Essays on the Art of Chaucer's Verse

Alan T. Gaylord, Alan T. Gaylord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134826490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

These fifteen essays, four of them commissioned for this volume, along with a discursive introduction which sets each essay into place and comments on its distinctive features, represent a gathering never before attempted: a symposium on Chaucer's craft that concentrates on his poetic forms, his rhythms, his riming, his versification, his prosody. In his seminal essay, Scanning the Prosodists, Alan Gaylord (the editor of this volume) had asked: To show how Chaucer moves, and in moving, moves us: is that not what the study of his prosody should do? Should it not identify a pattern of sounds in motion, a regular and expressive succession which is part of the order of verse and a major component of its effectiveness? In the two decades that followed that essay, a number of distinguished scholars provided a variety of answers for such questions, arising from the authors' work as metrical theorists, or editors of medieval verse, or literary historians, or critics -- but in every case, such work connected to the initiatives and discoveries of the classroom. The best written and most useful of those essays, by recognized authorities in their fields, have been included in this volume. The volume will be of use to the advanced student of Chaucer and medieval poetry, and to the teacher interested in identifying, explaining, and bringing to life the patterns of sound and sense in Chaucer's verse. The extensive master Bibliography for the whole volume comprises a library of references which will have been reviewed and discussed in the essays.

Part One:
Historical and Theoretical Essays

Thomas Tyrwhitt

Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer. Part the Third^*

Before we proceed in the third and last part of this Essay, in which we are to consider the Versification of Chaucer, it may be useful to premise a few observations upon the state of English Poetry antecedent to his time.

§ I. That the Saxons had a species of writing, which differed from their common prose, and was considered by themselves as Poetry (39), is very certain; but it seems equally certain, that their compositions of that kind were neither divided into verses of a determinate number of syllables, nor embellished with what we call Rime (40). There are no traces, I believe, to found of either Rime or Metre in our language, till some years after the Conquest; so that I should apprehend we must have been obliged for both to the Normans, who very early (41) distinguished themselves by poetical performances in their Vulgar tongue.

The Metres which they used, and which we seem to have borrowed from them, were plainly copied from the Latin (42) rythmical verses, which, in the declension of that language, were current in various forms among those, who either did not understand, or did not regard, the true quantity of syllables; and the practice of Riming (43) is probably to be deduced from the same original, as we find that practice to have prevailed in Ecclesiastical Hymns, and other compositions, in Latin, some centuries before Otfrid of Weissenberg, the first known Rimer in any of the vulgar European dialects.

§ II. I wish it were in my power to give a regular history of the progress which our Ancestors made in this new style of versification; but (44), except a few lines in the Saxon Chronicle upon the death of William the Conquerour, which seem to have been intended for verses of the Modern fashion, and a short Canticle, which, according to Matthew Paris (45), the blessed Virgin was pleased to dictate to Godric, an Hermite near Durham, I have not been able to discover any attempts at Riming Poetry, which can with probability be referred to an earlier period than the reign of Henry the second. In that reign Layamon (46), a Priest of Ernleye near Severn, as he calls himself translated (chiefly) from the French of Wace (47), a fabulous history of the Britons, entitled “Le Brut,” which Wace himself about the year 1155, had translated from the Latin of Geffrey of Monmouth. Though the greatest part of this work of Layamon resemble the old Saxon Poetry, without Rime or metre, yet he often intermixes a number of short verses, of unequal lengths but riming together pretty exactly, and in some places he has imitated not unsuccessfully the regular octosyllable measure of his French original.

§ III. It may seem extraordinary, after these proofs, that the art of Riming was not unknown or unpractised in this country in the time of Henry II, that we should be obliged to search through a space of above an hundred years, without being able to meet with a single maker of English Rimes, whom we know to have written in that interval. The case I suspect to have been this. The scholars of that age (and there were many who might fairly be called so, in the English dominions abroad [48] as well as at home) affected to write only (49) in Latin, so that we do not find that they ever composed, in verse or prose, in any other language. On the other hand they, who meant to recommend themselves by their Poetry to the favour of the great, took care to write in French, the only language which their patrons understood; and hence it is, that we see so many French poems (50), about that time, either addressed directly to the principal persons at the English court, or at least written on such subjects as we may suppose to have been most likely to engage their attention. Whatever therefore of English Poetry was produced, in this infancy of the art, being probably the work of illiterate authors and circulating only among the the vulgar (51), we need not be much surprised that no more of it has been transmitted down to posterity.

