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QUINN. WILLIAM ANTHONY THE ORAL PERFORMANCE OF MEDIEVAL POETRY AND REGULAR END-RHYME.

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, P H .D ., 1979

COPR. 1979 QUINN, WILLIAM ANTHONY University Micnjifilrns International 300 n zeeh hoao. ann ahboh.48 iogMr

@ 1979

WILLIAM ANTHONY QUINN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE ORAL PERFORMANCE OF MEDIEVAL POETRY

AND REGULAR END-RHYME

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

William A. Quinn, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1979

Reading Committee: Approved By

Professor Christian K. Zacher, Chairman

Professor Stanley J. Kahrl

Professor Alan K. Brown (.0 : 1 1 f : Advis^i Department of English To Tricia, Who drove me home.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although much has been written about the conventional phrasing of oral poetry, the thanks that I now need to convey seem equally formulaic. It is, however, the first time I perform this task. And all these cliches seem suddenly new, significant and alive.

Therefore, I wish to thank, as so many have thanked before, the members of my reading committee--Professors

Alan K. Brown, Stanley J. Kahrl and especially my main adviser, Christian K. Zacher. I thank them for both their patience in receiving and their promptness in returning my efforts. I thank them for forcing me to think more and to think again. I also wish to thank all my friends and colleagues at Ohio State University, but especially

Miss Jane Wemhoener who more than merely typed the final copy of this text; though I authored this dissertation, she was its jongleur.

Also, all my former teachers deserve some mention, but I will confine my ebullience at the completion of this project to acknowledging the late Fr. Thomas G. Savage, S.J.

Professor Karl Wentersdorf and the entire faculty of the Honors Program at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

My parents, my first teachers and my best, have

long ago grown accustomed to being thanked last--and most; I shall never thank them sufficiently. But now

I know one who deserves to be thanked as much and more, and for her is reserved the dubious honor of being thanked last. My wife, Tricia, did not vow to endure

the manic anxiety of this project, but she did, and I will thank her the rest of our lives. VITA

May 30, 1951 . . . . Born - Newark, New Jersey

1973 ...... B.A., Xavier University Cincinnati, Ohio

1973-197 4 ...... Graduate Fellow, English Department, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974-1976, 1978-1979 Graduate Teaching Associate, English Department, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1975 . . . M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1976-1977 Graduate Fellow, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1977-1978 Graduate Teaching Associate, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Medieval English Literature

Minor Fields: Renaissance, Modern and Drama

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page DEDICATION...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

VITA...... v

INTRODUCTION...... 1

Chapter

I. RHYME AND R E A S O N ...... 12

Rhyme in Theory ...... 12 Rhyme in P r a c t i c e ...... 46

II. THE MEDIEVAL WELSH TRADITION ...... 86

Historical Contexts ...... 86 The Question of Origins and Primacy 98 The Bardic Rhyme Patterns ...... 108 The Formal Functions of Medieval Welsh Rhyme Patterns...... 126 The Welsh Tradition in English Verse 139 Critical Principles for Assessing Primary Rhyme Patterns...... 158

III. THE ART OF END-RHYME IN TWO MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES...... 172

King Horn and Havelok the Dane. . . 172 The Oral Theory and Middle English Romances...... 179 The Jongleur's System of Improvised End-Rhymes in King Ho r n ...... 189

IV. CONCLUSION...... 224

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 238 Page APPENDIXES

I. Examples of the Traditional Welsh M e a s u r e s ...... 257

II. The -YN Rhymes of the Armes Prydein. . 260

III. The End-Rhymes of King Horn...... 262

A. End-Rhymes that occur in only One or Two Couplets of the C- Manuscript of King Horn .... 268 B. End-Rhymes that occur m Three to Nine Couplets of the C- Manuscript of King Horn .... 272 C. End-Rhymes that occur in Ten or More Couplets of the C- Manuscript of King Horn .... 334 INTRODUCTION

The exact origin of rhyme is another of those points which Fate, or Logic, or, if anybody pleases, Pusillanimity, dispenses us from attacking.

George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, vol. I (1923), p. 19.

It seems quite difficult to prolong a discussion of rhyme and, at the same time, to maintain any semblance of "high seriousness." In general, most studies of rhyme may be classified as either observational or historical— though quite a few histories of English prosody combine both approaches. Observational studies simply attempt to label the plethora of patterns for rhyme-arrangement in 1 poetry. Historical studies record when each pattern was first practiced, when it was most popular and, finally, 2 when it fell from fashion. This study shall attempt, however, to suggest why regular end-rhyme may have been dismissed from serious English poetry by analyzing first why it was introduced.

Any observational study of rhyme will offer a lexicon of the standard patterns in English poetry. Observational studies provide the necessary vocabulary for any further discussion of rhyme and should be judged, like any glossary, according to their encyclopedic inclusiveness. It is assumed that certain patterns of regular end-rhyme in

English poetry may be considered more or less "standard"

(i.e., available for future imitation) based on their more or less successful and recurrent use in previous English poems. The scholar who, however, confines himself to such a study usually ostracizes himself from all future company. He becomes, at best, a crashing bore with an etymologically chaotic vocabulary. Such terms as rime royale, Alexandrine, ballad and ballade, sonnet (with its multitude of modifiers), villanelle, terza and ottava rima, and on and on, wind their way into his cocktail chit-chat. At worst, such a savante can simply mumble: abac; aabb; abba, and on and on. But the most terrifying phenomenon— the fact that haunts the encyclopedist of rhyme patterns— the threat that makes him somnambulate— is his realization that anyone at any time can Invent an entirely new rhyme scheme; and it may be a pattern, as in Dylan Thomas' "Prologue," which requires that he finally learn not one, but two complete alphabets. Though the history of rhyme per se must begin with a question mark and can conclude only with a full colon, the historian's sanity is saved by the outline of time. He can organize the introduction of rhyme patterns into English poetry from fixed date to fixed date, and then can blithely allow his heirs to record any future developments.

Nevertheless, the task of the historian of English rhyme remains difficult in the extreme. As the cataloguer could

have warned on the brink of his breakdown, English poetry

is constipated with a diet of imported forms. The Late Latins, Welsh, Vikings, French and Italians have all pro­ vided prosodic entrees for native English poets to digest. It is now universally acknowledged that regular end- rhyme may not be considered part of the native Anglo-Saxon 3 tradition for English poetry. That "Anglo-Saxon" itself means "native" to English poetry may be argued. But it is clear that the scops made no more of regular end-rhyme than many of our contemporary poets do; the rhyming tradition conquered a successful non-rhyming one only after 4 1066. Despite this late start and despite the Alliterative

Revival, regular end-rhyme endured as both native and

natural to English poetry through the nineteenth century.

It is now, also, almost universally accepted that the Norman political conquest itself explains the startling prosodic revolution that occurred in English poetry between the Beowulf bard and Chaucer. It is undeniable that " . . . the bias of prevailing taste in the fourteenth century and later towards French styles is a fact of moment in any consideration of the influences under which Chaucer 5 and his fellows developed their art." Chaucer started his poetic career with Norman verse forms because Richard's 6 ancestors were Norman. Such a statement of history is in itself true, but, as an aesthetic justification of regular end-rhyme, it becomes increasingly unsatisfactory when we consider the implications of subsequent developments in English poetry's uses of rhyme. Because of the relative­ ly late start of the rhyming tradition, because of the Alliterative Revival, and ultimately because of the twentieth century's almost unanimous rejection of regular end-rhyme in serious poetry, one can again ask both how and why such rhyme could have seemed so natural for at least five centuries of English verse. "Rhyme— as foreign to the Romans as to the Germanic peoples, hesitantly taken up, not bound by rule and consistency, finally developing into an ordered and miraculous splendor— is the great new creation of the Middle 7 Ages." To this testimony, the qualification must be added that simple end-rhyme seems never to have worked so well nor to have been so appreciated for its own sake since those Middle Ages. History can explain how end-rhyme was first introduced into English poetry, but social circumstances alone cannot answer why its use continued for so long there­ after. Only the inherent value of the technique itself can justify its own survival. History can and does appeal to the conservative power of tradition; yet, true poets have always known that "if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively 8 be discouraged." History tells us when and from where rhyme patterns were introduced into the English tradition,

but a purely historical approach to the study of rhyme

can justify its use only after its success; this same

rationale now justifies its dismissal. The study that follows always acknowledges the real power of precedent in conserving the rhyming tradition in English poetry, but further attempts to clarify what its inherent value originally was in English verse and how its value has gradually diminished since Chaucer.

I shall attempt to show that the prestige of rhyme was originally quite justified by its very pragmatic and, therefore, necessary functions; these may be best perceived

in the medieval Welsh tradition. I shall also attempt to

show that the earliest English iongleurs (who earned a

living by making French art accessible to an English market) had similar pragmatic reasons to continue the use of regular end-rhyme. Rhyme, at the time, worked for both

artist and audience. On the other hand, I shall attempt to suggest that these real reasons for using regular end-rhyme have steadily diminished in English poetry since Chaucer discovered new standards for composition. Stripped of its original functions, rhyme has become decreasingly able to defend itself, and the conservative impulse of tradition alone has been fighting a losing battle. I hope to clarify that only after regular end-rhyme became unnecessary for the audience did it become unsatisfactory to the poets.

I shall not be concerned with the continuing attempts 9 of many prosodists to defend the natural appeal of rhyme itself. Such attempts, though they rightly indicate the audial pleasure of rhyme, can justify thereby only "good rhyme" and the technique's availability— not its necessity. Furthermore, rhyme does not have a monopoly on phonic appeal in the composition of verse, and the pleasure of all other phonic techniques in English poetry (such as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, etc.) is diminished rather than improved by monotony. So, arguments for the "natural" appeal of rhyme itself tend logically to defeat a defense of the rigid patterns that regular end-rhyme has imposed on English poetry. Nevertheless, the succeeding chapters of this study will focus almost exclusively on the most monotonous of end-rhyme patterns— sequential rhyme,* stanzaic patterns will be discussed only in so far as they reflect the same structural principles as the simpler sequential pattern. X shall attempt, in fact, to defend the monotony of rhyme.

It is generally conceded that, for good or ill, regular end-rhyme imposes an artifical structure on the composition of poetry. For example, Curtius asserts: 7

Without a configurational schema (Platonically: eidos) hovering before him, the poet cannot compose. The literary genres, the metrical and stanzaic forms, are such schemata. They are an element of endurance, but they come under the law of 'diminishing returns.'"10

Yet, no one of these schemata is itself considered mandatory; substitutes are always available. I will argue that there were no substitutes that could fulfill the functions of

regular end-rhyme in much medieval poetry. Furthermore, most critical statements, like Curtius', regarding the structural effects of regular end-rhyme

assume the composer's point of view. For example, Max

Rieser argues:

The associative function which characterizes repetition becomes manifest also in rhyme . . . Rhyme intensifies the ordering, and as a result, the calming effect of rhythm, its soporific action issuing from regular recurrence . . . [ M becomes the suggestive vehicle for strengthening the material . . .3-1

Even when the argument that regular end-rhyme provides a

compositional aid is conceded (and it rarely is today), its benefits must be qualified. For example, I. A. Richards grants "It is probably true, even of the best writers, that 'Rimes the rudders are of verses/By which, like ships, they steer their courses,' but most people's first voyages, in command, are made in vessels that are all rudder, and they frequently retire from the trade before this stage 8 12 has been passed." So, rhyme, like any tool in the workshop, can be used well, can be used poorly, or can be used not at all. When used well, most critics agree that, "Broadly speaking the main function of rhyme in English stress-syllable verse is the same as the function of alliteration: to define or isolate the individual line of verse, and also to link different lines of verse 13 together." Again, rhyme is considered useful on occasion, but replaceable with other techniques and, therefore, unnecessary. But I hope to demonstrate that the real function of the monotony of patterned end-rhyme for the mainstream of English verse at the start of the fourteenth century was both necessary and unique. The structural effects of regular end-rhyme were considered "beautiful" by medieval poets because rhyme alone fulfilled the aesthetic needs of 14 their immediate audience. Rhyme alone made a poem; at the time, there could be no valid distinction between "mere verse" and "true poetry." And it will be argued that, in so far as any poem is intended for oral performance, or in so far as its oral presentation requires audible designations of form, regular end-rhyme still functions. But the very pragmatic, structural reasons for rhyming in Latin, Norman, Welsh and early Middle English poetry did not rejuvenate after the War of the Roses nearly so well as English poetry itself. More precisely, the functions of regular end-rhyme did not survive the gradual rise of printed poetry intended for closer, private, and increasing­ ly "silent" appreciation. The real reasons for regular end-rhyme have largely been forgotten, and rhyme itself has become recognizably artificial. The memory of a rhyming tradition, if not the tradition itself, survives in the twentieth century. And "good rhyme" still justifies itself because "da mihi amantem et sentit quod dico." So, almost every poet at some time still asks himself, "Why rhyme?" But, the rhyming effort in general has become highly questionable, and implicit in the cliche "without rhyme or reason" is the growing belief that a real distinction now exists in poetry between these two principles. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

^•Tbe labelling of traditional rhyme patterns has not proven to be a particularly dynamic field for critical attention in recent years. To discover the label for a known stanza pattern, I would recommend either William Olding's The Technic of Ve r s i fication (Oxford: Parker and Co., 1916) or Clement Wood's The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet1s Craft Book (cf. "Stanza Patterns," pp. 39-52; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1936). To discover the pattern of a stanza's known label, I would recommend the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics ed. by Alex Preminger et al (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965).

2The history of the functions of regular end-rhyme in English poetry (not to be confused with theories about its more remote origins) is usually assumed under the more general history of English prosody. The investigations of Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser, first made public in "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody" (College English, 28 (December, 1966), 187-219), have revolutionized the analysis of metrical principles, but no such study of the principles of regular end-rhyme has significantly advanced our understanding beyond the observations of George E. B. Saintsbury in A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1923). Also helpful are the tables on historical verse forms that chart their introduction to English poetry and the duration of their popularity in Lawrence John Zillman's The Elements of English Verse (New York: Macmillan Co., 1935). ^Saintsbury, pp. 413-17; Appendix VIII, "Rhyme— 1200- 1600.»

^Regarding the rhymed Paternoster (E.E.T.S. 1868, i. 55f), Saintsbury asserts it "can hardly be younger than the twelfth, century" (p. 33). 5w. H. Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (London: Macmillan and Co., 1931).

10 11 For an analysis of the prosodic tradition that effected Chaucer's apprenticeship, cf. Saintsbury, pp. 144- 47. For a more sophisticated analysis of the more complex traditions that affected (and unify) the four major Ricardian poets, cf. John Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the 1Gawain1 Poet (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971). 7Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans, by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953), p. 390. ®T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," rpt. in American Poetic Theory, ed. by George Perkins (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 220. ^Against the rising popularity of the "free verse" movement and its blatant attack on the validity of end- rhyme as a continuing element of poetic composition, George Young offered An English Prosody on Inductive Lines (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928). 10Curtius, p. 391. -^Max Rieser, Analysis of Poetic Thinking, trans. by Herbert M. Schueller (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 30. ^T. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study in Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), p. 31. •^G. s. Fraser, Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1970), p. 60.

•^Cf. M. H. Abrams' "Pragmatic Theories," pp. 14-21, in The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). CHAPTER ONE RHYME AND REASON

I . Rhyme in Theory

There are many speculations about the ultimate origins of rhyme,1 and there are many polemics for or against its artistic value,2 but there are few actual theories about its functions. At the moment, rhyme is considered almost completely passe by critics and poets alike. Paul Fussel has noted that there now seems to exist a growing "attitude toward rhyme as a formal device which can only be described as a programmatic hostility."3 For a multitude of dubious reasons that champion the liberty of art, the formal restrictions of the traditional versifier's craft have been summarily dismissed. Yet, "Some kind of meaningful repetition would seem to be required to save a poem from oblivion. . . . What is wanted is the sort of reconciliation . . . that could be effected by another Yeats."4 The general opinion of modern poets doubts that this "meaningful repetition" can be rediscovered by a simple return to regular end-rhyme. And (for once) general opinion seems to be correct.

12 This study is not primarily intended to herald the coming of a rhyming Messiah; each poet must still champion his own art. It is and, in fact, has been since the Renaissance completely absurd to ask— is regular end- rhyme a necessary element of English poetry? One need simply glance at Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, Tudor drama, Milton's epic or most contemporary lyrics; each alone disproves any ontological or psychological arguments in the defense of the necessity of rhyme. Quite simply, rhyme can be useful to poetry in many different ways. I will not say it rs, for the verb would imply an existential justification of rhyme which does not exist. In order to give more clarity to the assertion that rhyme is not essential to poetry, it may help to define the essence of poetry itself. No small task this I As with all such generic definitions, the lexicographer is torn between his desires to be precise and to be simultaneously inclusive. Too vague a definition makes it impossible to distinguish poetry from prose. Too precise a definition, however, might lop off several excellent poems from our consideration. Like Shelley, I will opt for inclusiveness (at the risk of including whole tomes of merely purple prose).

"Poetry" is the formal manipulation of language as language (in all its aspects— figurative, phonic, visual, whatever, as well as semantic) rather than exclusively as 14 a vehicle for the communication of data. All "polish" is, therefore, essentially poetic. To distinguish a

"poem" from the merely "poetic," we ask a poet to add conspicuous form. It is common to claim that rhythm

(if not regular, then at least patterned to an intended cadence) provides the foundation of all English poetry.

And this is true. Yet, is it necessarily true of all poetry? Medieval Welsh poetry, prior to the development of cvnghanedd, seems to have ignored, or rather to have avoided regularity in rhythm patterns. Rhythm should be considered merely the most honored convention of English poetry while, at the moment, regular end-rhyme seems the least. Conspicuous form alone is essential to all poetry, but not any one informing technique.

If we accept the correctness (albeit not the completeness) of the statement that "poetry is the formal manipulation of language as language,", then it follows that a poem is largely self-proclaiming.

If I were two

rite

a sentence LIKE this, an audience attuned to the visual appearance of contemporary verse might expect a poem.'* I apologize now for their disappointment. Yet, the format alone (because it fits a familiar convention) keys the reader to anticipate a poem.6 Recognizable format decrees poetic form. The "free verse" movement largely sacrificed form to content. T. S. Eliot was among the first to lament the sacrifice: "No one has better cause to know than I, that a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse. And William Carlos Williams has expressed, as well as any, the current hope for the new reconciliation between form and content that Fussel indicated: "There is, you see, in our minds the possibility of a technique which may be used. It must be large enough, free enough, elastic enough, new enough yet firm enough to hold the new well, without spilling. It must have form."® The study of rhyme per se, as a phonic technique, tells us nothing about its functions in determining the form of a poem. Innumerable studies of the value of rhyme itself have been made; such comments may be easily divided into two camps— pro and con. Once this distinction has been made, there seems to be a conspiracy of agreement (and repetition) within each group. The standard arguments in defense of rhyme's worth may be found summarized in almost any introduction to poetry. For example, Laurence Perrine offers the mandatory definition of rhyme itself as "the repetition of the accented vowel sound and all succeed­ ing sounds" and then notes: 16

End-rime is probably the most frequently used and most consciously sought-after sound repetition employed in English poetry. Because it comes at the end of the line/ it receives emphasis as a musical effect and perhaps contributes more than any other musical resource except rhythm and meter to give poetry its musical effect as veil as its structure. There exists, however, a large body of poetry which does not employ rime, and for which rime would not be appropriate. Also, there has always been a tendency, especially noticeable in modern poetry, to substitute approximate rimes for perfect rimes at the ends of l i n e s .10 (italics mine)

I have found no better summary of the merits of rhyme than Perrine's; yet, several objections come immediately to mind. First, as already noted, regular end-rhymes are seldom still sought-after by mature poets for their serious endeavors. The first three sections of Ezra

Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" demonstrate the enduring validity of serious end-rhyme patterned abab, but even in this notable exception to a far more general trend it must be observed that Pound complexifies the simple pattern with macaronic rhymes (e.g., trentuniesme/diadem), and that the pattern itself (like "a botched civilization") falls apart in sections four and five.

