The Caesura and the Rhythmic Shape of the A-Verse in the Poems of the Alliterative Revival
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The Caesura and the Rhythmic Shape of the A-Verse in the Poems of the Alliterative Revival Noriko Inoue and Myra Stokes Introduction The metre of Middle English alliterative verse is a subject which remained relatively neglected for much of the last century until a new impetus was given to it by the work of, most notably, Hoyt Duggan, whose findings regarding the rules governing the b-verse (the second half of the alliterative line) have provided a persuasive and thought-provoking focus for renewed interest in the subject.1 Since the structure of the a-verse is now attracting attention, the present seems a timely moment in which to open the subject of the caesura: for whether or not the caesura requires to be audibly signalled by a beat at the conclusion of the a-verse is a matter that bears significantly on any theories of the metrical shape of the first half of the line. The existence of such a stress at the caesura has usually been implicitly assumed, though not often explicitly argued, and has never until recently been seriously questioned. The fact of the caesura itself is accepted by metrists of nearly all persuasions — neces- sarily so, since the distinction between the a-verse and the b-verse (which forms the basis of nearly all metrical discussion of alliterative verse) presupposes some perceived division of the line into separable halves. Norman Davis represented the orthodox view when he stated that ‘the long line is divided by a natural pause, or caesura, into two half-lines each of which normally contains two lifts.’2 Duggan’s work also of course rests on the assumption that ‘the alliterative line is made up of two distinct half-lines (verses) divided by a caesura which usually corresponds to a phrasal boundary’; ‘though some recent metrists and editors have expressed doubt about the existence of the caesura and thus of the half-line, manuscript evidence strongly supports the notion that the long line is composed of two cola separated by a metrical caesura’.3 Some editors of Middle English alliterative verse have in fact continued the convention, regularly observed in editions of Old English verse, of presenting the text with 1 For a recent and convenient summary of Duggan’s research, see his ‘Metre, Stanza, Vocabulary and Dialect’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 221–42. 2 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd rev. edn. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 148. 3 ‘Metre, Stanza’, p. 228; the ‘doubt’ is that of generative metrists such as S. J. Keyser, A. Schiller and R. Sapora, who sometimes deny the existence of the caesura (ibid., n. 12). 1 The Caesura and the Rhythmic Shape of the A-Verse a visible gap between the two half-lines, in order to render the caesura as visible to the eye as they implicitly assume it must have been to the ear of its original audience.4 It is indeed plainly critical to a proper appreciation of the metrical structure of the allit- erative line that one should know where the caesura falls. The phrasal or syntactic boundary it coincides with is often quite a minor one. But in most cases the second alliterative beat of the a-verse falls indisputably on the word after which the caesura falls and thus serves to announce it (‘All watz hap vpon heȝe in hallez and chambrez, With lordez and ladies, as leuest him þoȝt’, SG 48–49).5 Most have therefore assumed (rightly, in our view) that the caesura must be so marked, and that the word that precedes it must bear a beat, even where it does not alliterate and/or is preceded by two alliterating words. It is for this reason that many schol- ars have posited the so-called ‘extended’ a-verse, with three (or even more) beats — though, since we do not ourselves believe in constant changes in the time signature of an essentially two-beat a-verse, we view such verses as metrically ‘crowded’ two-beat, rather than ‘extended’ three-beat, ones.6 For instance, Duggan assigns three beats and the following scansion to the a-verse of this line:7 x / / x x / x x /(x) / x And now nar ȝe not fer fro þat note place SG 2092 aax/ax Although Duggan treats a monosyllabic adverb as a closed-class word (which is not normally a candidate for beat), he assigns a beat to the non-alliterating monosyllabic adverb fer as well as to the preceding alliterating words now and nar. We are convinced that his decision to assign a beat to fer is right: fer is in fact probably the most semantically significant word in this particular a-verse; and, equally importantly, it carries phrase-final stress at the pre-caesural position, where the metre requires a beat that makes audible the boundary between the two half-lines. Certainly as concerns open-class words at the caesura in this particular text, it was established some time ago, in a weighty study by Joan Turville-Petre, that, apart from a few instances of verb + adverb, an unstressed but semantically heavy word in that position occurs only with the adjective + noun combination (where the adjective may take alliterating beat and the noun function as its unstressed continuant): ‘Braydez out a bryȝt sworde’ (SG 2319), for 4 See, for example, Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. by Stephanie Trigg, Early English Text Society, o. s., 297 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. by Eugene Kölbing and Mabel Day, Early English Text Society, o. s., 188 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). 