§ IV. The learned Hickes, however, has pointed out to us two very curious pieces, which may with probability be referred to this period. The first of them is a Paraphrase of the Gospel Histories, entitled Ormulum (52), by one Orm, or Ormin. It seems to have been considered as mere Prose by Hickes and by Wanley, who have both given large extracts from it; but, I apprehend, every reader, who has an ear for metre, will easily perceive that it is written very exactly in verses of fifteen syllables, without Rime, in imitation of the most common species of the Latin Tetrameter Iambic. The other piece (53), which is a moral Poem upon old age, &c. is in Rime, and in a metre much resembling the former, except that the verse of fifteen syllables is broken into two, of which the first should regularly contain eight and the second seven syllables; but the metre is not so exactly observed, at least in the copy which Hickes has followed, as it is in the Ormulum.

§ V. In the next interval, from the latter end of the reign of Henry III, to the middle of the fourteenth century, when we may suppose Chaucer was beginning to write, the number of English Rimers seems to have increased very much. Besides several, whose names we know (54), it is probable that a great part of the anonymous Authors, or rather Translators (55), of the popular Poems, which (from their having been originally written in the Roman, or French, language) were called Romances, flourished about this time. It is unnecessary to enter into particulars here concerning any of them, as they do not appear to have invented, or imported from abroad, any new modes of Versification, by which the Art coud be at all advanced (56), or even to have improved those which were before in use. On the contrary, as their works were intended for the ear more than for the eye, to be recited rather than read, they were apt to be more attentive to their Rimes than to the exactness of their Metres, from a presumption, I suppose, that the defect, or redundance, of a syllable might be easily covered in the recitation, especially if accompanied, as it often was, by some musical instrument.

§ VI. Such was, in general, the state of English Poetry at the time when Chaucer probably made his first essays. The use of Rime was established; not exclusively (for the Author of the “Visions of Pierce Ploughman” wrote after the year 1350 (57) without Rime,) but very generally; so that in this respect he had little to do but to imitate his predecessors. The Metrical part of our Poetry was capable of more improvement, by the polishing of the measures already in use as well as by the introducing of new modes of versification; and how far Chaucer actually contributed to the improvement of it, in both or either of these particulars, we are now to consider.

§ VII. With respect to the regular Metres than in use, they may be reduced, I think, to four. First, the long Iambic Metre (58), consisting of not more than fifteen, nor less than fourteen syllables, and broken by a Cæsura at the eighth syllable. Secondly, the Alexandrin Metre (59), consisting of not more than thirteen syllables, nor less than twelve, with a Cæsura at the sixth. Thirdly, the Octosyllable Metre; which was in reality the antient Dimeter Iambic. Fourthly, the Stanza of six verses; of which the first, second, fourth, and fifth, were in the complete Octosyllable Metre; and the third and last catalectic, i.e. wanting a syllable, or even two.

§ VIII. In the first of these Metres it does not appear that Chaucer ever composed at all, (for, I presume, no one can imagine that he was the author of Gamelyn,) or in the second; and in the fourth we have nothing of his but the Rime of Sire Thopas, which, being intended to ridicule the vulgar Romancers, seems to have been purposely written in their favourite Metre. In the third, or Octosyllable Metre (60), he has left several compositions; particularly, “an imperfect Translation of the Roman de la Rose,” which was, probably, one of his earliest performances; “the House of Fame;” “the Dethe of the Duchesse Blanche,” and a poem called his “Dreme”: upon all which it will be sufficient here to observe in general, that, if he had given no other proofs of his poetical faculty, these alone must have secured to him the pre-eminence, above all his predecessors and contemporaries, in point of Versification.

§ IX. But by far the most considerable part of Chaucer's works is written in that kind of Metre which we now call the Heroic (61), either in Distichs or in Stanzas; and as I have not been able to discover any instance of this metre being used by any English poet before him, I am much inclined to suppose that he was the first introducer of it into our language. It had long been practised in France, in the Northern as well as the Southern provinces; and in Italy, within the last fifty years before Chaucer wrote, it had been cultivated with the greatest assiduity and success, in preference to every other metre, by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccace. When we reflect that two of Chaucer's juvenile productions, the Palamon and Arcite, and the Troilus, were in a manner translated from the Theseida and the Filostrato of Boccace (62), both written in the common Italian hendecasyllable verse, it cannot but appear extremely probable that his metre also was copied from the same original; and yet I cannot find that the form of his Stanza in the Troilus, consisting of seven verses, was ever used by Boccace, though it is to be met with among the poems of the King of Navarre, and of the Provencal Rimers (63). Whichever he shall be supposed to have followed, whether the French or Italians, it is certain that he coud not want in either language a number of models of correct and harmonious versification; and the only question will be, whether he had ability and industry enough to imitate that part of their excellency.

§ X. In discussing this question we should always have in mind, that the correctness and harmony of an English verse depends entirely upon its being composed of a certain number of syllables, and its having the accents of those syllables properly placed. In order therefore to form any judgement of the Versification of Chaucer, it is necessary that we should know the syllabical value, if I may use the expression, of his words, and the accentual value of his syllables, as they were commonly pronounced (64) in his ti...