A second possible objection to Perrine's summary of the merits of rhyme is based on the realization that rhythm and meter are two rather extraordinary exceptions in determining the contribution of rhyme. One cannot discuss the emphatic quality of end-rhyme without subordinating it

to a study of rhythm. As B. J. Pendlebury asserts, "Perhaps the first point to establish is that rhyme is essentially a kind of stress, and consequently it is

found only in verse that employs a regular stress-pattern." With this realization should come the admission that the often laudable emphatic quality of end-rhyme is, in fact, a superaddition since the effect can be achieved in English poetry by rhythm alone— specifically, in blank verse. A third, and perhaps the most serious objection to the standard assessments of rhyme follows from this question: what sort of an artistic technique becomes

appreciated more (when present at all) in its "approxima­ tion" rather than in its complete realization? "The twentieth century has seen an enlargement of the concept of rhyme" 12 — a concept which often seeks randomness rather than regularity in the placement of rhymes and which often makes it impossible to distinguish "rhyme" from the more

flexible techniques of alliteration and assonance. Sir George Young, anticipating such developments, objected, "Rime of the suppressed order is not rime at all."-^ Variety in the use of rhyme is not exactly analogous to the use of variation in regular rhythm. In the simplest terms of traditional metrics, metrical variations that do not tamper with the total quantity of a foot may be considered valid.^ For example, in quantitative verse, 18 a trochee may replace an iamb, but not a spondee, without making the whole line ametrical. Certain liberties have always been recognized in the rhyming of English verse; the normal excuse for such liberties is that "English is less rich in rhymes than many other languages" 15 with the explanation that "In the course of three hundred years English lost many of its easy rhymes." The testimony of Vladimir Nabokov that "Russian rhymes are incomparably more 17 attractive and more abundant than English ones" makes a comparative survey almost complete; exact and regular end- rhyme in the stress poetry of the least inflected Indo- European language is most difficult, and always has been. So, variety in the use of rhyme has, since Chaucer, always been desirable in English poetry to avoid "rym doggerel." But the difficulty of rhyme in English does not alone ex­ plain the constantly increasing trend of English poets to suppress the conspicuousness of this technique; the twenti­ eth century has merely completed this process by redefining previous concepts of "faulty" rhyme; they have become sufficiently "near." Yet, unlike rhythm, rhyme per se offers no valid "equivalents"; exact rhyme and near rhyme are substantially different, whereas the trochee and iamb are not. For phonemes to be truly "equivalent," they must in fact be identical.18

I hope to make it clear that the requirements of rhyme itself, as a "musical device," and the requirements of 19 regular end-rhyme, as a structural device, are mutually contradictory. This fundamental discrepancy to a large extent explains the ambivalent attitudes towards rhyme of several major English poets surveyed in the following section. Rhyme, as a phonic technique, invites ingenuity, variety and randomness. End-rhyme, as a structural technique, demands exactness, regularity and monotony. Unfortunately, most studies of regular end-rhyme are subsumed under the analysis of rhyme as a whole. And, in the twentieth century, most such studies eventually concede that regular end-rhyme tends to handicap originality. Still, when the study of regular end-rhyme is divorced from the phonic study of rhyming in general and is married to a discussion of poetic structure, arguments for its necessity fare little better than before. For example, Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues in Poetic Closure that

"Poetic structure is, in a sense, an inference which we draw from the evidence of a series of events . . . the conclusion of a poem has special -status in the process, for it is only at that point that the total pattern— the structural principles which we have been testing— is re- vealed." This theory of retroactive recognition seems, at first, very promising for a defense of the couplet's "clenching quality." Among the traditional verse forms in English, the couplet has proven the most popular and most successful, and, though the heroic mode is seldom attempted 20.

in serious contemporary verse, the couplet still readily

concludes several quasi-stanzaic patterns. For example, the final fifteen-line verse paragraph of Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" concludes with this "near couplet":

Ambiguous undulations as they sink. Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

But Smith goes on to prove that "rhyme is neither the sine qua non of poetic closure nor a sufficient condition for its occurrence"^ and that "If the couplet of an

English sonnet has notable closural force it is largely because any terminal modification of form will strengthen closure."21 Again, regular end-rhyme proves itself

ultimately unnecessary in English poetry because there are always alternatives available. Furthermore, regular end- rhyme seems always on the brink of imposing triteness through monotony— a detriment to the structural as well as phonic appeal of poetry as we understand it. The phonic and structural functions of regular end-rhyme cannot, after all, be validly severed in our analysis.

To state the problem most simply, the structural link of a couplet presupposes the clear echo of each line's final phoneme. The paradox imposed by the diametrically opposed criteria of these two facets of regular end-rhyme (the

originality required for phonic appeal vs. the monotony required for structural clarity) remains unavoidable. Why rhyme? Walt Whitman's revolutionary answer— that there remains no reason whatsoever— has become almost unanimously accepted and is gradually fading into an unquestioned preconception. F. R. Leavis conceded over thirty years ago, "The work has been done, the re-orienta­ tion effected: the heresies of ten years ago are orthodox- y." 22 Rhyme alone fulfills no artistic function in

English poetry today and we are left to wonder if it ever truly did. Still, when a contemporary poet asks "Why rhyme?" he at least limits his question to the consideration of a particular poem— his own. The poet asks, "Why should I make rhyme now?" But modern critics, understandably influenced by modern poets (and often practitioners of the art themselves), have adopted the habit of asking, "Why should I seriously discuss rhymes ever?" In this second context for the initial question, a very practical answer assumes unwarranted abstraction; "not now" becomes falsely translated into "never." It is true that the absence of rhyme has never been taken to mean complete formlessness in English poetry. Should regular end-rhyme, therefore, be considered merely a fashion, like perukes, which has grown too cumbersome and been discarded?

Since rhyme itself is simple to perceive (only re­ calling names for all the possible patterns of rhyme be­ comes complex), its very simplicity seems to have been the cause of its fall from fashion. Its artificiality was once, perhaps, the essence of regular end-rhyme's appeal to an audience, but this same artificiality has become the focus for critical antipathy when it appears in a poem that pretends to serious integrity. Since rhyme is familiar to all from nursery school and still punctuates the punch lines of "light verse" and still haunts lyrics on the AM radio waves, its apparent simplicity and arbitrary artificiality have probably caused new analyses of its real functions to be ignored. Since the poetic contexts in which regular end-rhyme successfully endures are now considered almost exclusively comic by more sophisticated readers (whether the artist originally intended this effect or no), it is very easy to assume that rhyme itself has become essentially funny. Rhyme itself is simple; it may be difficult (or im­ possible now) to do well in serious poetry, but it is easy enough to do and easier still to notice. And it is, there­ fore, trite and, therefore, funny. Inherent in these concessions to contemporary composition are more serious questions regarding the appreciation of the former achieve­ ments of English verse. Does poetry age like wine, or has

The Faerie Queen turned to v i n e g a r ? ^ Does John Milton's blank verse preserve Paradise Lost from the critical abuse that Michael Wigglesworth1s "Day of Doom" has received? Has there been an irreversible dissociation of modern taste 23. from the more uniform aesthetic principles of previous generations? If the validity of a poem equals the in­ tegrity of its functioning parts, can more than five hundred years of rhymed English poetry continue to appeal to future audiences whose hostility towards this most obvious of functioning parts seems likely to become only fiercer than our own? The critical presupposition that seems to justify such questions is the aesthetic conviction that the means by which we appreciate modern poetry should work equally well for all poetry. For example, W. K. Wimsatt has argued, from "the inescapable fact of psychology," that: "We are bound to have a point of view in literary criticism, and that point of view, though it may have been shaped by tradition, is bound to be our own . * . Our judgments of the past cannot be discontinuous with our own experience or insulated from it."24 If this fact of critical appreciation is granted, can we then validly have two separate systems of critical standards for rhymed and unrhymed poetry? It is common to apologize for the accidents of traditional verse and, then, to celebrate its substance. But if the essence of poetry is "conspicuous form" how can we know a poem's substance except through its accidents? No poetry should be immune from "close analysis." We should expect artistry in all art. There is no fallacy in criticizing the doggerel of a Wigglesworth. But a critic 24. may reach faulty evaluations of a poem's worth if he fails first to appreciate the parameters that the poem's intended mode of appreciation sets on such analysis. If we can imagine a serious film critic attempting to reject the appeal of Dr. Caligari's Cabinet because of its tedious dialogue, we can also imagine that he should be hooted as a buffoon. So, too, the critic who expects more of poetry intended for an exclusively audial appreciation than can be gained from "close audial analysis" is attempting to crush concrete with a scalpel. The over­ riding problem that has hindered modern critics' full appreciation of the historical necessity for regular end- rhyme in verse is the fact that no English poetry since Chaucer has been intended for an exclusively audial appreciation. In order to clarify the parameters established by a completely audial mode of poetic appreciation, we must analyze the functions of regular end-rhyme in pre- Chaucerian verse— and so we will. From Chaucer to Tennyson, however, most poems should be considered hybrids— artifacts intended for both audial and studied appreciation. It is this hybrid quality of English poetry that fosters the paradox imposed by the diametrically opposed impulses of regular end-rhyme— its efforts to seek regularity and originality at the same time. It is, then, this inherent paradox that frequently cripples the "close analysis" of all rhymes in a poem. When a particular conjunction of 25. rhymed words seems especially clever, it may be highlighted. But when a couplet is simply a couplet, it is frequently ignored. When, however, a poem is still intended for

primarily audial appreciation, simple rhyme endures as a valid technique— as in musical lyrics, "light verse," and nursery rhymes. The value of regular end-rhyme has

become an on-again, off-again business in English poetry, and so has the theoretical debate among critics who posit Chaucer as the father of English poetry.

Among the most recent and, despite its brevity, most substantial defenses of regular end-rhyme as a still valid

poetic technique in English poetry is Wimsatt's essay, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," in The Verbal Icon. Wimsatt in this chapter seeks "to develop the idea that verse in general, and more particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic structure in virtue of a studiously and accurately semantic character. They impose

upon the logical pattern of expressed argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical implication."^

Against all odds, Wimsatt is arguing that regular end-rhyme

deserves studious attention. Wimsatt indicates that,

although the original functions of rhyme may have been phonic Cor, as Ferrine says, "musical"), rhyme became in­

creasingly unnatural as the English language evolved. There is nothing new to this observation, but Wimsatt con­

tinues to analyze what he considers the most successful 26. artistic response that several of the greatest English poets have employed to reconcile the paucity of rhymes in their language to the demands of a three-hundred-year-old rhyming tradition.

Wimsatt' s, study concentrates on the achievement of

Alexander Pope. Criticisms that Pope's couplets suffer from a certain poverty of rhyme, "can spring only from a limited view of rhyme as a form of phonetic harmony—

to be described and appraised in terms of phonetic accuracy,

complexity, and variety— in other words, from a failure to connect rhyme with reason."^ Wimsatt indicates that the use of rhyme in English poetry should be considered not merely "artificial" (that is, without a necessary function) but by its very artificiality ironic in nature (and thus able to function for satiric effects).

It is within the scope of my argument to grant the alogical character of rhyme, or rather to insist on it, but at the same time to insist that the alogical character by itself has little, if any, aesthetic value. The music of spoken words in itself is meager, so meager in comparison to the music of song or instrument as to be hardly worth discussion.27

The analysis that leads Wimsatt to this argument seems most compelling. He does indeed demonstrate (for New Critics, at least) that the most profitable use of rhyme in English poetry has been its ironic use. Although "it must be 27. admitted that in certain contexts a high degree of parallel in sense may be found even in rhyme," it is the inherent antithesis that rhyming words can offer each other— or "chiastic rhyme"— that provides "the most brilliant and complex of all the forms of rhyme variation. In quite a different context, F. R. Leavis has noted how the eighteenth century turned another alogical technique based on phonetic harmony to irony. "Pope's puns are rarely mere puns; they appear to be a distinctly personal and period development out of the metaphysical conceit: by them 1 the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together1— the most diverse feelings and associations are brought into co-presence." 29 Even so, Leavis hesitates to comment on the appeal of puns per se. Similarly, if we grant the validity of Wimsatt's insight that "chiastic rhyme" may be the best use of regular end-rhyme— that is, the most rewarding for a studied appraisal— and, therefore, its only profitable use in English verse since the eighteenth century, we have only observed the preferred usage of several relatively modern poets. We have defined neither the original functions of regular end-rhyme when it was introduced into the English tradition nor, more significant­ ly, the essential function of regular end-rhyme as the norm against which such variations define themselves. Wimsatt's observations merely explain how English poets 28 could overcome an apparent handicap in their tradition by- making an ironic virtue of the logical vice of rhyme. In the process, however, Wimsatt has significantly weakened any defense of regular end-rhyme based simply on the appeal of its "phonetic harmony." Since the arguments from neither phonetic harmony nor structural clarity seem sufficient anymore to justify the use of regular end-rhyme on aesthetic principles, the hardly new^O suggestion that rhyme aids the memory has been gaining increased emphasis. "We may note, first, the mnemonic value of rhyme. Every schoolboy knows that it is easier to memorize two or three stanzas of 1 The Lady of Shalott' than a dozen lines of the Morte d 1 Arthur. 11 31 Such a defense of rhyme based on strictly personal experience can now be supplemented by predominantly sociological studies that have illuminated the very pragmatic uses of verse among primitive societies. "The bookless societies that have been normal for most of human history needed verse for purely utilitarian needs, as well as for the expression of more exalted matter; good memories were important.First, however, it must be noted that since the exact workings of the human memory^ are only now being clinically investigated it is too easy for anthropological observations to slip into psychological speculations and then to slide inconspicuously into mere aesthetic guesses. Second, the mnemonic value of verse (particularly cadenced chant) to pre-literate societies has little practical relevance to our understanding of regular rhyme as an invention of medieval literature. As Frances Yates has clearly indicated, the medieval understanding of The Art of Memory^ was based primarily on the architectural arrangement of metaphorical (i.e., visual) correspondences and not on phonetic harmonies; the mnemonic argument does more to explain the frequently grotesque images of medieval poetry than the regularity of its end-rhyme. Third, such pragmatic excuses for rhyme based on its supposed origins implicitly also condemn its continued use in English poetry. Charles Olson has both recognized the mnemonic excuse for regular end-rhyme and rejected it: "For the ear, which once had the burden of memory to quicken it (rime & regular cadence were its aids and have merely lived on in print after the oral necessities were ended) can now again, that the poet has his means, be the threshold of projective verse." 35 Olson also indicates how a new poetic format with new "means" for the intended appreciation of poetry demands new criteria for its composition:

It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath,, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxta­ positions even of parts of phrases, which he in­ tends. For the first time the poet has the stave 30

and bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.36 (italics mine)

Olson's manifesto remains somewhat controversial. Many, quite sound critics are willing to accept the achievements of projectivist verse, and many more are willing to admit the movement's little lamented obituary for regular end- rhyme. But, above all, it should be clear that Olson is almost exclusively emphasizing the performance of a poem that will prove faithful to the formal intentions of its composition. Mutatis mutandis, Olson and many other theorists assume that the primary function of regular end-rhyme was (once upon a time and long ago) to provide a mnemonic aid to the performer of a poem; it is difficult not to assume that regular end-rhyme reflects the pragmatic functions of more primitive (unrhymed) verse. It is also difficult for the modern reader to separate

the concept of a poem's performance from his own, individual experience. For drama to be fully appreciated, despite such bookish arguments as Charles Lamb’s, we still recognize the necessity of at least three distinct agents-— play­ wright, actor, and audience. The recent emphasis on "auteur criticism" for film seems to recognize the director 31 of a script as a separate (and perhaps the most important) agent of production, but in so far as directors, producers, musical composers, set designers or even particularly imaginative gaffers contribute to the creation of a final text, they may be considered agents of composition, "writers" as it were. In the appreciation of modern poetry, however, we seldom consider that there should be any agent to parallel the job of an actor in such productions. We occasionally attend a public reading of poetry, but on the norm only when the reader is advertized as the poet himself (and too often we discover how tedious an affair the oral performance of such poetry can be). In complete contrast to this modern tradition of poetry intended foremost to be visually studied, the studies of Milman Parry and F. P. Magoun, Jr., and their followers have analyzed the ancient tradition of oral poetry formulaically composed. For modern poetry of the completely visual mode, the proper performer .is the private reader; there exists no real distinction now between performer and audience. For ancient poetry of the completely oral mode,3^ we understand the performer to have been the scop, or bard himself; there once seems to have existed no real distinction between performer and poet. Neither of these two modes of intended appreciation accurately describes the poetry of the Middle Ages that we shall be analyzing in succeeding chapters, particularly the 32 English poetry.

