Extended A-Verses in Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Extended A-Verses in Middle English Alliterative Poetry Hoyt N. Duggan Ifmetre requires 'the deliberate use of a regular and recurrent pattern in a literary composition', it would be difficult to argue that the poetry of the so-called Alliterative Revival has a distinctive metre at all, for the form admits both aand b-verses with a considerable range of rhythmic variation. A-verses with four or five unstressed syllables and two stresses appear to be metrical, but then so too do those a-verses that have three metrically stressed syllables and up to nine unstressed ones. So great is the diversity of rhythmic patterns in a-verses that, faced a decade ago with the necessity of characterising the metre in our edition of The Wars ofAlexander, Thorlac Turville-Petre and I offered this commodious characterisation of a-verse patterns: There are rarely more than six syllables in an a-verse dip, and the most common rhythmical patterns involve three or fewer syllables in each dip. None to five unstressed syllables m a y appear before the first stressed syllable; after it none to seven may appear. After thefinalstressed syllable there m a y be from none to four unstressed syllables. Though any two of 1 Raymond Chapman, Linguistics and Literature (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), p. 86. 2 On the inadequacy of the traditional view of things encapsulated in the term 'Alliterative Revival' see Ralph Hanna, III, 'Alliterative Poetry', in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David A. Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 488-512. 54 Hoyt N. Duggan the three dips may contain three syllables, the third dip in such lines tends to be light. Similarly, when any one dip contains four or more syllables, the other two dips tend to have two or fewer. As qualified as that normative statement was, our characterisation of the ex a-verses was even less committal, for w e ourselves did not agree about the poet's practice. Citing the work of Marie Borroff, Joan Turville-Petre, and Thorlac himself, w e described such a-verses in the Wars in the following terms: Extended half-lines are those in which there are three positions that, perhap take stress and alliteration. In such verses the alliterative patterns AAA..., AAX..., XAA..., and AXA... all appear. Scholars disagree as to whether any half-lines have indeed three metrically prominent positions, some arguing that always one potentially stressed position is to be subordinated, others that three positions are indeed metrically important. As no choices between manuscript variants turn on whether extended lines have two or three stressed positions, w e offer no opinion on this point, (xxi) Our disagreement is not surprising. Since the second half of the nineteenth century when scholars began to study the formal features of the body of poems produced during the Alliterative Revival, there has been little consensus on verse design. Scholars of great distinction have reached diametrically opposed positions on such fundamental issues as the number of ictus positions permitted in each half-line or, indeed, in the full long-line. It has been a very long time since any scholar has argued that each half line carries four metrical stresses, and I believe no one has argued in the last three-quarters of the twentieth century for seven metrical stresses in the alliterative long line. The last serious proposal for the 3 The Wars of Alexander, EETS ss 10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4 Much of the older scholarship is vitiated by the false assumption that the essential metrical features of late Middle English alliterative verse were the same as those governing Old English and other early Germanic poetic traditions. For surveys ofthe development of the scholarship, see Aage Kabell, Metrische Studien, I: De Alliterationsvers (Munchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1978), pp. 87-158, though he does deal with the late medieval forms. Older treatments are still useful. See W. W. Lawrenc Chapters on Alliterative Verse (London: D. Frowde, 1893); Jakob Schipper, A His ofEnglish Versification (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910); Max Kaluza, Engl'ische Met historischen Entwicklung (Berlin, 1909), trans. A. C. Dunstan, A Short History English Versification (London: G. Allen; New York: Macmillan, 1911...