A History of English Versification. J. Schipper
words rinc and of would be extended to two, and gūð and fold would each be extended to four units, in order to fit in with the scansion ×́×|×́×|×́×|⏑́×. Most of the partisans of the four-beat theory for the hemistich agree in making two of these beats primary, and two secondary; Trautmann, however, does not seem to recognize any such difference in the force of the four accents. All the supporters of the four-beat theory have this in common, that the rhythm of the verse is assumed to be based on time (taktierend), but in other respects differ widely from each other; Hirt, for example, in his last discussion of the subject,[34] claiming that his own view is fundamentally different from that of Kaluza, which again he looks on as at variance with those of Möller and Heusler.
§ 17. The two-beat theory, on the other hand, is that each of the two hemistichs of the alliterative line need have only two accented syllables. In England this view was taken by two sixteenth-century writers on verse, George Gascoigne[35] who quotes the line,
No wight in this world, that wealth can attain,
giving as the accentual scheme ` ´ ` ` ´ ` ´ ` ` ´; and by King James VI, whose example is—
Fetching fude for to feid it fast furth of the Farie.[36]
In 1765, Percy, in his Essay on Pierce Plowman’s Visions, pointed out ‘that the author of this poem will not be found to have invented any new mode of versification, as some have supposed, but only to have retained that of the old Saxon and Gothick poets, which was probably never wholly laid aside, but occasionally used at different intervals’. After quoting[37] two Old Norse, he gives two Old English verses:—
Sceop þa and scyrede scyppend ure (Gen. 65),
ham and heahsetl heofena rices (ib. 33);
he continues: ‘Now if we examine the versification of Pierce Plowman’s Visions’ (from which he quotes the beginning—
In a somer season | when softe was the sonne
I schop me into a schroud | a scheep as I were, &c.)
‘we shall find it constructed exactly by these rules’, which are, in his own words, ‘that every distich [i.e. complete long line] should contain at least three words beginning with the same letter or sound; two of these correspondent sounds might be placed either in the first or second line of the distich, and one in the other, but all three were not regularly to be crowded into one line.’ He then goes on to quote further specimens of alliterative verse from Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, The Sege of Jerusalem, The Chevalere Assigne, Death and Liffe and Scottish Fielde, which latter ends with a rhyming couplet:
And his ancestors of old time | have yearded theire longe
Before William conquerour | this cuntry did inhabitt.
Jesus bring them to blisse | that brought us forth of bale,
That hath hearkened me heare | or heard my tale.
Taken as a whole his dissertation on the history of alliterative verse is remarkably correct, and his final remarks are noteworthy:
Thus we have traced the alliterative measure so low as the sixteenth century. It is remarkable that all such poets as used this kind of metre, retained along with it many peculiar Saxon idioms, particularly such as were appropriated to poetry: this deserves the attention of those who are desirous to recover the laws of the ancient Saxon poesy, usually given up as inexplicable: I am of opinion that they will find what they seek in the metre of Pierce Plowman. About the beginning of the sixteenth century this kind of versification began to change its form; the author of Scottish Field, we see, concludes his poem with a couplet of rhymes; this was an innovation[38] that did but prepare the way for the general admission of that more modish ornament. When rhyme began to be superadded, all the niceties of alliteration were at first retained with it: the song of Little John Nobody exhibits this union very closely. … To proceed; the old uncouth verse of the ancient writers would no longer go down without the more fashionable ornament of rhyme, and therefore rhyme was superadded. This correspondence of final sounds engrossing the whole attention of the poet and fully satisfying the reader, the internal imbellishment of alliteration was no longer studied, and thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost in our common burlesque alexandrine, now never used but in songs and pieces of low humour, as in the following ballad; and that well-known doggrel:
‘A cobler there was and he lived in a stall’.
Now it is clear that this verse is of exactly the same structure as the verses quoted by Gascoigne:
No wight in this world that wealth can attayne,
Ùnléss hè bèléue, thàt áll ìs bùt vaýne,
where the scheme of accents is Gascoigne’s own, showing that he read them as verses of four accents in all, two in each hemistich. They show the same rhythmical structure as the ‘tumbling’ or alliterative line given by James VI[39] (1585):
Fetching fude for to feid it fast furth of the Farie,
and described by him as having ‘twa [feit, i.e. syllables] short, and ane lang throuch all the lyne’, in other words with four accented syllables in the verse.
Percy detected very acutely that the Middle English alliterative line stood in close connexion with the Old English alliterative line, and suggested as highly probable that the metre of Pierce Plowman would give a key to the rhythm of that older form of verse, which would have to be read with two accented syllables in the hemistich, and therefore four in the whole line.
Had this essay of Percy’s been known to Lachmann’s followers, many of the forced attempts at reconciling the Old English verse with a scheme that involved a fixed number of syllables in the line would not have been made. Lachmann himself, it must be remembered, admitted the two-beat scansion for Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old English. Meanwhile other investigators were at work on independent lines. In 1844 A. Schmeller, the editor of the Heliand, formulated the law that, in the Teutonic languages, it is the force with which the different syllables are uttered that regulates the rhythm of the verse, and not the number or length of the syllables (which are of minor importance), and established the fact that this alliterative verse was not meant to be sung but to be recited.[40] He does not enter into the details of the rhythm of the verse, except by pointing out the two-beat cadence of each section. Somewhat later, W. Wackernagel[41] declared himself in favour of the two-beat theory for all Teutonic alliterative verse. In every hemistich of the verse there are according to Wackernagel two syllables with a grammatical or logical emphasis, and consequently a strong accent, the number of less strongly accented syllables not being fixed. The two-beat theory was again ably supported by F. Vetter[42] and by K. Hildebrand, who approached the subject by a study of the Old Norse alliterative verse,[43] and by M. Rieger in his instructive essay on Old Saxon and Old English versification.[44] In this essay Rieger pointed out the rules prevailing in the poetry of those two closely related Teutonic nations, dealt with the distribution and quality of the alliteration, the relation of the alliteration to the noun, adjective, and verb, and to the order of words, with the caesura and the close of the verse, and, finally, with the question of the accented syllables and the limits of the use of unaccented syllables.[45] Other scholars, as Horn, Ries, and Sievers, contributed further elucidations of the details of this metre on the basis of Rieger’s researches.[46]
Next to Rieger’s short essay the most important contribution made to the accurate and scientific study of alliterative verse was that made by Sievers in his article on the rhythm of the Germanic alliterative verse.[47] In this he shows, to use his own words, ‘that a statistical classification of groups of words with their natural accentuation in both sections of the alliterative line makes it clear that this metre, in spite of its variety, is not so irregular as to the unaccented syllables at the beginning or in the middle of the verse as has been commonly thought, but that it has a range of a limited number of definite forms which may be all reduced to five primary types.’ These five types or chief variations in the relative position of the accented and unaccented syllables are, as Sievers points out, of such a nature and so arbitrarily