The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

With Old English poetry there is NO SYLLABIC COUNT and there is NO RHYME. Is it free verse, then, unbounded by rules? By no means. Old English verse is distinctly patterned. Until now we have been looking at metre composed according to rules of syllabic accentuation: Anglo-Saxon poetry is composed according to rules of accent only: it is a form of accentual verse. Accentual-alliterative to be precise. Oo-er, sounds a bit scary. It really isn’t, I promise you.

Alliteration is the trick of beginning a succession of words with the same consonant.³⁰W. S. Gilbert’s ‘life-long lock’, ‘short sharp shock’ and ‘big black block’ are examples of alliterative phrases that we have already met. Alliteration is still rife in English–advertisers and magazine sub-editors seem obsessed with it. Next time you find yourself out and about with your notebook, write down examples from advertising hoardings and newspaper headlines. It is an English disease: you won’t find it to anything like the same degree in Spanish, French or Italian. It lives on in phrases like ‘wit and wisdom’, ‘parent power’, ‘feast or famine’, ‘sweet sixteen’, ‘dirty dozen’, ‘buy British’, ‘prim and proper’, ‘tiger in your tank’, ‘you can be sure of Shell’ and so on. As we have seen, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream mocked its overuse when Bottom and his friends attempt dramatic verse. Here is another part of their dreadful ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’:Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;

That is cast in standard Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Old English verse made no such regular, organised use of iambs or any other kind of foot; instead, their verse was based on a much simpler kind of accentuation. The poetic line is divided in two. Two parts, each containing two stressed elements, two beats. The Greek for half a line is hemistich (pronounced hemmy-stick) and so, Greek being the language even of native English prosody, hemistich is the word commonly used to describe the Anglo-Saxon half-line.

Each hemistich must contain two stressed syllables. It doesn’t matter where they come or how many unstressed syllables surround them. For now, we will call the stressed syllables one, two, three and four. One and two are placed in the first hemistich, three and four in the second. I have left a deliberately wide gap to denote the vital caesura that marks the division into hemistichs.

One comes along with two

and three is there with four

Let old one take two’s hand

while young three has a word with four

Here come one and two

three is there with four

Although ‘comes’, ‘along’, ‘there’, ‘hand’, ‘young’ and ‘word’ might seem to be words which ought properly to receive some stress, it is only the numbers here that take the primary accent. Try reading the three lines aloud, deliberately hitting the numbers hard.

You get the idea. Of course there will always be minor, secondary stresses on the other words, but it is those four stressed elements that matter. You could say, if you love odd words as much as most poets do, that a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is in reality a syzygy of dipodic hemistichs. A pair of yoked two-foot half-lines, in other words. But I prefer syzygy. It really is a word, I promise you.³¹

Now for the alliterative principle, christened by Michael Alexander, Anglo-Saxon scholar and translator of Beowulf, the BANG, BANG, BANG–CRASH! rule.

ONE, TWO AND THREE ARE ALLITERATED, FOUR ISN’T

It is as simple as that. No rhyming, so syllable counting. In fact, why bother with the word hemistich at all? The line is divided into two: the first half has bang and bang, and the second half has bang and crash. That’s all you really need to know. Let us scan this kind of metre with bold for the first three beats and bold-underline for the fourth, to mark its unalliterated difference.

It embarks with a bang

sucking breath from the lungs

And rolls on directly

as rapid as lightning.

The speed and the splendour

come spilling like wine

Compellingly perfect and

appealingly clear

The most venerable invention

conveniently simple.