5 Quotations from the Cotton Nero poems are from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Cleanness, ed. by John J. Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977); and Patience, ed. by John J. Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969). It should be noted, however, that none of these editors assumed (as we and others now do) that an unstressed syllable at line-ending is actually required (not simply preferred), and some of the lines quoted have line-ending words in which a missing final -e required by the metre has not been editorially supplied. 6 For the record, by ‘beat’ we mean what is described by Derek Attridge as the main rhythmic pulse in metrical verse; see Derek Attridge, A Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 9. This is sometimes called ictus, and sometimes stress, though the metrical stress thus indicated should not be confused with linguistic stress, since the two do not always co-incide. 7 Duggan, ‘Metre’, p. 226. We use the conventional notation in scanning: over the lines, slash marks indicate metrical stress, x an unstressed syllable, brackets indicating a syllable that might or might not be sounded. Mean- while, after the line reference, a indicates alliterating stress; x non-alliterating stress; and / caesura. 2 Noriko Inoue and Myra Stokes example.8 As will become apparent, even words relatively unimportant semantically appear to bear stress in this caesural position. Those who argue (as we do) for a regularly two-beat a-verse, with consequent occasional disjunction between alliteration and beat, likewise do so because they assume the necessity of a caesural beat, and we would ourselves give to the above line a notation of (a)ax/ax (where (a) stands for an alliterating word that does not take metrical ictus). Thus it is precisely because of the felt need for a caesural stress that most theorists have found themselves unable to fit all alliterative lines to the ‘textbook’ scansion of the aa/ax pattern, since a number of a-verses, especially but not exclusively in Sir Gawain, seem to require notations of aaa/ax or aax/ax (or — according to our own belief in consistently two-beat verses — of (a)aa/ax or (a)ax/ax). However, Ad Putter and Judith Jefferson have recently sought to re-instate the textbook scansion as a truly universal rule: they believe, as we do, that the a-verse carries only two beats, but they argue that those two beats must always be marked by alliteration.9 Invariable stress at the caesura is an inevitable casualty of this attractively simple and consistent rule, for by it metrical ictus can fall only on alliterating words, and lines such as the one cited would thus need to be heard and scanned as follows: x / / x x x x x /(x) / x And now nar ȝe not fer fro þat note place SG 2092 aa/ax This results in not merely one but three separate lexical items without stress at the caesura. The reading would sound awkward to many, probably precisely because (since the phrasal boundary at which fer falls is not such as in itself to create much of a break or emphasis) it seriously blurs the boundary between the a- and the b-verses by leaving the caesura unmarked by a stress on the last word of the a-verse.10 Putter and Jefferson support their claims (for a two-beat a-verse in which stress and alliteration always coincide) by an argument that is exceptionally coherent and clearly thought through, and one which yields, in addition, the following rhythmical rule: the a-verse ‘must contain either a long initial and medial dip or, failing that, an extra-long dip or a long or heavy final dip’.11 By ‘an extra-long dip’ is meant either an initial or medial long dip with four or more unstressed syllables, and a ‘heavy final dip’ is a final dip occupied by a monosyllabic adverb, by a verb such as ‘be’ or ‘do’, or by a syllable with secondary stress (including suffixes such as -ly,-ship, and -less), all of which they demonstrate are strictly avoided at the end of the line (where an unstressed syllable proper is 8 Joan Turville-Petre, ‘The Metre of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, English Studies, 57 (1976), 310–28, p.