As a rule uneducated and neither poets nor composers, the jongleurs were singers of other men's songs, and their vagrant life gave those songs the widest possible dissemination. In this way, at least, the jongleurs contributed to the flowering of both Latin lyric and the % vernacular songs of the troubadours and trouveres.38

It is not unlikely that several medieval poets performed their own poetry, as it is not uncommon today for an actor to attempt directing or for a writer to perform. Neverthe­ less, their two jobs as composer and then performer remain distinguishable. The function of the wandering jongleur was replaced by moveable type; the function of the poet was not. The composition of much medieval poetry (unlike the ancient, oral tradition) was literate; but the performance of most medieval poetry (unlike the modern, visual tradition) was illiterate. The roles of poet, performer and audience, especially in such medieval romances as King Horn, are clearly distinguishable. If we wish then to argue the pragmatic value of regular end-rhyme as a memory device, we must first clarify— whose memory? The most obvious choice is the performer's; through him, the audience may obtain a particularly memorable lesson in a particularly memorable way. This analysis is probably true of many, short verses from the Middle Ages. For example, Denys Thompson offers this example from "John Ridewell, an English Franciscan of the fourteenth century visualizing idolatry as a blind and deaf harlot, diseased and with a disfigured face: 'Mulier notata, oculis orbata,/aure mutilata, cornu ventilata,/vultu deformata et morbo vexata' (Smalley 1960, p. 112)." How the graphicness of this description contributes to its memorable quality has been explained by Frances Yates, but Thompson continues to point out that "Ridewell's rhymes were written down to help him memorize points for a sermon. Habits of attention and retention must also have worked very powerfully when it came to listening to anything in the form of verse."39 Such sequential rhyme as Ridewell's fourteenth-century example can be traced to the Latin rhyme of the early Middle Ages and no earlier; there exists no proof that rhyme was ever a part of the mnemonic systems of any pre- literate society, though verse certainly was. Ernst Curtius summarizes the medieval development of regular end-rhyme this way:

Late antique literary artifice became a technical stimulus and awoke artistic ambition . . . The first phase is the Ambrosian hymn stanza without rhyme. In Fortunatus' hymns, two centuries later, there are assonances . . . No strict schema is followed. At the beginning of the eleventh century we find a tendency to rhyme the lines of a stanza in pairs. This may predominate in a 34

given poem, but need not be carried through. But it is also possible to rhyme a poem of 48 lines entirely on a. This is called "tirade rhyme."40

Regular end-rhyme is primarily a literary development in­ tended for audial appreciation; if it has a pragmatic, mnemonic value, the "evolution" of such seems to have been from artifice and not the other way around. Without doubt, medieval educators exploited end-rhyme as a pedagog­ ical tool.^1 They, at least, believed in the clear, mnemonic value of sequential rhyme as an organizing device for relatively short, didactic lessons. Longer lessons apparently required additional organization, such as alphabetical and acrostic patterns, so that line eight was not recited fifth— the inherent hazard of purely sequential rhyme. But what can be the mnemonic value of rhyme in the more extended poetic expressions of medieval art after the eleventh century? Rhyme may help the jongleur anticipate the second line of a given tetrameter couplet, but what helps him remember the first line of his next couplet? What happens in the memory when any rhymed sequence or stanzaic unit concludes, but the poem continues? I am willing to grant that regular end-rhyme has real mnemonic value, because I am willing to grant that organiza­ tion of any sort assists the memory. But, for several reasons, I am not willing to concede that this pragmatic excuse contains in itself the essential explanation of regular end-rhyme1s development in the Middle Ages. First, the mnemonic benefits of sequential end-rhyme are short­ term; as a particular sequence becomes longer and longer, maintaining the uniform end-rhyme becomes proportionately more difficult for the performer. Welsh bards excelled in a conspicuously difficult and mysterious craft. Second, the argument for the mnemonic value of rhyme to a performer is inseparable from the pedagogical argument of its mnemonic value to his audience. If rhyme assists one memory, it assists all memories. But, with the exception of some particularly gnomic utterances, neither the Welsh bards nor the English jongleurs desired that their craft should become accessible to their audiences; they made a living {however meager) precisely because they alone could perform the extraordinary. Third, there exists no demonstra­ ble organizing principle based exclusively on end-rhyme for an entire poem, when the rhymed units of that poem are clearly divisible. The interlocking stanzas of terza rima are not clearly divisible; a similar, though less conspicuous, system of interlocking units may have existed for much Welsh poetry. But the couplet, quatrain and other clearly divisible stanzaic patterns quickly became the predominant patterns of English medieval verse, and there is no apparent 36 mnemonic link between these rhymed units. Finally, the mnemonic excuse for rhyme as a necessary tool of the performer offers no aesthetic justification for its appeal to either a poem's composer or its intended audience. In summary, there are three major theories that have been offered to justify the function (I am not concerned with origins) of regular end-rhyme in English poetry:

1. Regular end-rhyme helps the memory of a poem's intended performer. 2. A regular rhyme pattern (arbitrarily imposed) helps the poet to compose by providing a structural frame for his imagination (an eidos). 3. Rhyme itself is a musical device (a coincidence of assonance and alliteration) that offers self-evidently pleasurable phonetic harmony.

There exists evidence in the rhymed English poetry since Chaucer to support all three of these theories independently, hut no one of them seems in itself adequate to analyze rhyme's functions in all English poems. Furthermore, the three basic arguments may not simply be combined into a system of options that defines rhyme because there are inherent contradictions among them. Only the third argument (for rhyme in general) considers the appeal of end-rhyme (as a specific application of rhyme) to a listener; but the appeal of such harmony in itself does not defend 37

regularity in its occurrence. Arguments about the sensual pleasure of rhyme per se have become interminable since the 1920's; such arguments of taste, that apply to assonance and alliteration as well, seldom offer more than contra­ dictory personal opinions which severally appeal to a certain consistency in human nature. Such debates regarding the human norm are best re­ solved by a thorough survey of general opinion; the majority rules. But such a poll regarding the sensual pleasure of regular end-rhyme would provide radically different returns if taken in the Middle Ages or today. My own taste (which is, of course, representative) would tend to defend the appeal of rhyme, if it were not "over­ done"— Michael Wigglesworth overdid his rhyme. My own taste for "rare rhyme" parallels my preferences in the preparation of beef, and my own taste is irrelevant to the following analyses of regular end-rhyme in various medieval traditions. Whether the harmonic echo of end-rhyme is pleasurable in itself or no, it remains conspicuous to the ear. It is a recognition of this audible conspicuousness alone which is necessary to an analysis of the proper functions of regular end-rhyme in medieval poetry. For the moment, nothing need be said about the aesthetic merits of rhyme per se as a "musical device." Similarly, the conspicuously maneuvered typing of projectivist poetry 38 declares what it is, without necessarily determining how good it is.

It is frequently assumed that the regular patterning of end-rhyme provides a means for achieving phonetic harmony. This assertion proves generally true of rhymed English poetry since Chaucer. But this assertion, by poets and critics alike, may also prove to be one of the grandest hvstera protera of all literary history. Before Chaucer (or, more suitably, before Caxton), phonetic harmony was a tool to achieve formal, audible poetic regularity. Medieval Welsh poetry and the Middle English romances have little in common except that both were apparently composed prior to a memorized performance for an exclusively audial appreciation; the two traditions developed quite different systems to achieve much the same end— audibly perceptible, poetic form. Though the exigencies of composition were quite different, the regularity alone of end-rhyme in medieval poetry was as necessary to its intended audience as the alliterative or rhythmic links between half-lines in the more ancient and completely oral (i.e., in composition as well as performance) traditions. Regular end-rhyme was, perhaps, a concession of the medieval poet, not to the weak memory of his per­ former, but to the formal demands of a listening audience. The medieval poet used rhyme to declare his poem a poem. 39

Regular end-rhyme does provide structure, not for a poet's imagination, but rather for an illiterate audience's appreciation. Monotony is indeed mandatory for a completely audial frame. King Horn is labelled iambic tetrameter, but we could not call it tetrameter except for its rhyme placements and we cannot always determine that it is even iambic.Welsh rhyme counts syllables not stress, so the length of a line is determined by the placement of its rhyme. Unsuppressed, unvaried, uninhibited, regular end- rhyme was, thus, once aesthetically justified as an in­ forming technique and needed not to be pragmatically ex­ cused. But the audial justification of regular end-rhyme does not endure in a predominantly literate age. In point of fact, we cannot accurately assess the aesthetic appeal of the rhymes in the succeeding chapters' poetry simply because we are looking at them. So, we must content our­ selves with attempting to clarify their formal functions in more systematic detail. Since there exists neither metrical regularity nor alliterative links in much of the medieval poetry to be analyzed, patterned end-rhyme alone provided audible poetic form. If the essence, the "bottom line" as it were, of all poetry is conspicuous form (manifested in many different ways), then conspicuous form in itself cannot be considered inappropriate to any topic that poetry chooses to contemplate.

* 40 But we can misappraise a specific technique by mis­ representing its intended mode of appreciation. We can make a musical comedy out of Macbeth; we can turn Paradise Lost into an animated cartoon, but then we are usurping the writer's privilege and not fulfilling the critic's. Since conspicuous form itself is not inappropriate to any poetic topic, the regularity of end-rhyme never seemed inappropriate to the tone of a given medieval poem intended for completely audial appreciation (though a specific phonetic harmony may indeed have displeased the medieval ear as much as our own). But, in retrospect, Wimsatt1s celebration of the studiously achieved "chiastic rhymes" of Alexander Pope does imply at least one explanation for the decline of rhyme as a legitimate tool in serious English poetry. Our often too hasty equation of regular end-rhyme with mere doggerel43 was, in fact, an inevitable step in the devolution of rhyme from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Rhyme's "appropriateness," that is, its compatibility with poetic content, has, as Laurence Perrine and many others have noted, gradually and greatly diminished in English poetry. The original and uniquely necessary function of regular end-rhyme in much medieval poetry is now as extinct as the oral formulaic tradition— at least, in terms of the continuing composition of poetry. 41

By the fifteenth century, any of our own speculations regarding the real roots of rhyme (e.g., as natural to a once inflected language, as a vestige of incantation, as a memory device, as a reflection of the twin hemispheres

of the human brain, as an echo of the heart's systole and diastole, as an example of the pervasive ying-yang) were completely ignored in poetic practice, and are, there­ fore, irrelevant to a critical analysis. Regular end- rhyme was part of an, albeit non-English, literary tradition. Tradition provided its own, aesthetically audible justification, and there was no need to offer pragmatic excuses for an admittedly troublesome, imported heritage; regular end-rhyme could be done well, it could be done poorly, but it should be done. Harry Bailey's exclamation which cuts short Chaucer's "Tale of Sir Thopas" indicates, however, that the English antipathy to mere rhyme, though probably most extreme at present, is not entirely new:

"By God," quod he, "for pleynly, at a word, Thy drasty rymyng is not worth a toordl"

Ironically, the "word/toord" juxtaposition of this couplet may be tahen as an early example of Wimsatt's "chiastic rhyme" and studiously appreciated as such. But "chiastic rhyme" is, by definition, a variation from the norm. In 42 general, the appeal of rhyme has become inversely pro­ portionate to the reader's conscious awareness of its presence.

I have seldom heard a critic argue that the consistent use of imagery by a poet is, in itself, excessive.

Metaphors are supposed to monopolize the reader's attention. A motif may be attacked as jumbled or tasteless or trite or hackneyed, but not simply because it is too long. Just the contrary seems true of modern tastes in rhyme. Phonetic harmonies should be varied; they should, on occasion, be off or near or omitted— "for variety's sake," and, for the sake of humor, rhymes must often be tasteless and trite.

But, even so, a run of end-rhyme may be critically dis­ missed simply because it is too long. Such critical antipathy to "excessive rhyme" would have been considered completely absurd in a pre-thirteenth-century appraisal of medieval Welsh rhyme.

The appreciation of poetry in the Middle Ages may have required a good deal more patience with mere versifiers than we are willing to muster. Given the opportunity, we would have forcibly cloistered some of their flagrantly mechanical rhymsters— like Lydgate. The medieval tolerance of traditional form in art may parallel their patience with equally traditional content, about which. C. S. Lewis has admitted, "The typical vice, as we all know, is dulness; sheer, unabashed, prolonged dulness, where the author does 43 not seem to be even trying to interest us.. If we start a historical survey of English prosody with Chaucer, we must recognize that the "drastiness" to which Harry Bailey refers had just recently become latent in any application of rhyme (and not merely the romance-sixes of Thopas) which an audience could consider unnecessary and inappropriate. By 1400, the tradition of audible regularity in end- rhyme had already become technically unnecessary to the conspicuous form of English poetry, and this development * is largely attributable to Chaucer's own command of regularity in English rhythm^5— technique, rather than taste, had started to change. The old technique began to seem funny primarily because it was being assessed by the standards of the new. Ironically, Chaucer the pilgrim shifts to prose and, thus, in an instant, anticipates a shift that English poetry as a whole would take five-hundred years to accomplish. Such a singing telegram as:

Your mother is dead. What more can be said? As she got out of bed, She fell on her head; So, your mother is dead, tra-lal would have disgusted anyone of sane mind and sound body long before the incorporation of Western Union. Yet, it is the very inappropriateness of such rhyme, its drastiness 44 • not its exactness, that permits the reader to be (albeit minimally) amused— that is, of course, if his own mother has not just recently died. The technical distinction be­ tween good and bad rhymes, the linguistic proximity of their phonetic harmonies, has become not nearly so signifi­ cant a concern as the critical distinction between appropriate and inappropriate rhyme. The content of a poem and the conspicuousness of its rhyme have become inextricably connected in the modern critic's assessment of that poem's artistic success. Regular end-rhyme now hinders poetic sincerity because it is, a superaddition to the conspicuous form of most English poetry? it has become "artificial" in the worst sense of the word. But in much medieval poetry, the necessity of regular end-rhyme was an inherent factor of its intended mode of appreciation for which no other informing technique was historically available. The "appropriateness" of such rhyme must be determined solely by its clarification of form; the quality of such rhyme should be assessed according to the sophistication of the poetic form that it makes audibly perceptible. The first task of such rhyme before Chaucer is to achieve conspicuous exactness. Just the opposite proves true of English poetry since Chaucer. How this shift in the real functions and subsequent assessments of regularly patterned end-rhyme has consistently developed in English poetry since Chaucer will be quickly surveyed in the following section. At the conclusion of this study, I will attempt to indicate that the seeds of these later developments in English verse can be perceived as early as the thirteenth century. Regular end-rhyme has since, gradually, become a tool for determining poetic tone rather than poetic form. Little needs to be said about how the inappropriateness of rhyme to a poem's subject matter now yields perceptible humor. "The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation." When a modern poet in­ tends the misapplication of rhyme (like Chaucer or Pope), when he, in Fielding's terms, plays the "hypocrite" (or eiron), the effect of conspicuous rhyme is satirical and, as Wimsatt perceives in a particular case, most justified. When, however, the poet is merely "vain," that is, un­ aware of the disjunction between his form and content, we laugh at such ignorance in a poem rather than with its wit. But neither of these two affectations could exist in the use of regular end-rhyme for determining poetic form before Chaucer. 46

II. Rhyme in Practice

The following critical survey of English poetry since Chaucer is intended only to suggest a consistent, historical trend among several major poets in their use

(or abuse) of regular end-rhyme. I do not intend to assert either the ubiquitousness of this trend or a conscious awareness of the trend as such among the poets themselves. The question of regular end-rhyme seems to have become a "matter of taste." If so, George Saintsbury's History of English Poetry offers not only a far more exhaustive review of prosodic developments than is here possible, but also a forceful, if futile, defense of a waning, "conservative" taste on the brink of becoming extinct. Saintsbury's comments will frequently be re­ ferred to in the following pages as a record of the pre- "free verse" assumptions regarding the nature of rhyme in poetry. But Saintsbury has come to be considered another Demosthenes who may have dipped his pen in poison once too often. Within one generation of Saintsbury's phillipics, I. A. Richards would do much to dismiss any critical interest in rhyme schemes for their own sake; recognizing a villanelle as such would become inconsequential because "Instead of trying the poem on, we content ourselves with a glance at its lapels or its buttons."46 By analyzing again the 47 developments exclusively in rhyming techniques for English poetry since Chaucer and by analyzing the standard justifica­ tions for these developments (without attempting to justify them myself), I shall attempt to show that the twentieth century's revolt in poetic taste is not so radical and not so sudden as it first seems. Nor was it, in fact, so much a change in "human taste" as a predictable, technologi­ cal development in prosody. Geoffrey Chaucer was only a servant to the court of England, but by divine right he was himself the king of English poetry. Throughout the fifteenth century, "the Chaucerian authority, and the Chaucerian accomplishment meet with no challenge or rebellion from anybody."^ The significance of Chaucer's achievement in establishing the iambic pentameter as the supremely successful line of English poetry cannot be overestimated. But few critics have attempted to clarify Chaucer's prosodic principles regarding the modification of a received rhyme pattern. For example, Saintsbury observes that Chaucer remained faithful to the content of his French original for the "ABC" but not to its form:

That original is in a twelve-line stanza of octosyllables rhymed aabaabbbcbbc. Chaucer shortens the stanza and lengthens the line, using eight decasyllables rhymed ababbcbc. Now this instinctive and early striking out for the great staple line of English poetry is 48 a prosodic fact, the importance of which cannot be overrated. 4*3

For now, it must be sufficient to note the extreme arbitrari­ ness with which Chaucer can change a fixed rhyme scheme to fit his poem at hand, and not vice versa. Chaucer's innovation seems formally more symmetric (aba bb cbc) than the original pattern and may be considered a sort of modified terza-rima. But, certainly, Chaucer's ababbcbc mirrors the aabaabbbcbbc of the French original; certainly the translation's longer line requires some change in the stanza's format; and, certainly, Chaucer's syncopation of the pattern seems (in retrospect) the most logical of modifications. Whether the longer line inspired the diminution of rhyme or vice versa cannot now be determined. But, certainly also, regular end-rhyme maintains only tertiary importance in Chaucer's art— behind, first, sense and, second, rhythm. Three French couplets have been completely eliminated and one triplet has been shortened to a couplet. The effects of these omissions is obviously to diminish the overall conspicuousness of rhyme itself. Already, Chaucer's instincts (or skill) guide him away from too much, "drasty" rhyme. The absolute authority of Chaucer in the succeeding century led its poets not only away from any alliterative revival but from any poetic form exercised simply for its own sake; at least, it should have. When the Parson affirms, "But trusteth wel, I am a Southern man,/I kan not geest 'rum, ram, ruf,1 by lettre,/

Ne, God woot, rym holde I but litel bettre" ("Parson's Prologue," I 42-44) , he echoes perhaps an aesthetic principle that has guided Chaucer since the "ABC."

Prosodic monotony, above all else, must be avoided, even if thematic sincerity requires resorting to prose. Chaucer apparently knew why as well— because poetry is no longer intended to be appreciated when performed "by lettre." Enjambment had already been sought, though not in­ sisted upon, by both the original authors and (with less success) the English translators of The Romance of the

R o s e . xt has been frequently observed that the couplet and the quatrain are the most popular patterns of end- rhyme in English poetry and that these are the simplest possible stanzaic arrangements of rhyme. But it should be added that few of the more complex patterns in English poetry are truly more complex in their use of end-rhyme than these two basic arrangements (sequential or embracing) and, as George Young admits, "The language does not seem to admit of more than two in continuous verse without strain."50 The rationale for this general trend in English poetry against excessive rhyme may be traced to the prestige of Chaucer's prosodic experiments. Since then, these principles may be considered firm for the composition of tasteful English, poetry. First, the selection of a specific rhyme pattern is always an arbitrary, not mandatory 50 decision of the poet; he suits the pattern to his poem at will. Second, end-rhyme itself should be as inconspicuous as possible. This inconspicuousness may be achieved in several ways: by avoiding more than two consecutive end- rhymes; by preferring embracing rhyme to sequential in most extended stanzaic patterns; by avoiding the concurrence of syntactic stops and end-rhymes; and, finally, by eliminating regular end-rhyme completely. Successive generations of poets have all sought to meet Chaucer's mandate against "drasty" rhyme by investigating new possibilities to make it inconspicuous. Chaucer, thus, established the most enduring trend of English poetry— the pursuit of prosodic innovation. Experimentation is itself the most traditional aspect of English literature since the fifteenth century.

