Strong-Stress Metre in Fourteen-Line Stanza Forms

Strong-Stress Metre in Fourteen-Line Stanza Forms Ruth Kennedy Almost every poet w h o attempted rhymed, stanzaic alliterative verse from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries in England and Scotland decided on the 13-line stanza with itsfive-linecaudal but the 14-line form made up ofan octave and six-line cauda was used only rarely. Jakob Schipper, after dealing with the 13-line corpus, appended a mere two sentences on the 14-line form - in essence: An interesting variety of the common form (with a five-lined cauda)... we have in the poem of.. John the Euangelist... [a] stanza consisting] of an eight-linedfrom... and a cauda formed by a six-lined tail-rhyme stanza of two-beat verses.2 1 By default this essay relates to study of two cognate forms that have been exp with great sensitivity by Susanna Greer Fein: the 12-line stanza and the 13-line stanza. See Susanna Greer Fein, 'Twelve-Line Stanza Forms in Middle English and the Date ofPearl', Speculum, 72 (1997), 367-98, and her essay for the present volume. 2 See Jakob Schipper, A History of English Versification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), § 264, 265, pp. 321-23. All references are to this translation ofthe one-volume abridgement (Grundriss der englischen Metrik, Wiener Beitrage zur englischen Philologie, 2 (Vienna, Leipzig: Braumuller, 1895)) of his seminal Englische Metrik in historischer und systematischer Entwickelung dargestellt, 3 vols (Bonn: Strau 1881-8). Of the six texts surveyed in this present essay, Schipper seems to have known only of The Alliterative Evangelist Hymn (at p. 323). 128 Ruth Kennedy Schipper appears to have made the pardonable assumption that the 14line configuration was cognate with the 13-line form with the arbitrary addition of one line. But, as this is akin to saying a 15-line decasyllabic poem is the same as a sonnet with the addition of one line, and as little else appears to have been written on this 14-line stanza in the last one hundred and twenty years, the present essay is largely a response to Schipper's coverage.3 At the very least, it will demonstrate that the difference never consisted in the addition of a line tacked to the end of a 13-line stanza, but - in the small extant corpus of six texts - was scored into the cauda in no less than three distinct ways. Anisometric stanzaic patterns have a c o m m o n ancestry in Indo-European lyric and dance, largely because of the mnemonic refrain that is needed to perform both.4 To that extent the 13-line and the 14-line form are related. But no one dances to strong-stress metre. Composing in this measure was a late, selfconscious and literary art form, and w e know next to nothing about its poets except, as might be expected, that some were regular and perhaps mendicant religious. The scant remaining body of verse in the 14-line anisometric stanza, all from around thefirsttwo decades of the fifteenth century, is made up of one political satire, stanzas from two pageants of the York cycle, and three saints' hymns. It is set out below for ease of reference, though the details of authorship, date and provenance proposed are largely speculative. 3 Some of the texts are glanced at in surveys such as J. P. Oakden, Alliterative in Middle English, 2 vols (Manchester, 1930, 1935), I: 215, 217-232, passim, and II: 79 (opening with 'St. John the Evangelist is not a noteworthy poem'; the companion volume accorded a detailed paragraph to the 'unfortunate style' and 'lack oforiginality' and of 'poetic style'). For the sum of critical notice since 1934 see also Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: Brewer, 1977), pp. 26 and 66, where all three texts are mentioned. Only Evangelist and Baptist are covered by reference to their M S S in Middle English Alliterative Poetry: Seven Essays, ed. b David Lawton (Cambridge: Brewer, 1982), pp. 97 and 159. The texts, despite their geographic links, so important to our understanding of the 'Revival',findno place in the most recent survey: Ralph Hanna III, 'Alliterative Poetry', in The Cambridge History...