Making Joy / Seeing Sorrow: Emotional and Affective Resources in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur

In its compressed and fast-moving form, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur creates a marked impression of emotional spontaneity, intensity, and suddenness. Poetic strategies of repetition, verbal collocation, and thematic connection create a volatile emotional environment in which joy and sorrow are registered as overpowering bodily and cognitive events. The poem's conduct both bears out the observation that medieval Arthurian romance is 'constructed upon the antithesis of reason and passion' and shows the precariousness of that distinction in its own practice.