Defending the artistry of the fifteenth century poets in England, however, has become a dubious affair. In general, they seem far too imitative and not sufficiently innovative in their admiration of Chaucer. For now, it is interesting to note that Saintsbury (in one of his many asides) comments:

It has been said that Lydgate is better at light subjects than at heavy ones, his lack of sheer poetry being less apparent in them, and his prosodic shortcomings benefitting by the universal allowance to comic verse, while his actual sense of fun is by no means dull. (italics mine) 51

The finger exercises of the much abused fifteenth-century English versifiers in regular end-rhyme too often become arthritic. Clearly, with Lydgate, "the rot had already set m . " A Although the immediate audiences of a Lydgate, Occleve or Hawes may have ranked their achievements with those of Chaucer and Gower, compliments paid to the English Chaucerians since the Renaissance have been rare and r a n d o m . Even so, it is less uncommon to admit the wit of their doggerel than the high seriousness of their rhymed bombast. Not merely had the ability of the English rhymsters themselves diminished after Chaucer, but their lack of permanent success together with the subsequent impact of both classical and Italian models for new poetic compositions did much to weaken the already ambivalent prestige of the medieval rhyming tradition. It is no surprise then that the Tudor poets, unsatis­ fied with the general stagnation of the fifteenth century, should investigate both of their only two alternatives for prosodic innovation— to experiment with new rhyme patterns or to eliminate regular end-rhyme altogether. Since the Tudor revival, there has been both greater continuity in the education and greater variety in the practice of English poets. Each and every poet of any note since the sixteenth century has had, at once, both greater freedom personally to explore what could be done artistically and (at least the opportunity to obtain) greater awareness of 52 what had already been accomplished. Tradition restrains while the imagination rebels. Ironically, the more thorough accessibility of tradition, which can be directly attributed to the rise of printing,54 apparently spawned an ever-increasing need for prosodic innovation.55

The foremost rebels of the Tudor renascence in English poetry were aristocrats— Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503- 1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Like Baptism and the Eucharist, the latter is generally considered "greater," but the former "more important" to the salvation of English verse. Wyatt introduced the Italian sonnet to English poetry, and Surrey succeeded at it. Yet, from the start, Wyatt preferred an abba abba cddc ee rhyme scheme to the Italian octave and sestet. Both Wyatt and Surrey, "though not wholly or ex­ clusively, incline to the form of sonnet which concludes with a couplet— the 'English' form, as it might perhaps best be called— the 'Shakesperian' form as it is usually called in opposition to the 'Petrarchian. '"55 Ambassador

Wyatt imported the fourteen liner, "infinitely the most important innovation, 1,57 so that English poets might rival the prestigious achievements of Petrarch, Sannazaro, Alamanni and numerous other Italian sonneteers. But the alien resident had first to be naturalized. Even when the octave and sestet of the Italian model were maintained by Wyatt, more than one of his sonnets "falls into a pair of 53 quasi rhyme-royal stanzas."5 8

Surrey, suspected of being a vandal in his youth, became the Napoleon of the first prosodic revolution against regular end-rhyme in English poetry. Saintsbury perceives among the subsequent experiments by Renaissance poets "the vast, if rather vague, contemporary striving to get rid of rhyme altogether as a barbarous medievalism, and to fall back upon unassisted metrical arrangement in the manner of the ancients." 59 Surrey*s translation of Book IV of Vergil's Aeneid first appeared in 1554— "Then issued she, backed with a great rout." Book II was published in 1557. Unrhymed iambic pentameter has since come to be considered almost inevitable to English poetic expression, and there are precedents for its use,60 but none so extended nor so conscientiously innovative. In fact, Surrey's original publisher apparently felt compelled to apologize for "this strange meter."6^ If the success of the prosodic innovations introduced by Wyatt and Surrey cannot be questioned, the influence of their experiments on the subsequent history of regular end- rhyme in English verse cannot be completely clarified. On the one hand, the Tudor poets successfully disproved any necessary function for rhyme in extended serious poetry- On the other hand, they preserved; they, in fact, emphasized the appeal of rhyme in the gradually preferred mode of 54

poetic expression— the lyric. But modern critics apparent­ ly are not so skillful at making generic distinctions as the Elizabethans.

It is sometimes hard to decide how to classify a poem, whether as lyric or as narrative. We might say that Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" is a narrative poem, and Crashaw's "Musicks Duell" a lyric.^2

Then, again, we might not. Surrey's antipodal attitudes towards the use of regular end-rhyme in either lyric or epic could be considered, at best, a tenuous and temporary distinction. "Yet from Petrarch to Milton— or the hapless Blackmore— almost all the serious poets of Europe dreamed of writing the great modern heroic poem."^ Many were rhymed; few were successful. The history of end-rhyme in narrative English poetry since Chaucer is one of constant prosodic modification (all tending to deemphasize the rhymes for serious subject matter) or of tonal modification (all tending to emphasize the rhymes for humorous poetry); it would take approximately two centuries for these same principles to apply to the composition of lyric verse as well. Surrey implicity established that whatever is to be considered the most serious mode of poetry should not be rhymed. "Because hymn is a very specialized form of poetry, 55

Renaissance critics generally paid lip service to its merits and then devoted major attention to the other forms in the high style, epic and tragedy.Renaissance poets promptly dismissed regular end-rhyme from both; when Walt Whitman would apotheosize the lyric Self, he would also dismiss rhyme. Contrariwise, the Renaissance also anticipated the rise of the rhymed mock-epic; from the Italians first and then on their own, the Renaissance poets rediscovered the humor of the Ovidian tradition. "Ancient tales had received comic handling from Shakespeare and Jonson, and Nashe and Dekker . . . the first real burlesque was the jovial James Smith's 'Innovation of Penelope and Ulysses, A Mock Poem.'"^5 since the Renaissance, whatever is regularly end-rhymed can be, as such, intention­ ally funny; the groundwork is laid for the aesthetic con­ viction that it therefore should be (as Wimsatt asserts) and then that it therefore ts (as most modern poets believe). In general, this much can be said about the rhymed composition of the successors of Surrey. The necessity of regular end-rhyme, so that a particular poem might be formally recognized as such, is completely disproved; metrical regularity (especially that of blank verse) is henceforth formally sufficient. Rhyme starts to be re­ duced to a random superaddition. And the presence of end- rhyme itself begins to affect the tone of a poem. Con­ fusing our study of the "general trend" against rhyme in 56

English poetry after Chaucer is the fact that the use of regular end-rhyme became the ad hoc privilege of the in­ dividual poet for an individual poem, and has remained such ever since. To rhyme or not to rhyme, regularly, became the question of narrative poetry in the late six­ teenth and the seventeenth centuries; lyric was, for the nonce, exempt from the challenge. The two greatest narrative poets of the time— Edmund Spenser (1522-1599) and John Milton (1608-1674)— each succeeded at the opposite answer. That the archaisms of Spenser's style were deliberate is well-known and is reflected in the subject matter of his poetry as well as its diction.^6 And Spenser's fidelity to regular end-rhyme should also be considered part of this artistic inclination. But English poetry has already arrived at a stage when even the submission to traditionalism can be considered a highly revolutionary poetic device. Saintsbury offers this contrast between the achievement of Spenser and that of Chaucer;

The poet of the Canterbury Tales sums up every­ thing that is good in his predecessors, adds much, does what can be done, and what no one but himself could do, for the present; but rather completes the past than begins the future. The poet of the Faerie Queene does just the contrary. From his immediate predecessors he takes hardly anything, and though he takes (with full acknowledgement) much from Chaucer himself, he handles it quite independently. He experiments largely.67 57 First Spenser created his own tradition (more like Blake than Chaucer) and only then was he faithful to it. In this innovative revitalization of traditional techniques, Spenser's prosodic principles seem consistent with those of Wyatt for the sonnet and with those of Chaucer for the couplet. The Shepheardes Calender claims antecedents as far back as Theocritus; yet, it has been termed "as original in its day as The Wasteland. I t may also be con­ sidered "a sort of exercising ground"^ in which Spenser experimented with a variety of metrical and stanzaic patterns in pursuit of the craft that he would master for The Faerie Queene. Saintsbury's survey of Spenser's rhyming technique observes that:

Double rhymes he does not altogether avoid, and he sometimes, though very rarely, takes the Wyatt licence of rhyming on different parts of the same termination; but the latter is always a blemish, and the former not an improvement. 70

With these few exceptions, Spenser the craftsman must everywhere else be praised for his ability to elude monotony, that is, his ability to incorporate variety into a fixed prosodic pattern of apparently ineluctable repetitiousness— the ababbcbcc of the Spenserian stanza. Through his expertise in rhythm variations, Spenser succeeded despite the regularity of his rhyme patterns. I grant that "the beautiful is difficult, 11 but it does not follow that the difficult is in itself necessarily beautiful. Yet, the appeal of the rhyming craft for its own sake is an undeniable element of the poetry of the Welsh bards and the English romancers before Chaucer. By Spenser's time, however, this appeal had been significant­ ly modified. In The Faerie Queene, the regularity of end- rhyme remains rigorous, but the conspicuousness of this regularity is simultaneously counteracted. The aesthetic principle of "ars celare artem" begins to apply to end- rhyme with a vengeance, as it could not in most medieval poetry. It is the paradoxical appeal of variety within regularity that becomes primary to the appreciation of end-rhyme and not the technical bravura of the exact rhymes themselves.

Like Spenser, John Milton experimented with a plethora of regular rhyme-patterns in his early lyric verse. Both "L'Allegro" (152 lines) and "II Pensero" (176 lines) begin with a ten-line stanza and then resurrect the tetrameter couplet from disfavor. Lvcidas employs a highly elaborate adaption of the canzone? its rhyme schemes are irregular, often blank, leading to two couplets that immediately precede the final ottava rima— for variety's sake. But when Milton sat down to write an original narrative poem (unlike Surrey's translation) he eventually decided to 59 eliminate end-rhyme completely (unlike Spenser's re- patterning) .

The use of blank verse for an heroic poem was a signal innovation and Milton1s handling of it added, not a new province, but a new world to English versification . . . (First), in the sonnets Milton had been moving towards the massive blank-verse paragraph; even where rhymes are emphatic (as in the Piedmont sonnet), the formal pattern could almost disappear because of run- on lines and strong medial pauses. In the epic verse these two principles, working through long sentences, contribute greatly to the continuous flow.71

If Milton's masterpiece has lost much of its popular appeal, it is for the same reasons that the Bible itself has grown less familiar to the "populace." But, unlike Spenser's narrative, Paradise Lost is seldom disliked a priori be­ cause of a formal objection to the chosen mode of poetic expression.72 Furthermore, the enduring success of Milton's epic without rhyme only helps to highlight the disastrous wrongheadedness of attempting the same with rhyme. It will not prove easy to accommodate the poetic achievements of the eighteenth century to the idea that a "programmatic hostility" towards regular end-rhyme has been present in English literature since Chaucer. But the Augustan poets were aware of and were unsatisfied with the accomplishments of their predecessors; to this extent, the Augustans were hostile towards "tradition." Dryden 60

particularly objected to the extravagances of the Metaphysical poets.

The couplet, however, was eminently practical and dependable, qualities which explain its popularity. Solid and clear, it suited reasonable poetry. It was efficient: it dissipated neither the energy of the poet nor the attention of the reader. End stopped, as it could and should be, it con­ tained the sense within itself. It encouraged reason, order, and form, and thus was the most fitting medium for expressing neoclassical nature. But since it did not encourage variation, as metaphysical practice had done, the danger was that it should be monotonous in its regularity and insipid in its h a r m o n y . 73

First and foremost, the heroic couplet works because of its conspicuous end-rhyme; but there are two entirely different criteria for determining when it works well in a particular poem. When neither seems to apply, this criticism necessarily follows: "The age was essentially prosaic . . . Much of what the Georgians called poetry was in fact pretentious prose, dressed up in rhyme and regular metre and adorned with archaisms and the flowery cliches of which pope complained."^4 The Augustan Age does not need to excuse its delight in pretention to us. But Dryden, Pope and Johnson excel because they could do so well what so many of their contemporaries did so readily and so poorly-.-write rhymes. They could make end-rhymes conspicuously inconspicuous in serious poetry or conspicuous­ ly ironic for satirical subjects. 61

Dryden's experiments with the couplet were geared primarily to reassert a suitable poetic tone of harmony and order. Like the medieval poetry we shall be analyzing in more detail, Dryden1s couplets are a means to an end, but their respective ends differ significantly. The medieval jongleur imposed end-rhyme to achieve perceptible structure because he had no other alternatives. Dryden abritrarily imposed end-rhyme in order to simultaneously impose an example of the universally ordered structure that reflected his thematic convictions. Rhyme in the Middle Ages was a tonally neutral technique; its structural conspicuousness was sufficient justification for its audial appreciation. But Dryden's end-rhymes had to be selected to fit his subject matter tonally. Serious rhymes must not be gratuitous; taste becomes an operative informing principle, and the eighteenth century poets presupposed that their taste was impeccable. John Dryden became Poet Laureate in 1668, after William Davenant. He was confirmed in this public appoint­ ment in 1670 and remained poet of the realm until 1689 when the realm, not he, changed. Shadwell succeeded. But Alexander Pope would receive the prosodic pallium. Dr. Johnson's famous comparison of Dryden and Pope, of the letter's inconsistent superiority to the former's superior consistency, remains a valid assessment and acknowledges 62 the continuity of the true laureateship. Pope continued Dryden1s experiments in sophistication of the heroic couplet. Perhaps Pope's more satiric inclinations can be traced to his opposition to the Walpole regime, perhaps to his quirky education, perhaps to his quirky physiognomy. But, perhaps also, the currently more popular ironic uses that Pope made of the rhymed couplet can be traced to his own recognition of the perceptible affectation that the inherently paradoxical uses of end-rhyme could impose on a poem's tone.

Remember Man i 'the Universal Cause Acts not by partial, but by gen'ral Laws' (Essay on Man, IV, 35-36)

The proper question of this study is not what were the causes of such a "Cause/Laws" rhyme juncture, but what are its aesthetic effects. Clearly, this declaration is not a joke; clearly, the rhymes are parallel in sense; so this couplet does not truly qualify for Wimsatt's appreciation of "chiastic rhyme." The Essay on Man is a most serious subject and is built primarily upon normal, ordered, non- satiric end-rhymes:

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line, While they ring round the same unvaried chimes With sure returns of still-expected rhymes (Essays on Criticism, 347—349) 63

— perhaps. There exist at least three types of regular end- rhyme that may be distinguished in Pope's poetry according to tone, not phonic technique. For a standard couplet of a serious poem to be considered "good" in the eighteenth century, it must have been never so well expressed before and could not be again. Only the initial author of a / cliche is exempt from the criticism of triteness; a specific rhyme juncture can be new only once, and its appeal derives primarily from this newness. Most "chiastic rhymes" are also simply new, but they require contemplation as well as perception. They reflect Wit and not just natural harmony, and as such belong most properly to a study of the pun and the conceit. But the third type of regular end-rhyme in Pope's poetry is perceptibly humorous upon first hear­ ing without the reader's studied contemplation; its aesthetic appeal derives from a disharmony between style (in general) and content, and not from examples (in particular) of a "fixative counterpattern of alogical im­ plication. " "Chiastic rhymes" demand the recognition of a semantic disjuncture between phonically linked words. The juxta­ position of "sink/wings" at the conclusion of Wallace Steven's "Sunday Morning" is such. The technique can also be achieved by internal rhymes, like the mutually contra­ dictory echoes of "partial . . . general" in the above 64 excerpt front The Essay on Man. "Chiastic rhymes" do not truly require and, therefore, do not truly defend an end- rhyme pattern. Yet, simple end-rhyme is frequently necessary for the irony of Pope's couplets:

But this bold lord, with manly strength endued, She with one finger and a thumb subdued: Just where the breath of life his nostrils drew, A charge of snuff the wily virgin threw. (Rape of the Lock, V, 79-82)

The rhymes of this most pleasant passage are conspicuously reinforced by syntactic stops— a coincidence to be heartily avoided in serious poetry. Furthermore, there is nothing particularly witty about the juxtaposition of "endued" with "subdued" or "drew" and "threw." Rather, the excessiveness of such rhyme is justified simply as but another example of excessive diction, like "manly strength" or "the breath of life," that contrasts so humorously to the triviality of the poem's plot. Yet, The Rape of the Lock, in fact all mock-epics since the Renaissance, parody a genre which simply never succeeded in original English verser— the serious epic in rhymed couplets. The "neoclassical" and the "free verse" movements in English poetry may seem antipodal in their presuppositions regarding the efficacy of regular end-rhyme. Yet, they are in fundamental agreement about its inherent dangers. 65

All three types of end-rhyme in Pope's poetry (each adjusted to the tone of a particular poem) deny the appeal of end- rhyme in itself; the heroic couplet works despite itself/ despite the paucity of rhymes in the language and, in serious poetry, despite its tonal implications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries could legitimately complain that the eighteenth century had already exhausted all the opportunities for making regular end-rhyme work despite itself.

A poet of the later century would, to write successfully in the Augustan tradition, have to have a very strong positive sympathy with it— a sympathy with it as something more than a literary tradition. He would have to be both like enough Pope and, civilization having altered, unlike enough— strongly enough unlike to effect decided positive alterations in that very positive idiom. These qualifications Johnson had.^*

And none have had since. The achievements of the eighteenth- century poets can defend only their own highly sophisticated uses of regular end-rhyme and no other. These achievements, in fact, eliminated vast quantities of heretofore acceptable rhymes. Thus, the eighteenth century did indeed reflect a "programmatic hostility" towards rhyme in English poetry since Chaucer, if only by declaring the previous norm for end-rhymes to be "tasteless."

In general, the nineteenth century revolted against many things,* the Romantic poets made many prosodic innovations, but they did not yet send regular erid-rhyme to the guillotine. There was, above all, great individual liberty in the selection of a specific rhyme pattern for a particular poem. Formally, 11 sonnet" had become an almost meaningless label for a variety of "little songs." Similarly, only five of Wordsworth's poems in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads use the standard ballad meter; the longer poems all use more sophisticated stanzaic patterns. "Apparently, however, Wordsworth and Coleridge did not think of themselves as inventing an important new species of verse, or they would hardly have said so little about

7 f% it." One reason for at least Wordsworth's retention of regular end-rhyme in his shorter lyrics was the fact that he intended such poetry to be read aloud.His more ex­ tended poems, however lyrical, such as The Prelude ("an autobiographical poem") or "Michael: A Pastoral Poem," generally revert to blank verse. Wordsworth was never quite satisfied with "Guilt and Sorrow"— neither with the radicalism of his youth nor with its 666 (the sign of the Beast?) lines divided into 74 Spenserian stanzas. But the Spenserian stanza survived the nineteenth century in "The Eve of St. Agnes" by Keats, in "Adonais" by Shelley, and in "The Lotus Eaters" by Tennyson— and so did regular end-rhyme in general. Nevertheless, William Wordsworth successfully demonstrated, as Surrey had demonstrated in epic verse two and a half centuries before, that blank- 67 verse was formally sufficient for the lyric mode of poetic expression. The inconspicuous end-rhyme of the eighteenth century's serious poetry now started to become visible. It was Byron, however, who with typically perverse vigor demonstrated the comic rewards of making conspicuous end-rhyme intentionally ludicrous or— if the anachronism is permi s sabl e— absurd.

