluate more thoroughly the body of surviving texts with 'substantial studies of dialect and dating'.1 In light of the disparate bits of evidence that survive, Hanna's advice is worth heeding. A full reassessment might best start with thorough revision ofJ. P. Oakden's formidable but n o w outdated taxonomy of the so-called 'movement' in light of recent finds and newer editions.2 But lacking such a wide-scale, accurate resource, w e still must rely on piecemeal assessments, and also pause, periodically, to refine the general picture by working 1 Ralph Hanna III, 'Defining Middle English Alliterative Poetry', in The Endles Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Boroff, ed. by M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1995), pp. 4364 (p. 57). See, too, his more recent essay, 'Alliterative Poetry', in The Cambridge History ofMedieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 488-512. 2 J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English, 2 vols (1930, 1935). 98 Susanna Greer Fein in the n e w bits (often in styles analogous to and dialects contiguous to the standard works) that continue to emerge. In pursuing this process, one cannot expect n e w determinations to be easily resolved into simple formulations. A s David Lawton explains: The reason why the issue has become confused is that we tend to deal with . . . different traditions under one name and this prejudges relations among them. It is as if the terminology insists on a unitary phenomenon, a 'continuum' or 'tradition', whereas all the hard evidence - the evidence w e review when looking at texts and their readers - points towards a bewildering plurality and diversity: the conjunction in different manuscripts of different texts from different places at different times. Who is to say, and with what meaning, that they add up to one tradition?3 Lawton points especially to the 'little literary historical work on the relation between aalax poetry and poems in the relatively rare thirteen-line stanza'. In finding the clues suggestive but inconclusive, Lawton questions Thorlac TurvillePetre 's hypothesis that a 'school' of 13-line poets was indebted for certain themes and patterns to the A A / A X poets.4 Meanwhile, looking in the other direction, w e have not investigated as fully as w e might the relation between alliterative 13-line stanzaic poems and early syllabic verse in stanzas systematically ornamented with alliteration - that is, poetic works like Pearl and many of the Harley lyrics.5 3 David A. Lawton, 'The Diversity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry', Leeds in English, 20 (\9S9), 143-72 (p. 151). 4 Lawton, 'Diversity', pp. 151-52; Thorlac Turville-Petre, '"Summer Sunday", "De Tribus Regibus Mortuis", and "The Awntyrs off Arthure": Three Poems in the 13line Stanza', Review ofEnglish Studies, n.s. 25 (1974), 1-13 [hereafter 'Three Poems'], 5 Recent studies have helped to clarify and distinguish the metrics ofalliterated syllabic verse in relation to long-line A A / A X verse. H. N. Duggan offers a convincing demonstration ofPearl's syllabic line in 'Meter, Stanza, Vocabulary, Dialect', in A Companion to the Gawain-Poe/, ed. by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), pp. 221-42 (pp. 222-23, 232-42). Meanwhile, Hanna ('Defining', p. 57) has classified the Harley lyrics by their alliterativity, ultimately rejecting two pieces anthologised in Alliterative Poetry ofthe Later Middle Ages: An Anthology, ed. by Thorlac Turville-Petre (London: Routledge, 1989) (that is, The Poet' Repentance and The Meeting in the Wood). On the uncertainty that has prevailed in regard to Pearl's metre, see Susanna Greer Fein, 'Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle...