|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
|
6 Went she over wave-seas, windy her faring, Floater foamy-necked- fowl was she likest. The observant student will notice: (1) that the lines are divided by a pause in the middle; and (2) that the two halves of each line have words that begin with the same sound (alliteration). In the old days verses were not read to one’s self, or even read aloud or recited; they were sung, or half-sung, or chanted, to the accompaniment of the harp, before a group of listeners at festivals, feasts, or parties. So they kept time in a very marked degree. There were four beats to each half-line. Some were very strong beats, especially those beats that fell on the alliterating syllables. Some were quite weak-little beats made clear by being accompanied by little pauses. But the time was marked just as definitely by the light beats as by the heavy ones. There is nothing mysterious about it. When one chants Sing a song of six-pence a bag full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. He marks time by both strong and weak beats-strong on ‘bag’ and on ‘baked,’ and weak on ‘full’ and on ‘in.’ The student will notice, again, that sometimes two accents come next to each other without any unaccented syllable between; that was a characteristic trick in Anglo-Saxon verse, a trick sometimes made use of in the kind of modern English verse that has carried on the old traditional way of verse-making. Now in my translation of the whole poem of Beowulf I’ve used a verse-form like that of “Sing a song of sixpence,” a form which really developed out of this same old Anglo-Saxon verse. I am really concerned that the reader get the music, the beats, of this verse of mine. I think he will, by just chanting, or half-chanting, it aloud. Let him read these lines aloud: Then around the mound rode with cry and call [pause] Bairns of the aethelings twelve of all [pause], To mourn for their Master their sorrow to sing [pause], Framing a word-chant, speaking mourn King [pause]. He will notice that there are many syllables beginning with the same sound, as in the Anglo-Saxon, but that they are not arranged with the same uniformity of number and position; But on the other hand he will notice that my verses rhyme (usually, as in this sample, in rhyme-pairs). And he will notice that, though in each first half-line there are four beats as in the old verse, there seem to be only three beats on each second half-line. I say “seem to be”; because there is, as one chants the lines, a natural pause always of the same length after each rhyme; and a boy, beating time with a stick or his finger, would make one beat there in the air between |