Byron's relation to the eighteenth century is a matter of the first importance. In 1820, he wrote: 'The great cause of the present de­ plorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to the absurd and systematic de­ preciation of Pope, in which, for the last few years, there has been a sort of epidemic con­ currence. ' 78

Pope had dammed the rising tide against regular end-rhyme in English poetry only by engineering an extremely sophisticated technology for its uses. Byron admired such sophistication. After Johnson, however, the technology was abused, neglected, forgotten? the dam broke and the flood picked up momentum. Byron could save only a half­ drowned survivor, Don Juan.

I would to heaven that I were so much clay, As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling— Because at least the past were passed away— Ahd for the future-— (but I write this reeling Having got drunk exceeding today, So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling) I say— the future is a serious matter— And so— for God’s sake— hock and soda water. This fragment, though properly part of no canto, is fairly representative of the prosody of Don Juan at large. Byron may owe much of his technique to Samuel Butler (1612-80) and to John Hookham Prere (1769-1846), but his skillful use of it remains his own and responds to the inherently ironic tone of conspicuous end-rhyme that the nineteenth century acknowledged unanimously. The excessive (i.e., Leonine) b-rhymes of this ottava rima "fragment"— "feeling/reeling/ceiling"— are a major source of its humor; they supplement the syntactic stops of the excessive dashes and parentheses to achieve the sense that the narrator's most immediate "feeling" is indeed one of reeling on the ceiling. "Having got drunk" sounds almost like a burp. But the primary source of humor in the stanza, the punch-line as it were, is the concluding couplet. The Hudibrastic rhyme (i.e., a goofed Leonine) of "the future is a serious matter" and "for God's sake— hock and water" throws the entire tones of these two statements into ironic juxtaposition; the latter reduces any significance in the former to triteness. Stanza 6 of Canto I is among Byron1s most masterful demonstrations of the ironic potentials of this humorous use of conspicuously "bad" end-rhyme:

Most epic poets plunge 'in medias res' (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road) 69

And then your hero tells, when1er you please, What went before— by way of episode, While seated after dinner at his ease Beside his mistress in some soft abode. Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern Which serves the happy couple for a tavern. (I, 6, 11. 41-48)

The interplay of all three rhymed phoneme clusters in this stanza supplements the tone of its statement. "Res" was pronounced to match "please" and "ease." Such a macaronic may indicate the pseudo-intellectual pretensions of this Ars Poetica. Byron himself pretends to do with ease what he pleases with rhymes. "Road" and "abode" may be considered a "chiastic rhyme"; this irony together with the emphasis on "episode" and the stanza's choppy syntax reflect just what the narrator wishes to criticize. Finally, "cavern" concludes a catalogue of loci amoeni only to be reduced by a Leonine, "chiastic" rhyme to a cheap London "tavern." The pyrotechnics of Byron's rhyming game in this stanza are extraordinary, but he presupposes the inherent absurdity of it all. Byron's masterpiece is unique among the narrative poems in English since Surrey; it succeeds not despite the handicaps inherent in regular end-rhyme, but because of them. Like Blake, Byron simply redefined "bad" as "good" and created a poetic environment to make the inversion work. But Byron, unlike Pope or Petronius, was never unanimously 70 acknowledged as an arbiter eleqantiae. John Keats, the currently most exalted prophet of the Romantic movement,®® seriously used the rhymed-couplet in Lamia (1820) just a year before Don Juan started to appear. There are always more urgent concerns in the criticism of poetry than regular end-rhyme— except now. The prestige of Byron did grow, more abroad than at home— particularly in France, whence came "vers libre."®^ Byron becomes so significant to this analysis because he makes an implicit trend of English verse, once and for all, explicit. Conspicuous end- rhyme is, in itself, funny. Inconspicuous end-rhyme, how­ ever, can have no phonic merits. Two of the most notable, Victorian poems that succeed at making completely regular end-rhyme all but inaudible (if not invisible) are Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" (1842) and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover" (1877, 1918). Browning's dramatic monologue so enjambs its couplets that the phonetic harmony of their rhymes all but disappears. To perceive this poem's rhyme scheme, like the Duke's message within it, one must indeed "read between the lines." Similarly, most readers have to be told that Hopkins' sonnet does, indeed, rhyme— aaaaaaa bcb cbc; the inconspicuous rigor of this pattern resembles the cruciform floor of a cathedral that only God can perceive: 71

a a bcb ©cbc a a a a

But, I would argue, this pattern is there. There is a thematic link that places the twin terza rimas of the poem’s conclusion on the cross-beam of the third line. The poem is another ecstatic "Dream of the Rood"; the image of the crucifix is the same as the Falcon riding on extended wings. The first rhyme of the second tercet is "sillion," a ridge between two furrows, suggesting a jewelled "eaxlgespanne." The last rhyme of the first tercet is "Chevalier," suggesting "Crist waes on rode." Nor is three lines riding on each side of the third line an accident; "High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing" presents the drooping arms of Christ triumphant. The inverted rhyme patterns of the final tercets reflect the "on the one hand, on the other" shift in their tones between "Buckle!" (1. 10) and "No wonder of it" (1. 12). The rhyme pattern also generates number symbolism; the "one," the "three" the "seven" all become evident. The inconspicuous pattern of Browning1s rhymes was "tasteful"; Hopkins' schema seems to Q p offer a mystical vision. Neither poem uses the phonic 72 harmony of rhyme/ in itself; both make much of the subtle implications of hiding its pattern. The hidden pattern is just the opposite of what most medieval poets strove to achieve for the audial appreciation of their poetry. The pattern of such suppressed rhymes as Browning's and Hopkins' can only be perceived visually; it is indeed "patterned poetry" and can be linked theoretically to either the visual conceits of George Herbert (1593-1633) in "The Temple" or the graphic design of much contemporary projectivist verse.88 The late nineteenth century also saw the rise of nonsense poetry such as the volumes of The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear (1812-1888) and the songs scattered through the Alice books by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). Carroll's verse frequently has a satiric significance to it, but Lear defended his rhymes as "nonsense pure and absolute":

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers, Leastways if you reckon two thumbs; Long ago he was one of the singers. But now he is one of the dumbs. ("How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear," 11. 9-12)

The pattern of rhymes is conspicuous and, as such, can be pleasantly ludicrous--but no more, because it serves no aesthetic purpose beyond itself. Lear's own recognition of this limitation gives his confession a certain pathos; 73 he is indeed dumb; he can rhyme and rhyme and rhyme/ but never say anything. Meanwhile in America— the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass either revolted its first readers or recruited them for the revolt. In pursuit of what Emerson called "organic poetry/" Whitman reached this clear, though somewhat florid understanding of the ultimate function of regular end-rhyme:

The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme, and of uniform­ ity that it conveys itself into its own roots in the ground out of sight . . . The fluency and ornaments of the finest poems or music or orations or recitations are not independent but d e p e n d e n t .

Whitman acknowledges that regular end-rhyme can work when­ ever it is "natural," that is, when it provides a formal means to an aesthetic end— no more, no less. No true poet of the English language (neither after nor before Chaucer) ever asserted anything else. Whitman, however, further implied that the beauty of the "roots" should be sufficient in itself and is seldom improved by an accommodation to traditional patterns:

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatness are in conjunc­ tion in a man or woman it is enough . . . the fact will prevail through the universe . . . but 74 the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.

In terms of prosody, Whitman was essentially a Puritan.

Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me? Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languish­ ing rhymes? Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow? . . . go lull yourself with what you can under­ stand, and with piano tunes, For I lull nobody, and you will never under­ stand me. (from "To a Certain Civilian")

Whitman absorbed many of his cadences from the King James Bible,86 which offers at least one link between his sentiments with "the vast, if rather vague" antipathy to rhyme that Saintsbury noted in the Renaissance. Into the twentieth century, "free verse" became the form of poetic expression. It was at once the most controversial, the most dynamic and the most influential of poetic expressions; it was not, of course, the only mode. Furthermore, under the banner of "free verse" we can rank such disparate poets as Whitman, Stephen Crane, the Imagists, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings and Charles Olsen. At first, the "movement" was not at all well received, but when Ira Gershwin converted the nonsense lyrics that he initially imposed on his brother's melody 75 into the lyric of "I got rhythm. Who could ask for anything more?" he acknowledged that not even "piano tunes" required regular end-rhyme anymore. But regular end-rhyme continues to be used in many different ways all the same. So where are we? We. seem to be at a plateau in our understanding of the functions of regular end-rhyme. James Dickey has offered this personal summary of the currently ambivalent situation, the gist of America's contemporary, giddy Geist;

I had in the beginning a strong dislike of rhyming poems, for the element of artificiality is one of the characteristics of poetry I most distrust, and I have always had trouble dis­ tinguishing between artificiality and the traditional modes and methods of verse; for a time I was convinced that craft and artifice were the same thing. At the time I also had a secret suspicion that Whitman, Lawrence, the Imagists, and others were cheating, absolving themselves from the standing problems and difficulties of verse. But I found, unlike so many others, that the qualities of poems which seemed to me poetic— essentially poetic— were not in the least dependent on whether or not they occurred in poems which r h y m e d .

The twentieth century has largely failed to distinguish be­ tween the question of the appeal of rhyme per se and the question of its regularity as an informing principle. "Simple" end-rhyme has never been considered acceptable in English poetry; the mere presence of the technique has never guaranteed applause for the skill of its use. Regular end-rhyme can still work in all poetry in­ tended to be appreciated audially. It is still tolerated in "light verse"; it has, in fact, become all but identified with light verse like that of Ogden Nash or A. E. Housman, It is true that light verse assumes "a relaxed manner to treat its subjects gaily, or comically, or whimsically, or with good-natured satire." It is also true that "pat rhymes" help to "convert what might have been matter for epic or tragedy into a comic narrative." But it does not follow that whatever verse "uses the ordinary speaking voice"®® need by considered tonally light. Conspicuously regular end-rhyme works when a particular poem (of any historical period) is intended to be both performed orally and appreciated immediately. These conditions together explain why end-rhyme has survived so well even in the most heartrending popular songs and has been all but abandoned in the more prestigious achievements of many modern poets (who generally intend their statements to be studied rather than heard once). A public recitation of such works as The Wasteland or The Cantos actually inverts the medieval job-description of the performer's role and that of his audience; today, it is the audience, not the reader, who must all but memorize the poem in advance if they wish to enjoy the show. On the other hand, Charles Olson is trying to make the typewriter a 77 cueing-machine for the audience as performer. Even so, as Whitman warned, perhaps "you will never understand me." It is the gradual rejection of end-rhyme1s simple regularity that seems to distinguish the skillful composition of English poetry after Chaucer from what was produced before his first experiments in prosodic sophistication. I will attempt to demonstrate, however, that this critical distinction is fundamentally false--as false as assuming that the Aeneid is "better" than the Iliad simply because it is "secondary" and therefore more sophisticated. It is not the purpose of the following studies to justify the continued use of regular end-rhyme in English verse. On the contrary, it is my belief that, had Harold ducked at Hastings, Langland (not Chaucer) might now be considered the "Father of English Poetry." There always have been numerous reasons not to attempt regular rhyme in English. Many critics have observed that a mediocre versifier, such as John Lydgate, demonstrates them all. But the hegemony of Norman taste seems to have imported rhyme, nevertheless. There was a method to such madness. We must first clarify what simple, unsophisticated, regular end-rhyme did for poetry before Chaucer before we can completely understand what it has gradually failed to do eyer since. As Kingsley Amis recently remarked, "What does concern me here is that when what is presumably aspiring to be high verse abandons form, a mortal blow is dealt light verse, to which form has always been of the

o n essence."0 I hope to demonstrate that such form was once the essence of "high verse" as well— specifically, in England and Wales before the fifteenth century. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

Cf. chapter IV, "Concerning the Origin of Rime," and chapter V, "History of Rime Theories," in Henry Lanz's The Physical Basis of Rime (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1931), pp. 105-199.

^For a particularly calm appraisal of the merits of rhyme itself, see B. J. Pendlebury's The Art of Rhyme (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971). ^Paul Fussell, Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, Inc., 1965), p. 162.

4Fussell, pp. 164-5. ^Cf. Rosmarie Waldrop, "A Basis of Concrete Poetry," in Twentieth Century Poetry, ed. by Harry R. Garvin (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1977). g Elder Olson offers a particularly illuminating and concise discussion of the difficulties involved in defining the "essence" of poetry in "William Empson, Contemporary Criticism, and Poetic Diction," in Critics and Criticism, ed. by R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 24-61. "Our initial recognition of poetic form says nothing about our subsequent evaluation of that poem as 'poetry.'" *^T. S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry," rpt. in Perkins' American Poetic Theory, p. 232.

Q William Carlos Williams, "Letter to Kay Boyle," rpt. in Perkins' American Poetic Theory, p. 268. ^The Arte of English Poesie, attributed to George Puttenham, dates from c. 1585 and is among the first, full discussions of both the inherent value and danger of regular end-rhyme among English prosodies. lOLaurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1956) .

^ B . J. Pendlebury, p. 10. 79 80

^•2B. j. pendlebury, p. 95.

l^Young, p. 110. ^ I n the more sophisticated terms of the Halle- Keyser system, many metrical alternatives exist within their prosodic principles and "The subsequent alternatives yield lines which are perfectly regular in that they violate no rule. However, they represent a more complex actualization of the metrical pattern." M. Halle and S. J. Keyser, "Chaucer and the Study of Poetry,", rpt. in Linguistics and Literary Style, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 381.

15C. S. Fraser, p. 61. 1 6 W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, Ky.: Univ. of Kentucky press, 1954), p. 157. ■^Vladimir Nabokov, "An Interview with Vladimir Nabokoy Conducted by Alfred Appel, Jr.," rpt. in George Perkins' The Theory of the American Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 455. 18 Cf. Young, p. 110: "Except the dissyllable ending, rime affords little scope for variation; nor does it leave, except as above, much facility to error." 1 9 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 13. ^Osmith, p. 49.

21Smith, p. 53.

99F . R. Leavis, Revaluation (1947; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963), p. 10.

23Cf. Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1962), pp. 9-11.

2^Wimsatt, p. 258.

25Wimsatt, p. 153.

26Wimsatt, p. 163.

27Wimsatt, p. 165.

28Wimsatt, pp. 156-163. 81 ^Leavis, pp. 98-99.

3 Henry Lanz discusses the earliest known mention of rhyme, or homoeoteleuton, in Aristotle's Rhetoric (III, 9, p. 1410a). Lanz concludes "If rime is a variety of anti­ thesis— which seems to be implied by the Aristotelian discussion of the matter— then its poetic effect can be explained only by its power to convey contrast in an easily accessible and obviously striking form. Rime, then, facilitates grasping and retaining ideas by our mind, a function which has ever since been attributed to all riming expressions as fundamental." The Physical Basis of Rime, p. 1S3.

31Pendlebury, p. 11. 32penyS Thompson, The Uses of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), p. 36. 3 3Both the bio-chemical, scientific facts and the historio-cultural, pedagogic beliefs regarding the work­ ings of the human memory remain particularly vague, though significant studies for future research. For now, I must simply assert that the currently hypothetical findings of such research are not particularly pertinent to the technological (i.e., formally functional) analyses of the usage of regular end-rhyme that follow; mnemonic rhymes exist as a particular application of artifice, but I doubt they explain the "origins" of the literary tradition imported to England, and I know they cannot adequately comprehend the artistic mutations that the rhyming tradition has undergone since before Chaucer. The very mention of "mutations" may conjure theoretical implications of the Chardin-McLuhan synthesis that is Walter J. Ong (cf. Bibliography). I hope to address these implications (Ong himself says very little regarding rhyme) in my final chapter. Frank Kermode has attacked Ong's evolutionary theory as unnecessarily vague (ergo invalid) in "Father Ong," rpt. in Modern Essays (London: William Collins' Sons Co., Ltd., 1971), pp. 99-107.

^Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966). 35Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," rpt. in Perkins' American Poetic Theory; pp. 339-40. 36oison, p. 339. S^For major analyses of the oral formulaic tradition of poetic composition, cf. Alfred B. Lord, Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), as well as • 82 Milman Parry,' The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Univ. Press, ,1971), and F. P. Magoun, "Oral- Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry" (Speculum, 28, 446-467). It remains, however, possible to assert that neither the Iliad nor Beowulf , though they reflect this tradition, belong to it completely. For example, the discoveries of Magoun have been qualified by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur in The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1959). 38Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), p. 52.

39Thompson, P* 37. 40Curtius, p. 389.

41Thompson, pp. 96-100.

42Cf. Joseph Hall, "Metre," pp. xlv-1, King Horn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901).

43Cf. Saintsbury, vol. 1, pp. 392-5? Appendix III, "The Nature and Phenomena of Doggerel."

44C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 204.

4^cf. M. Halle and S. J. Keyser: "a random selection of one thousand lines in Chaucer yielded less than 1.0 percent exceptional lines," p. 411. ^ 1 . A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1929), p. 32.

47Saintsbury, p. 289.

48Saintsbury, p. 148.

^9Saintsbury, p. 146. ^Young, p. 105. Saintsbury, p. 225.

52saintsbury, p. 275. 53por example, even though allegory became the dominant literary form "between Chaucer's death and the poetry of Wyatt," C. S. Lewis is among the first to admit the frequent turgidness of the period's compositions. 83 Cf. The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958) , pp. 232-34. ^Cf. "The Renaissance as the Forerunner of the Printing Press," vol. 1, pp. 317-47 in George Haven Putnam, Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages (1896-97; rpt. New York: Hilary House, 1962). Cf. also H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature (1945; rpt. Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977). 5^T. s. Eliot has acknowledged the critical tendency that fosters such innovation, in "Tradition and the Indiyidual Talent," rpt. in Perkins' American Poetic Theory: "We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predeces­ sors. (p. 220)

58Saintsbury, p. 307. ^Saintsb.ury, p. 309.

58Saintsbury, p. 308.

59Saintsbury, p. 315.

80Cf. Saintsbury, pp. 314-15.

8^-Cf. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954; OHEL, vol. 3), p. 233. 62Lowry Nelson, Jr. Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 53. 82Douglas Bush, English Poetry: The Main Currents from Chaucer to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952)., p. 368. fi4o. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill:. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 70.

65Bush, p. 370.

^6Cf. C. S. Lewis, pp. 352-53. .6 7 Saintsbury, p. 351. 68John Hollander and Frank Kermode, eds., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: The Literature of Renaissance England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 155. 84 69 Saintsbury, p. 352.

7°Saintsbury, p. 368n.

7-!-Bush, p. 408.

72Cf. Graham Hough, Preface to The Faerie Queene {New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1962), pp. 10-11. 7^Robert Lathrop Sharp, From Donne to Drvden: The Revolt Against Metaphysical Poetry (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965), p. 174.

7^William B. Willcox, The Age of Aristocracy: 1688- 1830. 2nd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1971), p. 42. 75 Leavis, p. 116. 7 6 John E. Jordan, Why the Lyrical Ballads? (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), p. 177.

77stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), p. 8 6 . 78'°Ronald Bottrall, "Byron and the Colloquial Tradition in English Poetry," rpt. in English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. by M. H. Abrams (New York: Oxford Univ. Press), p. 212. 7^This independent ottava rima was found written on the back of the Poet's MS. of Canto I. Cf. The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron. ed. by Paul Elemer More (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1905), p. 745. 80Douglas Bush summarizes the critical debate re­ garding the poetic stature of John Keats in "Keats and His Ideas" (rpt. in English Romantic Poets, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 326-27. ®^For his 1926 Russian edition of St.-John Perse's Anabasis, Valery Larbaud reviews the efforts of the French poets from 1895-1925— a period "of feverish activity. Poets were completing the dislocation of the Alexandrine . . . Free verse was in the process of invention"; "Preface for and Edition of Anabase," rpt. in Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse, ed. and trans. by T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1938), pp. 101-104. 85

®^The yision seems to be that the kite Is, the crucifix.

83Cha,rles Olson argues that the primary appeal of "'COMPOSITION BY FIELD,'" as a format for dramatic rendition, should be to "not the eye, but the ear" (Perkins’ American Poetic Theory, p. 339). 84Walt Whitman, "Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass," rpt. in Perkins' American Poetic Theory, p. 141.

8-8Wh±tman, p. 141. °86 On the other hand, Whitman's "ear" can also be attributed to his familiarity with "Shakespeare, Ossian, Scott, Homer, and something of the Greek and Hindu poets, the Niebelungenlied and Dante" as well as Italian opera,- cf. James D. Hart, ed., Oxford Companion to American Literature, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965) , p. 918.

8^James Dickey, "The Poet Turns on Himself," rpt. in Perkins' American Poetic Theory, p. 365. 88M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 85. Q Q Kingsley Amis, "Introduction," in The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), p. xxi. CHAPTER TWO THE MEDIEVAL WELSH TRADITION

I. Historical Contexts

To most students of English prosody, the mention of a "Welsh tradition" often means little more than Dylan Thomas and, perhaps, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet, excellent introductions to the history of Welsh poetry have for some time been available to English students: Sir Idris Bell's The Development of Welsh Poetry appeared in 1936, and in 1953 Gwyn Williams provided An Introduction to Welsh Poetry because "there must be a large number of intelligent users of the English language who know little or nothing about this subject. "-^Although it is neither possible nor necessary, at present, to offer another survey of medieval O Welsh literature, a brief review of the often inseparable social and artistic histories of the Welsh bards from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries may help to clarify their art. This chapter will attempt to discover a consistent function to the patterned end-rhyme in the traditional verse formats employed by the Cynfeirdd and the Gogynfeirdd

66 87 (those who composed prior to the development of a rigorous system of cvnahanedd) by analyzing the twenty-four/ standard bardic meters as described in the Gramadeqau 1r Penceirddiad. It shall also attempt to demonstrate the manifestation of these principles in the Armes Prvdein and to review frequently suggested avenues of influence by which these Welsh principles may have affected the English rhyming tradition. As a matter of fact, if Williams' assessment of the familiarity of the Welsh tradition remains correct, the vocabulary of my intentions for this chapter (I hope not the intentions themselves) may have seemed already unnecessarily arcane. I wish to investigate the artistic functions of regular end-rhyme in the surviving poetry of the Earliest Welsh Bards (Cynfeirdd, c. 550-1100 a.d.) and their immediate heirs, the "sub-Cynfeirdd" or Bards to the Independent Welsh Princes (Goqynfeirdd, c. 1100- 1350 a.d.), prior to the development of a rigorous system of intralinear "harmony," by analyzing the twenty-four traditional bardic meters as described in an early four­ teenth-century "Metrical Treatise" most commonly attributed to the Welsh poet Einion the Priest. I wish to demonstrate that the original and universal function of regular end- rhyme in the earliest Welsh poetry was to structure the total form of a poem intended for aural appreciation, and that this underlying artistic principle is particularly manifest in the extended Welsh vaticination, "The Prophecy 88 of Britain" (c. 930).3 The history of Welsh poetry proper begins at approximately the same time as the language itself. The highly inflected Brythonic language had developed into the analytic syntax of Middle Welsh by the time of the earliest preserved poetry, parts at least of which are generally supposed to be of the late sixth century.^ In the Historia C Bnttonum,J Hennius names the five most notable poets about the time of Ida (who ruled as the second king of Bernicia from 547 to 559). No works survive for three of these poets— Bluchfardd, Cian and Talhaearn TadAwen— and their epithets alone suggest a certain legendary quality to their existence.*’ But fragments of the works of Taliesin and Aneirin, two of the pencerddiad (or "chief bards") known to Nennius, have been preserved. These two are the first of the Cvnfeirrd, the Foremost Bards. There exists, of course, a remarkable gap between the actual composition and the manuscript preservation of their poetry. The four major sources of the earliest surviving Welsh poetry are The Black Book of Carmarthen (c. 1170-1230), The Book of Aneirin (c. 1250), The Book of Taliesin (c. 1275) and The Red Book of Herqest (c. 1375-1425).^ The spans of five to eight centuries between the original composition and the scribal record of this poetry makes any textual criticism, dating and even attribution to a particular 89

poet especially difficult. "Y Goddoddin" in The Book of Aneirin is generally considered Aneirin's own, and little else therein;® only about a dozen shorter pieces in The Book of Taliesin are now considered authentic compositions of the pencerdd himself.^ All the earliest fragments of the Welsh craft have apparently been corrupted by later interpolations. The actual poems of Aneirin and Taliesin (such as remain) predate the forced separation of the Britains into discrete regions of the North and West (the antecedents of modern Scotland and Wales). The final schism occurred when Penda was defeated by Oswin of Northumbria in 654/5. It can be argued that the poetry of Wales per se begins with a poem of praise to Cynan Garwyn of Powys whose son had been killed in the battle of Chester (c. 615, a defeat that had already significantly weakened the link between the north and west Britains).10 The fragmentary remains of Welsh poetry from 600 to

1000 a.d. can readily be classified according to the traditional, heroic modes of verse— either molawd (eulogy) or marwnad (elegy). The names of the major Welsh poets from this period of constant turmoil include Morfran, Meugan, Arofan, Afan Ferddig and, of course, Anonymous. "Vaticinatory poetry, " such as the A m e s Prvdein (c. 930) which will be discussed below, was also a popular genre, particularly after a significant defeat by the Saxons. These "vaticinations" seem often more satiric than prophetic in both their tone and content; they were, no doubt, appreciated as revolutionary complaints rather than as accurate foretellings.'1''*' The poetry attributed to Llywarch Hen in The Black Book of Carmarthen is also most significant to an understanding of the bardic craft. These enqlvnion (three or four line stanzaic patterns discussed below) were once considered to be of sixth-century origin, but are now generally recognized as mid-ninth-century verse remnants of predominantly prose sagas.^ ^he arrival of the Normans on the isle of Britain suspended, to a large extent, the traditional enmity between Welsh and Saxons and marks a significant division in both their literary histories. But it also remains common to separate Welsh literature into its Primitive (600-800) and Middle (800-1300) periods. The fact that these standard phases (either historical or linguistic) for discussing transitions in the history of medieval Welsh literature fail to coincide itself indicates that there was a consistent development in the history of the bardic versecraft rather than a marked break such as occurred between the Saxon and Middle English traditions. Quite simply, the Normans failed to hold Wales— either politically or artistically— though their influence cannot be ignored. A second phase in the history of medieval Welsh literature does begin with their revolt against the Norman lords in 1094 and ends with their conquest two centuries later by the English nation. The death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, last prince of Wales, in 1282 was generally assumed even then to mark the end of an age. In the following year, Edward I executed Llywelyn's brother, David, and secured the English conquest. On the one hand, this new rule did much to destroy the underpinnings of the native bardic tradition; on the other hand, the destruction of courtly institutions that had preserved an extra­ ordinarily traditional mode of poetic expression did much to liberate the already vital achievements of a non- aristocratic Welsh craft. From the sixth to the thirteenth century, there existed (at least in so far as the preserved remnants indicate) an astounding consistency of technique among practitioners in the Welsh literary craft— a consistency preserved because innovation in the mode (and, to a lesser extent, the content) of poetic expression was considered illegal. 13 This statement has been challenged as an oversimplification of the rigor of the bardic system,1^ but only because it is incomplete rather than incorrect. Gruffudd ap Cynan (1054-1137) had secured the independence of the principality of Gwynedd; under his sponsorship and that of his successors, several Goqynfeirdd, or court poets, flourished. Innovations and individual styles among the bards are, on occasion, perceptible, but always within the dictates of strict tradition. The Goqynfeirdd unanimously sought a perfection rather than a rejection of the verse techniques of the Cvnfeirdd. The bards became

a legally recognized class 7 both the role of poet and the craft itself could, therefore, be considered hereditary. So, Meilyr (pencerdd to Gruffdd ap Cynan) and his son Gwalchmai ap Meilyr (1130-1180) and, in turn, his son's son, Meilyr ap Gwalchmai, are the first outstanding poets of this second phase of Welsh poetry, and all three were bards to the court at Aberffraw in Gwynedd. Hywel ab Owein (d. 1170) also flourished as a bard of Gwynedd; Hywel's verse is frequently called "innovative” and often is really so in terms of theme and tone, but never as regarding prosodic technique. Powys became the other great Welsh principality to sponsor bards. Among the most note­ worthy poets of Powys are Owein Cyfeiliog (c. 1140-1197) and Cynddelw Bryddyd Mawr (c. 1155-1200). The most famous single marwnad of the period, the lament of Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch for the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, mourns the close of the period of the Goqynfeirdd itself. Yet, almost a century after the collapse of the princely sponsorship of the bardic system, the greatest single 93

"bard" of Wales would flourish— Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. 1340-1370). Dafydd was a contemporary of Chaucer, and, in many ways, their roles as "the father of modern poetry" in 1 6 their respective languages have been considered analogous. The period between the death of Llywelyn and the advent of Dafydd ap Gwilym was indeed tumultuous, though not with­ out its poetry. The bards had lost the legal recognition of their hereditary status. And their poetry, in order to appeal to a new audience, became less aristocratic in theme and tone, but preserved formal patterns modelled on eleventh-century techniques.

The patronage of the gentry generally and of the dignitaries of the Church, which seems to have become common by the second half of the fourteenth century, ensured the perpetuation of the bardic tradition and indeed gave it a powerful impetus. . . But the impact of the political changes resulting from the events of 1282 must have been temporarily disruptive to the bardic order, and the paucity of poetry in the period we are concerned with can thus be accounted for.l?

The period of Welsh literature that follows this upheaval can be considered less conservative than the hereditary practices of the Goqynfeirdd, but remains excessively traditional in form all the same. Dafydd led a poetic upheaval in South Wales from 1350 to 1450 that resulted in what has now come to be considered the "Golden Age of 94

the Cywydd" (its most popular stanzaic pattern, discussed below). After the English conquest, both the traditional­ ly native and the newly imported (often originally Norman) modes of poetic expression could be freely blended. "The poets from now on will find it harder to make a secure and honorable living, and to resist inroads upon the technique of their craft.

It is difficult for the students of English poetry, who have become so attuned to the formally rebellious attitudes of post-Romantic poets, to conceive of the hieratic conservatism that minimized poetic experimentation within the bardic system prior to 1282. Frequent comparisons have been drawn between the bards and the Brahman caste of India, but this analogy may seek to explain the obscure only through the more obscure. There survives little religious verse of the Goqynfeirdd. ^ Though the ancestors of the bards may have once been pagan priests, the earliest surviving poetry of the bards themselves is predominantly secular, a celebration of the princely patron and his ancestors, rather than of either the native mythology or of Christianity. A clearer understanding of the bardic system may be available in a comparison of it to our own A.M.A. or the legal Bar. The bardic system could, as it were, review the work of its recognized members and, in case of malpractice, revoke licenses. Within this bardic system, poets could be further distinguished according to two entirely different criteria. First, the bards were subdivided into three classes according to the relative status of the audiences whom they served. The pencerdd sang for the prince himself, while the bardd tenlu sang to his war-band. The subject matter of both was confined to poetry in a strictly heroic mode. The third class of cerddorion, or minstrels, enter­ tained the masses with poems that included such unheroic topics as bawdy satire and love,* these cerddorion often also seem to have functioned as the cvfarwvddiaid, or prose story-tellers. When, therefore, it is suggested that the frequently overestimated "collapse" of the bardic system in 1282 liberated the Welsh tradition, little more is meant than that these three class distinctions among the bards and their respective modes of expression began to fade. Logically enough, the cerddorion apparently survived the English Conquest and its attendant elimina­ tion of native patronage in Wales better than the other, "higher" (i.e., "more highly sponsored") classes of bards. Subsequently, the less aristocratic, but still traditional poetic productions of the Welsh minstrels became the focus of the new nation's literary attention. These largely self-sustaining artists soon developed their own principles of poetic excellence. More emphasis was given 96 to the regularization of cvnghanedd, or intralinear harmony,^1 , than simply to the preservation of the * traditional end-rhyme patterns. Similarly, the less aristocratic tradition of oral prose tales flourished well beyond the end of the thirteenth century. The most famous remnants of the cvfarwvddvd tradition are the eleven tales collected in The White Book of Rhydderch (c. 1300-25) and then in The Red Book of Herqest (c. 1375,- 1425)— now known as the Mabinoqion. The second traditional system for determining the relative status of a Welsh poet made distinctions within each of the three classes of bards. Individuals were distinguished and later certified^ according to a test of technical skill in their respective crafts. This classification of bards according to their individual proficiency endured (long after the conquest of Wales) as an essential part of its educational system.23 Thus, even after the collapse of legislated class distinctions among the bards in the fourteenth century, formal conservatism could remain an extraordinarily strong force within the Welsh poetic tradition. For example, Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote according to the technical conventions of both the penceirdd and the beirrd tenlu, while his diction N. and subject matter show influences of the trouveres and the clerici vaqantes in general and of the Roman de la 97 Rose in particular. "Dafydd ap Gwilym, although most often thought of as an innovator, was fully trained in the intricacies of the bardic craft.After 1282, the Welsh bards generally abandoned the often impenetrable language of the Goqynfeirdd for a diction and a subject matter made more accessible to new audiences not steeped in the verbal conventions of the old modes. But most of the traditional rhyme patterns endured, with some modifications, into the sixteenth century, "the last during which every

reputable Welsh poet was a master of the classical m e t r e s . "25 It is with the bardic system's formal canons for the acceptable uses of end-rhyme— particularly the enqlvnion and awdl measures— that the third section of this chapter shall be primarily concerned. Naming the twenty-four "original" meters of the medieval Welsh tradition has proven almost as difficult as finding the seven hills of Rome (it is easy to see either too many or too few). "We would not be justified in attributing any deep significance to the number . . . once the number had become established, there was a strong tendency to adhere to it, merely through force of attachment to the familiar, long after its symbolic significance had been forgotten."2^ in an eisteddfod, or assembly, held at Carmarthen about 1450, Dafydd ab Edmwnd rearranged the twenty-four meters largely to account for recent practice. The earliest document to describe the traditional meters is the Gramadeq Einion Offeiriad, and even this first record of the bardic poetics reveals some modification according to contemporary innovation. But one fact remains constant in all medieval Welsh verse— a regular pattern of end-rhyme was considered essential. As Gwyn Williams remarks, "All early Welsh poetry is rhymed. The word awdl, used for the work of a chief bard, is the same as odl meaning rhyme, and an awdl was rhymed speech.In the Welsh tradition, regular end-rhyme and orally performed poetry were {and to a large extent still are) considered symbiotic. No surviving Welsh poetry predates the Welsh use of rhyme. Thus, I believe, the original functions of patterned end-rhyme, if not precisely its historical origins, may be found in this, its unmitigated use by the Welsh bards. Within the bardic tradition alone, regular end-rhyme remained, for almost a millennium, both a sufficient and a necessary condition that would define a poem as such.

II. The Question of Origins and Primacy

In 1923, George Saintsbury declared:

We will not here discuss the vexed question whether rhyme was given by Celtic to Latin or by Latin to Celtic. I have very little doubt about it; but here it does not matter, for the Englishman of 99

1200 was certain to get his notions of rhyme from Latin or French, not Irish or Welsh.28

Saintsbury's aside to a certain extent merely reflects

modern scholarship's revolt against the Celtomania29 of the nineteenth century— which seems to have sought a Gaelic origin for even the Unmoved Mover. After all, was there any reason not to imagine the Trinity as a vestige of some old Irish triad? Did not St. Patrick use this coincidence to advertise the new religion? In the ebb and flow of scholarly attention, excessive enthusiasm is normally succeeded by only excessive neglect. To a certain extent, Saintsbury's declaration champions the latter, equally invalid stance. But, also to a certain extent, Saintsbury's aside simply reflects his own common sense. The search for the origins of literary devices (especially among the shadowy data of pre-literate traditions) can grow rather frantic and often suffers diminishing returns. Regarding the "origins" of regular end-rhyme, James Travis has noted that the "seeds" (or, at least, several provocative precedents) for the art of rhyming per se can be found in verse which irrefutably predates (and presents no possible contact with) either the Latin or Celtic traditions: 1 00

For example, Egyptian verse by 2000 b.c. exhibits an artistic use of incremental repetition and triadic stanza characteristic of early Welsh verse; Chinese verse by the fifth century b.c. exhibits regular quatrains, patterned end-rime, regular word foot rhythm, and various other parallels with early Irish verse; Ethiopian verse by the fifth century a.d. exhibits a unique kind of rime; Fiji verse exhibits a use of repetition not unlike that of ancient Babylonian verse, and also a systematic use of end assonance that compares with usage in the Old French laisse, the Old Spanish iuqlar and the early Welsh verse paragraphs. One could cite further parallels from poetries so mutually remote as the Hebrew, the Eskimo and the Japanese.30

None of this rather impressive catalog has any relevance to the medieval English jongleur1s understanding of his own craft. Antecedent parallels do not compel the scholar to recognize valid precedents, if no avenue of direct influence can be demonstrated; the existence of coincidences in the appearance of literary devices, in fact, undercuts the compulsion to recognize any literary "origin" as a determining force in the devices' further development. Nevertheless, pinpointing the historical origins of regular end-rhyme may prove a more elusive task than de­ fining its primary function. The controversy between Latin and Celtic influences on the English rhyming tradition derives from an almost universal presupposition among liter­ ary historians (on both sides of the debate) that the search for a technique’s origin should ultimately discover some 1 0 1 singular source— behind a Babel of poets, from whom all prosodies flow, we suspect the Ur-poet who first rhymed, "Madam, I'm Adam." In a showdown between the influence of the Latin and Welsh traditions of rhyme on English poetry, the Latin camp inevitably wins. The simple accessibility of the Latin language and the relative prestige of all continental art seem to give its defenders an enormous advantage over celebrators of the Goqynfeirdd, whose lyrics were not readily understood by even their native audiences and whose country's name had been replaced by the rather uncomplimentary, Sassenach term, wealas or "Romanized foreigners." The language and cultural barriers between medieval English poets and the Welsh bards certainly seem higher than those that separated Gower from the Latin and French traditions. Yet, the dispersion of the Arthurian legend proves that such barriers could be circumvented. It may further be argued that language itself offers no barrier at all between the audible conspicuousness (not necessarily the translatable content) of the various cultures' end-rhyme techniques. some of my very best (and reasonably sane) friends tell me that they truly enjoy Puccini or even Wagner, though they remain completely dependent on the overpriced librettoes to discover any sense in all that sound. Saintsbury's initial comment about the "vexed question" of the origin of rhyme, in fact, camouflages several questions. 1 0 2 The debate over historical precedence between the Latin and Celtic rhyming traditions becomes moot if a common Indo-European heritage, from which each could have developed independently, should prove precedent to both.31 But the more complex and more specific questions of subsequent, mutual influences between them and then of their simultaneous influence on English verse would remain. Furthermore, the very nature of such influence remains highly questionable in itself. Only two types of people are sincerely interested in the history of prosody— poets and prosodists— and their interests differ significant­ ly. Prosodists proper may be considered the physicists of poetry, but poets are its engineers. The latter1s grasp of the former's universal principles is often more intuitive and particular than thorough and analytic; poets are constantly mucking-up the theories by preserving anomalies that work and by experimenting with innovations that defy previous categories. The question of "deep roots" for rhyme— either in the linguistic proclivities of the Indo-European language or, still deeper, in the primitive psychology of the

Indo-Europeans themselves— may now be dismissed as either immediately irrelevant or permanently unanswerable. But several, discrete questions about accessible, formal models for the Welsh poets to imitate and, then, of specific 103 avenues for these (now Welsh) techniques to influence subsequent English poetry remain pertinent. Literary historians generally assume that chronology permits causality and, hence, that precedence indicates influence. Theoretically, these assumptions are valid, though too often (for the sake of persuasio 32 ) the predicates mutate into "prove" and "demonstrate." But the education of each artist has its own chronology, and it is not necessarily guided by the neat calendar of history. In the pursuit of literary influences, the accessibility of tradition to the individual poet or to a largely isolated school of poets, such as the bards, becomes more important a concern than the history of the tradition itself. The priorities of in­ quiry for the poet and for the literary historian are, in fact, often inverted. Poets generally remain content with efficient and immediate causes (the achievements of the previous generation of poets), while historians often pursue first and remote causes (an analysis of the total anthology of all generations of poets). Furthermore, even after a tradition's accessibility to the individual artist can be determined, the sequence per se of such influences can only be demonstrated ex post facto from the poet's canon. For example, Chaucer's transition from a French to an Italian phase in his literary career happens to co­ incide with the chronological sequence of the histories of the traditions themselves. But, it need not have been so. Similarly, the influences of classical tragedy, medieval liturgical drama and modern Expressionism are all evident in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Yet, the conjoined effects of these historical influences on the particular work of art are simultaneous in the poet's imagination rather than sequential. The priority among such influences can be determined only by an inductive analysis of operative formal principles in a particular poem, and not by the chronological precedence among its antecedents. The rhyming traditions of the Welsh (from the sixth century), of the Latin (from approximately the fifth century) and of the French (from the eleventh century) poetries, all had the potential to influence the thirteenth-century poets of England. And, from the English jongleurs1 perspective, which (as Saintsbury indicated) is the proper one, these influences can all be considered co-temporal. These "roots" for rhyme in the English tradition are both deep enough and equally deep.

For over fifty years, it has been generally assumed by English prosodists that the rhyming techniques of the Welsh tradition can be neglected because they were both derivative of and less accessible than the continental traditions. It remains necessary, therefore, to clarify both the Welsh tradition's autonomy, if not its uniqueness, 105 and its initial independence, if not its isolation after the English conquest. A search for the historical precedents that influenced the formal principles of the Goqynfeirdd can stop with their own, highly legislated tradition, based on the achievements of the Cynfeirdd. By the thirteenth century, their highly elaborate rhyming system had long been thoroughly Welsh. And it is the possibility of the subsequent influences that the later bards may have had on medieval English poetry which will need to be investigated at the conclusion of this chapter. It is only the prestige of the Cynfeirdd themselves in the overall history of rhyme that has become highly debatable. In 1961, Gerard Murphy reaffirmed the theory that the techniques of Welsh end-rhyme can, in general, be derived from Latin precedents.33 j believe, however, that James Travis has since then effectively demonstrated in Celtic Versecraft the probability of the Welsh rhyming tradition's native origins.34 The debaters begins in pre­ suppositions about the relative priority of formal precedents (whose dates in themselves remain debatable). Travis per­ ceives the possibility of cognate developments in their respective histories of rhyme, analogous to the development of cognates between the languages themselves— "There is thus no more inherent necessity to seek a non-Celtic source for Celtic verse forms and ornament than for Celtic languages. 106 Parallels between the poetic techniques of medieval Latin and Welsh verse forms may simply be coincidental developments from their more remotely unified, linguistic origins. Though the question of mutual influence^ is infinitely confused by the spfecific practices of individual bards in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Travis' analysis of vestiges of the Celtic versecraft in Wales from the first to the fifth centuries a.d. offers sufficient and certainly more accessible foreshadowings of the Cynfeirdd1s rhyming techniques within the native tradition. But there comes a point in the history of the develop­ ment of any poetic technique (as in the history of all technologies) when unprecedented invention must be accounted for.

In Old Welsh verse, although it employs the same kinds of rime as Old Irish (end, internal, in­ laid, interlaced, etc.), the corresponding sounds are usually identical rather than phonetically related. Even so, sufficient instances of phonetic (or generic) rime occur to establish a similarity in principle between early Irish and Welsh r i m e . (italics mine)

Before 1903, there were countless precedents for the tradition of human flight— in gliders, in balloons and always in the individual's imagination, from Daedalus to da Vinci. But Wilbur and Orville were the first to launch 107 a self-propelled, heavier-than-air vehicle from level ground in sustained flight. Technically defined, the highly debated "precedents" for regular end-rhyme (be they systematic alliteration, assonance, internal or interlaced generic rhymes, incremental repetition, or whatever) are not fixed pattern end-rhyme at all— though they do suggest poetic environments conducive to its subsequent invention and they did become acceptable exceptions to its systematic use, or examples of "near-rhyme." The pre-medieval "origins" of regular end-rhyme suggest its rigorous use by the bards only in so far as a heap of struts, silk and bicycle wheels suggest the aeroplane. The Welsh bards "invented" regular end-rhyme— if only their own systematic patterns in their own language. From the sixth century on, patterned rhyming became the primary artistic impulse in the composition of medieval Welsh poetry, and it is this primacy that seems so exceptional in comparison to other, more flexible literary traditions of the Middle Ages. It is the traditional Welsh patterns, the largely unalterable blueprints for the proper uses of end-rhyme, strictly defined, that seem peculiar to the bardic tradition— not homeoteleuton, or phonic linkage itself. And it is the artistic functions of these set patterns that will be the primary focus of the following analysis. 108 III. The Bardic Rhyme Patterns

The details of the prosodic education of a Welsh bard prior to 1282 remain largely speculative because the transmission of that education from generation to generation was completely oral? no contemporary description of the "school's curriculum," as such,has survived. Parallels between the Welsh and Irish systems seem likely.^ And the principles of a traditionally Welsh poetics can, of course, be induced from its consistent manifestation in the poetry itself.But, rather than reviewing the entire canon of the Cynfeirdd and Goqynfeirdd in order to determine the formal functions of regular end-rhyme within the medieval Welsh versecraft, it is possible to summarize (with certain qualifications) the observations of an early fourteenth-century Welsh poet on his still conservative system. "There is one document which historians of Welsh literature and thought have regarded as being of prime importance for understanding the back­ ground of medieval Welsh poetry"^1— this is the Gramadeqau 1r Penceirddiaid, most often attributed to Enion Offeiriad. Thomas Parry's analysis of the nature of this treatise, whose very authorship remains debatable,4^ has greatly qualified a previously excessive evaluation of the Grammar’s 109 significance as an accurate record of the pre-fourteenth- century bardic practice. Parry explicity challenges a too hasty assessment of the tract as "an authoritative work, the basis of all we know about the bardic craft.In particular, Parry finds several discrepancies (only some of which are attributable to scribal modifications) between the principles of the treatise, originally composed c. 1325, and the surviving compositions of earlier bards. Parry summarizes his observations on the nature of the Grammar itself by inducing this evaluation of its author's prosodic expertise:

It appears to me that the original author of the treatise (be it Einion Offeiriad, or Dafydd Ddu, or possibly someone else) was a clever and quite well-informed dilettante, who approached the bardic craft from a personal or un-bardic stand­ point, and imposed upon it a system which was in many respects a reflection of his own whims. The system was definitely not a codification of existing practice.44

Parry's analysis of the Gramadeg indicates that its rules are, to a certain extent, tainted by its author's tendency to confuse twelfth and thirteenth-century developments in the Welsh versecraft with more primitive bardic practices. Furthermore, the Grammar may be occasionally guilty of amplificatio in order to "introduce the bards to the broader culture of Europe." 45 The first of the Grammar1s two, readily divisible sections offers little more than a mediocre adaption to the Welsh language of a systematic Latin grammar a la Priscian and Donatus. Section one need not concern us here, though it does classify syllables according to their prosodic functions.4^ But it is in the Grammar's second section {cf. Appendix 1) that the author (himself a poet striving to recapture and preserve the bardic tradition, if not a formally trained member of its shaken class structure) categorizes his own understanding of the tradition­ al Welsh rhyme patterns. Since, as Parry concludes, both Einion Offeiriad and Dafydd Ddu Athro were equally qualified to have written the Grammar (the latter may have in fact revised the original work of the former), and since the question of an exact attribution for the Grammar is in itself irrelevant to the following analysis, I will hence­ forth follow the older custom of referring to the treatise as Einion's. But it remains important to note from the start certain shortcomings and modifications that Einion, or someone very much like him, seems to have imposed on this most ancient description of the medieval Welsh versecraft. Einion's sins against the bardic prosody include those of both omission and commission. As Parry remarks, "Anyone reading this treatise would undoubtedly be surprised to find that it contains no description of cvnghanedd, Ill that most obvious of all the features of Welsh poetry. Cvnghanedd evolved gradually and without conscious effort on the part of the bards over the period between 1100 and 1350."^ The Welsh poets developed three basic kinds of intralinear harmony to supplement the interlinear harmonies of the more ancient end-rhyme patterns employed by the Cynfeirdd. Cvnghanedd Gvtsain uses alliterative links alone within the verse line; Cvnghanedd Lusg uses only internal rhymes; and Cvnghanedd Sain uses a combination of the two linking techniques. Subdivisions within each of these three basic kinds of cvnghanedd can be further categorized according to the placement of their respective links in each line. Although random examples of cvnghanedd are available in the earliest surviving Welsh poetry,^® its consistent use in bardic verse was clearly pre-dated by the Cynfeirdd * s rigorous system of appropriate end-rhyme patterns. Perhaps, Einion's failure to categorize the thirteenth century's still unsettled systematization of intralinear harmony within the more ancient, prosodic principles of Welsh versecraft reflects a certain ultra­ conservative fidelity to the original bardic priorities. On the other hand, three of Einion*s twenty-four traditional verse patterns are clearly thirteenth century inventions: Hir-a-thoddaid, Cyrch-a-chwta and Tawddgyrch Cadwynog (#'s 22, 23 and 24 below). Furthermore, Cywydd llosgyrnog (#12 below) seems to have been modelled on a precedent 112 Latin verse form. Cvnghanedd itself seems to be of no immediate concern to our overall analysis of the original functions of regular end-rhyme. So, perhaps, it is just as well that Einion neglected to comment on it in any detail. It seems likely, however, that the gradual systematization of cvnghanedd after the eleventh century (with its new emphasis on a "regular line") did much to encourage experimentation with the (heretofore unalterable) verse forms of Wales from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. I will argue that even such minimal innovations in the bardic tradition did much to mask the primary functions for patterned end-rhyme. We shall see that an analogous prosodic revolution occurred in English versecraft after Chaucer's experiments with the iambic pentameter line. In both literary traditions, the intralinear experiments were highly successful. In the simplest of terms, cvnghanedd (like regular rhythm in English verse) first supplemented, then confused, and finally supplanted an earlier rhyming tradition. Einion wrote his Grammar during a period of confusion, prosodic as well as political. A result of this confusion may have been Einion's insertion of four relatively new measures within the Welsh tradition. Similarly, the englvnion measures, once favored by the cerddorion. do not seem to deserve so much attention in a treatise allegedly presenting the practice 113 of the penceirddiaid. ^ But if, in fact, two of the four new patterns are the author's own inventions, modern sceptics suspect fraud— just as they sneer at the inclusion of Deuteronomy among the Five Books of Moses. Whether Einion was himself duped or merely wished to canonize his own compositions, the Grammar1s four highly questionable measures do seem to fit the tradition and could be con­ sidered justified thereby— the author's original motives in themselves do not matter. It is sufficient to note that for a Welsh verse form to be considered valid in the fourteenth century it still had to be labelled "bardic." Einion's description of the twenty-four traditional Welsh measures remains the first and the best touchstone for determining the underlying principles of medieval Welsh verse. A schematic representation of the Grammar1s description of "bardic" rhyme patterns will help to reveal end-rhyme1s primary and consistent function within the Welsh tradition as a whole. Other qualifications regarding the actual "traditionalism" of individual verse forms will be noted parenthetically in the schematization that follows. But it is with the Grammar1s fourteenth-century sensibility regarding regular end-rhyme's intended effects that the subsequent analysis will be primarily concerned. The twenty-four Welsh measures presented in the Gramadeq are readily divisible into the three major group­ ings of Englynion, Cywydd and Awdl measures. Only the 114 shorter Englynion measures fit our standard understanding of the stanza as a fixed number of lines with a set rhyme scheme. The Awdl and Cywydd measures seem rather to estab­ lish ratios of syllable count to rhyme placements; in theory, the recurrence of such end-rhymes may extend many of the following "stanzaic patterns" indefinitely. Nor do the "end-rhymes" of the Welsh measures always take their normal position as a line's final phoneme. An a priori system of rhythmic regularity is not evident in the fixed syllable count of these Welsh verse lines except when supplemented by cynqhanedd, and, as a general rule, two equally stressed, sequential end-rhymes were considered tasteless by the bards. A recurrent element that links adjacent lines in several of the following Welsh measures is the qair cyrch (cf. measures #1, 3, 4 and 15 below). The qair cyrch consists of the one to three syllables that follow its line's internal placement of a given measure's principal rhyme (the end-rhyme in other lines) ,* one of the phonemes in a qair cyrch will be echoed by assonance, alliteration or rhyme in the first half of the following line. In each of the following schemata, the first and the last placements of a primary rhyme, that together define the measure as a verse unit, have been circled. It should be noted that in every instance, the measure's primary rhyme becomes an end-rhyme in its final line. 115

The Traditional Welsh Measure

In the following schematic representation of Einion's catalog of traditional Welsh measures, each period equals one syllable of undetermined length or stress. Identical lower case letters ("a,a; b,b"; etc.) indicate phonemes that must rhyme exactly. Corresponding upper and lower case letters indicate the placements of near-rhyme (a,A; b,B",* etc.). Asterisks over a period indicate the approximate locations of assonance or alliteration ("?").

A. Englynion

1. Enqlyn penfyr {the "short-ended" englyn, also called englyn o'r hen ganiad, or "englyn in the old style")

* ...... a

© 2. Englyn Milwr ("the soldier's englyn")

© ...... a

© 3. Englyn unodl union (the straight, one-rhymed englyn) (continued) © * * V X. Paladr ("the shaft")

...... a yr esovll ("the wings") © Englyn unodl crwca (the crooked, one-rhymed englyn) ® ...... a ...... a . *- * © Englyn cyrch (Stricter craftsmen insisted that the initial rhyme not fall on two stressed syllables.)

© ...... a ...... b . . - b . .(a)(the internal rhyme may occur in any syllable before the line's caesura) Englyn proest dalgron Rhyme vowels need only be of the same length and may be followed by the vowel W or by a consonant. short vowels long vowels ...... liw/ gwiwder lien ...... law/ mynor qwin ...... glew/ galar tan ...... byw/ dolur cwn Englyn lleddfbroest Cf. #6; rhymes using any combination of the four dipthongs: ae, oe, wy, ei. 117 8. Enqlyn proest qadwvnoq (cadwvn means "chain") ...... A

© ...... A

© B. The Cywvdd Measures In the cywydd measures, the couplet is generally considered the basic unit of measure and may recur as often as the bard desired. 9* The awdl qywvdd ...... b . . . b ...... c . . c . . . (Cf. #5 on the placement of internal rhyme.) 10. Cywvdd deuair hirion (long-lined couplet) A 7-syllable couplet with final rhymes, one of which must be unstressed. 11. Cywydd deuair fvrion (short-lined couplet) Cf. #10; a 4-syllable line. 12. Cywydd llosqyrnoq ...... b ...... b 118 C. The Awdl Measures As with the cywydd measures, the awdl may be freely extended, 13. Rhupunt . . . b . . . b {. . . b . . . b) . . . (a) . . . c . . . c (. . . c . . . c) . . . 14. Cvhvdedd fer

©

© 15. Byr a thoddaid

©* - |i toddaid byr

a (> cyhydedd fer © ) 16. Clogyrnach © ...... a . . . . b .... b . . . b . (ja} 17. Cyhydedd Naw Ban (Usually used for extremely long sequences of rhyme.)

© ...... a

( 0 ) 119 18. Cyhydedd Hir (Each line is often printed as four.) . . . .b....b....b... (aj • . . . c .... c .... c .. . (?) 19. Toddaid (Generally used with other forms.)

© - b . . . b .... a ...... a . . c *.c....« (^) 20. Gwawdodvn

a 9-syllable couplet + a toddaid (or cyhydedd hir) = 4-line stanza

21. Gwawdodyn Hir Cf. #20; two or more couplets precede the toddaid 22. Hir a thoddaid (Probably not one of the truly ancient measures.)

© ...... a ...... a

...... a a b 120 23. Cyrch a. chwta (Probably not one of the truly ancient measures.)

© ...... a ...... a ...... a ...... a ...... a b

24. Tawddqyrch cadwvnoq (Cf. #13.)

. . . b . . . C . . . C .. . (d) ...b...d...d...0

Despite its surface neatness, there are many in­ consistencies in the above system. Different rules are used to distinguish different verse forms from one another. Likewise, several distinctions seem more accidental than substantial because they are not applied uniformly. Some of the measures differ only in their syllable count; for example, the hirion and fvrion forms of cywydd deuair (#10 & #11). Others differ only in their line count, like the qwawdodvn measures (#20 & #21). Some measures simply vary the order of elements within their respective stanza patterns; for example, the union and crwca varieties of the enqlvn unodl (#2 & #3) simply invert the order of 121 the paladr and esavll. Other forms are distinguished only by the nature of their rhyme elements; in particular, the three proest ("half-rhyme") varieties of enqlyn (#6, #7, & #8). Again, Einion's division of the tradition­ al measures into twenty-four seems probably more symbolic than real. Neither syllable count nor rhythm pattern may be considered the most important criterion for determining form in the earliest Welsh verse. Rhythm offers no real rival to the claim of rhyme for priority in the bardic definition of what makes a poem; fixed rhythm patterns are not any concern of the stanza as a whole. Rather, the relation of stress and alliteration within a line is a locally determined consideration— each complementing the occurrence of the other, but neither determining the definition of a verse form.

Syllable count, then, seems to offer a more serious challenge to the claim of rhyme for primacy in the Welsh craft's technical hierarchy. Kenneth Jackson argues: "The principle of the line is not a matter of alternation of stresses, as in English poetry, but the number of sylla- bes in the line; this is, or should be, fixed according to a regular pattern, though there is some latitude which in many cases may really be due to the imperfect preservation of the text."^® Twenty-two of Einion's twenty-four measures do indeed fix a definite syllable count per line. 122

And all establish a definite ratio of syllables to rhymes in each line. But the former seems the more flexible of the two criteria and, therefore, dependent upon a poet1s initial selection of a traditional pattern for the latter. At best, syllable count is a factor equal in importance to rhyme, not superior. But there are further indications that rhyme pattern provides the first determination of a poem's form. For example, the gair cyrch is employed in seven of the above measures (both enqlynion and awdl) including the toddaid and all measures that employ a toddaid byr: englyn penfvr, enqlvn unodl union and crwca, byr a thoddaid, qwawdodyn and qwawdodyn hir. The gair cyrch itself is difficult to define as a fixed quantity, however, since it may be one, two or three syllables long— its "length" de­ pending on how far from the line's conclusion the stanza- defining rhyme falls. If Einion is even only eighty per cent accurate in his description of the bardic techniques, it seems clear that the acceptance of any new rhyme pattern always defined a substantially new stanzaic form. For example, the rhupunt measure, found in the oldest surviving Welsh verse, is impossible to define as a fixed form except according to its rhyme pattern. Internal rhyme can extend the rhupunt1s line length from twelve to twenty syllables 123 (in multiples of four). At the discretion of a scribe or printer, "A rhupunt may be written out as one line or each of its divisions may be taken as a line."^1 When subdivided at its internal rhymes into separate lines, the resulting rhupunt "stanza" equals three to five lines of four syllables each, and may appear analogous in its workings to the more familiar terza rima. In the Italian mode, however, the stanza-linking middle line's, stressed end-rhyme can vary at random throughout the poem just so long as it is maintained by the first and third lines of the immediately succeeding stanza. Within an isolated stanza of terza rima one can find no regulation of the second line's final phoneme. In rhupunt, however, the rhyming principle defines the stanza's terminal points; the unifying rhyme occurs at the conclusion of the first and final lines. There exists no opportunity for linking this verse unit to another beyond those boundaries. When the principal end-rhyme of a rhupunt cannot be repeated in its appropriate locale, and only then, that particular awdl concludes. Albeit, a new rhupunt may immediately commence (introducing a new a-rhyme in our schema). But this situation would be more analogous to a succession of Spenserian stanzas than to the tightly interlocking pattern of terza rima. Mutatis mutandis, these same principles apply to cyhydedd hir and cawddqyrch cadwynoq and, with other qualifications, define all twenty-four measures. 124 In medieval Welsh poetry, the term strophe must be defined, in a rather unfamiliar way, as the regular re­ currence of a primary rhyme which is always in the final position in the concluding line. It is generally accepted that, "The basic element of coherence in a strophe, a stanza, is end-rhyme."^2 it is seldom claimed, however, that rhyme alone provides the most important and, perhaps, the original definition of the stanza as an audible form. The Welsh bards implicitly made just this claim. Thomas Parry ignores this possibility when he claims that "with one exception, namely, the enqlyn" (an extremely large exception, it seems) "the stanza was not an original feature of Welsh poetry."33 Such a series of lines as schematized below may be considered possible (though unappealing) in Welsh verse: . . .b...b...b...b... (a) * t ■ C • • • O • 4 ■ C • • ■ C • • « cL . . . d . . . d . . . a • • • 6 • « • 6 • Q ...f...f...f...a ...g...g...g...0 I do not know if Einion would himself have considered such a poem as either one stanza in the rhupunt mode or a bizarre series of (more than one, and therefore) three rhupunt "couplets." I would simply suggest that he could (and theoretically should) consider this pattern to rep­ resent a single stanza; it maintains the four-to-one ratio of syllables to rhyme in each line and is unified 125 throughout by the a-rhyme. The proposed variety in the quantity of syllables between the stanza's principal rhymes cannot be considered too offensive to Welsh ears, since exactly this phenomenon occurs in cloavrnach, enqlyn cyrch, hir a. thoddaid, cyrch a chwta and all measures that employ the gair cyrch. It seems clear to me, therefore, that the bards defined the stanza itself, or verse paragraph (though in Welsh the effects are phonic rather than syntactic), solely according to the anticipation of a single end-rhyme— the last one. No matter if a cyhydedd fer be maintained for two or two-hundred lines, either case should be considered a single and conspicuously formal awdl. The overwhelming significance of rhyme to early Welsh verse has invited much speculation about its causes and effects. Is odl the natural vestige of a language that remained highly inflected until just before the sixth century? What in­ fluence did it have on the frequently less cultivated conquerors of the Cymry? One thing seems certain; the ancient Welsh bards unanimously accepted a single judgment of.prosodic skill. Crudely stated, quantity often indicates quality. The bards created a craft in which there can be no such thing as excessive rhyme. This artificiality and formal conservatism has made Welsh verse particularly vulnerable to be criticized, even 126

by its foremos.t admirers, as excessively superficial. Thomas Stephens lamented, a century ago, that: "With this deficiency of really poetical thought, fire, and sentiment, the conventionality of bardism has much to do; and by fix­ ing an artificial standard of versified perfection, they concentrated attention upon the word, and neglected the spirit of their poems." 54 Analogous criticisms have been made about Celtic metalwork, about their manuscript illumination, and about the primitive fascination with the intricacies of geometric art in general. These criticisms have, in turn, been more than adequately criticized else­ where. It is not my primary intention to offer an aesthetic defense of the Welsh versecraft's enduring appeal. But I hope to clarify the original conditions under which the bards' apparently excessive emphasis on regular end-rhyme could and should be appreciated.

IV. The Formal Functions of Medieval Welsh Rhyme Patterns

It should be clear from the above descriptions that the exact patterning of regular end-rhyme was the only, completely necessary and ubiquitous formal feature of Welsh poetry from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries. No equivalent claim can be made for the poetry of any other nation for such a duration of time. One can also 127 claim that the bardic conventions ceased to be universally applied only after medieval Welsh poetry ceased to be composed. It seems proper, therefore, to seek the "essence" of this formal technique within the principles and conditions for performance of the bardic prosody, for which the technique itself has long been considered its uniquely essential feature. As Sir Idris Bell observed,

. . . in all Welsh poetry, even down to Huw Morris in the seventeenth century, and beyond, it was a fundamental principle that in verse sound is as important as sense. The poetry was written to be sung or recited, and the hearers must be de­ lighted by the chime and clash of rhyme and alliteration. Sound being equally important with sense.nthe latter could on occasion be neglected. {italics mine)

More modern scholars might balk at Bell's use of the word "written" to describe a predominantly oral tradition's mode of composition. Yet, the implication of Bell's, perhaps hasty, verb choice— that the bards offered a poetic text to be performed both aloud and exactly as composed— seems a more accurate description of the Goqynfeirdd1s verse than an equally hasty comparison of them to "oral formulaic" poems might suggest. The interlinear rhyme patterns of this Welsh tradition offer a more fixative system for the composition of a particular poem in toto than did the intralinear links of either the Greek or Anglo-Saxon, formulaic traditions. This fact has led many scholars to suggest that rhyme's primary function was to assist the performer's memory. Even when the validity of this argument is granted, it tells us nothing about end-rhymes1 formal functions; expediency does not offer aesthetic justification. But end-rhyme also fixed the conspicuous form of a given Welsh poem in two, completely audible ways: it both indicated individual line length (i.e., the exact count of ametrical syllables), and it clearly marked the terminal lines, first and last, of the multiple verse unit (i.e., what we might call the verse paragraph of an awdl measure or the stanzas of enqlvnion). Regular end-rhyme performs these two formal functions simultaneously in all of Einion's twenty-four "traditional" measures, and nothing more is aesthetically demanded by the patterns than that the rhymes themselves be exact and audibly conspicuous. Such "parallel" uses of rhyme are, however, the very features of end-rhyme in general that Wimsatt finds least appealing when they occur in post-Chaucerian, English poetry. Thus, there exists a fundamental difference between the intended modes of appreciation for these two poetic traditions that distinguishes the formal appeal of their respective uses of end-rhyme.

The original function of end-rhyme in bardic verse, whose patterns are fixed by the primary end-rhyme's final placement, seems to have been to provide audible structure— 129 not merely between lines within a measure, but to each of the twenty-four measures as a strophic unit. We habitual­ ly define the stanza in poetry as a grouping of some fixed number of lines, and this habit has led Thomas Parry to assert that the stanza per se was not an original feature of Welsh verse. But if we consider the Welsh strophe to be a set of sequential rhymes, and if we admit that the number of lines in a run of blank verse can be perceived only visually, it follows that patterned end-rhyme audibly defined the structural unit of Welsh poetic form. The primary functions of rhyme must be understood in terms of formal structure for an oral performance. Since the bards and their immediate audiences found it difficult to conceive of excessive structure in a poem, all exact rhymes were good rhymes. Furthermore, such a conception of the structural function of patterned end-rhyme could permit the linkage of units (and not merely lines) within an ex­ tended poem. The more rhyme patterns a poem incorporated, the more audible form it offered. Such a quantitative guide to determining the technical quality of a given Welsh poem is clearly demonstrated in the Armes Prvdein from the Canu Taliesin. "The Prophecy of Britain" is a vehemently anti-Saxon poem and, dating from the early tenth century, is probably the oldest ex­ ample of Welsh prophetic verse. It exhorts the Welsh and all Britons to unite and revolt successfully; no reference 130 is made to the Normans. The "Prophecy's" surviving text consists of 199 lines which break down into eight awdl units. The shortest awdl of the Armes equals eighteen lines; its longest offers fifty-three rhymes in a series.^ Each awdl would be considered an astounding, possibly miraculous (if not good) achievement were it to be paralleled in English verse. 57 The technical bravura of the Armes becomes even more apparent when one realizes that, although there are eight distinct awdl in the poem, the poet re­ quired only half that many different phonemic clusters to make those rhymes and seems to have varied their use accord­ ing to a deliberately interlocking pattern:

rhyme base lines awdl # -yn 1-23 i 45-68 iii

87-106 v

-ed 24-44 _ ii «J

-an 69-86 iv 127-146 vii

-yd 107-126 vi

147-199 viii 131

It should also be noted that the first and final rhyme sequences in the poem, in themselves, account for almost two-thirds of all the lines. In Welsh, crude verbal repetition for the sake of exact rhyme is quite successfully avoided as it cannot be, under similar conditions, in English. Thus, for the sixty- five lines of the Armes that conclude with an -vn rhyme, fifty-three different words are used (Cf. Appendix I). Only three words repeat as an end-rhyme more than twice (Phrydyn, qenhyn, almyn). More significantly, the exact repetition of an end-rhyme word within any single awdl also occurs only three times (genhyn: 11. 2 & 11, 88 & 102; allmyn: 11. 94 & 106). And always, at least eight lines separate repetitions from one another. Perhaps it is only because such pyrotechnics are impossible to achieve in English that it has become customary to detest the attempt. In Welsh, however, the longer the final rhyme recurs, the longer the stanza itself endures, and the more it can be appreciated by its listeners. Logically enough, the final and most climatic awdl of the Armes Prvdein is also the longest. Since it is the longest, it is by Welsh standards the most impressive, the most artistically made and, therefore, the most dramatic. This use of patterned end-rhyme to structure strophes and then entire poems (which have not been bounded a priori to any fixed length) gives 132 the earliest Welsh poetry its frequently acknowledged in­ toxicating quality. And a good run of rhyme was apparently consumed like good mead— the more, the better. The following conditions seem to have made such regular end-rhyme a completely necessary element of bardic poetry: — the performance of such poetry preserved a fixed text, but was completely oral; — the appreciation of such poetry had to be immediate and aural; — the stress pattern of the Welsh poetic line was largely unfixed. These first two conditions of bardic verse illuminate the artistic potential for simple end-rhyme as a formal function in general; the third condition explains the necessity for the invention of such rhyming devices under certain circum­ stances which can themselves be explained either by the exigencies of the historical development of the Welsh language or by the exigencies of bardic performance. The necessity for end-rhyme1s fixative pattern in a poetic tradition whose language suffers from an instability of stress-placement may indeed have generated the develop­ ment of patterned end-rhyme; there exists a cliche to this effect regarding all inventions. The pronunciation changes that unstabilized the Welsh language occurred at precisely 133

the time when the bardic versecraft first emerged, es­ tablished its fixed principles and then flourished in 58 practice. Coincidence suggests causality; so, the necessity for regular end-rhyme may indeed have been "originally" an accident of the evolution of a vernacular language. A similar argument can be made for the "origins" of Latin rhyme. But such explanations offer only a negative defense of rhyme— end-rhyme alone provided poetic form to medieval verse because no other options were linguistically available. Yet, regular end-rhyme endured as a formally successful verse technique long after its linguistic necessity had diminished. The systematization of cvnghanedd, which Einion largely neglected, clearly required a language which had by then developed stable stress placement. Furthermore, the diction of the Gogynfeirdd had already become a "literary language," as removed from the common usage of twelfth- century Wales as Augustan Latin from the vulgar diction of first-century Rome.5 9

Modern English prosodists generally consider stress to be the foundation of all poetry, and rhyme, its optional ornament. The Welsh bards, however, inverted this system of prosodic priorities— apparently, at first, because they were linguistically compelled to. But, although the exigencies of a language's development may best suggest 134 the origins of regular rhyme, the artistic requirements of bardic performance seem more significant factors in under­ standing the formal functions of the craft once it had developed and then became rigorously preserved. It should again be noted that the Welsh bards generally avoided the coincidence of sequential final stresses and end-rhymes; but, unlike our own heirs to Surrey, the bards preferred rhyme patterns to fixed metrical systems. In considering more general conditions for the public reading of any poem, Henry Lanz observed that, "There are, of course, several different ways to read each verse. The performers' inflections, which normally produce "dramatic readings" and which can be as numerous as the performers themselves, can affect the rigor of fixed scansion. Lanz argues further that "a metrical scheme is never strictly followed in the practical composition of poetry . . . rime restores the rhythm distorted by inter­ ruptions . . . Rime, therefore, creates a regular super­ meter which is seldom interrupted . . . Thus rime has an organizing function in the metrical composition of the verse. It helps us to recognize the end of a metrical period by beating its melodious drum." Lanz's more generic observations seem fundamentally correct in reference to bardic verse, though they have been seriously challenged in the last fifty years. Lanz pursued a uniform function 135 for end-rhyme (which he did not clearly distinguish from the functions of rhyme in itself), a function that would apply equally well to all poetries for physical reasons. Lanz would have rhyme redefine the (somewhat irregular) line; the Welsh bards used end-rhvme alone to define the audible strophe. Many of the metrical "interruptions" to which Lanz refers in both the composition and performance of poetry can now, through the Halle-Keyser system, be recognized as thoroughly valid stress equivalents. Furthermore, if we accept Lanz's musical analogies at all, we must recognize that end-rhyme, prior to the thirteenth century, functions in Welsh verse not as a "super-meter" (a notion that may, however, explain the subsequent systematization of cynqhanedd), but as the meter of the bards. Welsh end- rhyme in itself has the potential to provide a completely self-sufficient structure for the aural appreciation of form— under the first two conditions for the performance of poetry noted above. This definition of the appeal of simple (i.e., "parallel") end-rhyme is highly restricted; the debate from taste regarding the "phonic appeal" of rhyme per se remains a separate question. It is the aesthetic appeal of the regularity of patterned end-rhyme (a now distasteful assertion) that I seeJc to clarify. And I suggest that the peculiar (because so exclusively constant) conditions of Welsh medieval verse best clarify the 136 unmitigated, formal functions of regular end-rhyme. These same functions can be perceived in the verse of other languages, but only with decreasing clarity as the aural conditions for its appreciation diminished. End-rhyme is audible structure; it is the form of bardic verse. From the enduring success of patterned end-rhyme in the Welsh tradition, we learn the optimum conditions for its aesthetic appreciation; and we can postulate that the artistic success of end-rhyme's primary functions in other poetries must correspond to the bardic conditions of verse performance. The poem exists as a fixed form prior to its oral performance. In order for the form of a specific poem to be audibly perceptible upon first hearing, the form itself should be traditional, that is, familiar to the audience as such. In her consideration of English poetry, Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued correctly that end- rhyme itself is not technically sufficient for an artistical­ ly successful closure. Sonnets that depend on a mere couplet for formal completion can be considered poorly con-

£ n eluded sonnets— trite is the normal assessment. And we tend to think of the sonnet as primarily a fixed number of metrically regular lines (or an equivalent system of stresses to account for Hopkins); the sonnet's rhyme schemes may vary. For the bards, however, a new rhyme pattern always defines a new measure— line length and line count 137 do not. In medieval Welsh poetry, the audible completion of a traditional measure's familiar pattern, through the final placement of the measure's primary rhyme which often occurred in its initial line as well, announces, and it alone can announce, the total aural form of that poem. Regular end-rhyme in bardic verse is never merely a sup­ plemental link between two discrete (i.e., formally es­ tablished .a priori) lines. Rather, rhyme is orally required first to define most Welsh lines by marking their terminal syllables. More significantly, medieval Welsh end-rhymes always frame a multiple-line form ("the audible strophe") whose repetition, in turn, structures the entire poem. Only after the verse-line itself could become a focus for formal attention (i.e., through its metrical regular­ ization, or through its visual perception, or, most commonly, through both) would these primary functions of patterned end-rhyme be considered excessive or blatant. The fourteenth century saw the realization of this possibil­ ity in both England and, to a lesser extent, in Wales. As noted, the bards developed three major types of cvnqhanedd; "Each of these kinds is subdivided according to the position of the recurring sounds within the line and to the accented or unaccented nature of the syllable at the internal pause and at the end of the line"^3 (italics mine). But the bardic tradition of avoiding the coincidence of final 138 stresses and final rhymes (so necessary in English verse) may have diminished cynqhanedd1s impact on the simultaneous appreciation of regular end-rhyme's stanzaic functions. In England, however, after Chaucer had set a formal standard for the pentameter line, the primary functions of an imported tradition for regular end-rhyme seem to have be­ come quickly clouded and were gradually dismissed. It is too often asserted that medieval poets "surren­ dered to the general tendency of medieval civilization— an indiscriminating appetite for style,that medieval audiences, in their folly, enjoyed trite rhymes, but that our taste has evolved beyond such simple-minded appreciation. Rather, half a millenium of English poets have, since Chaucer, responded to new conditions for the appreciation of rhyme. We have forgotten that the bards, as public performers of oral poetry and not just its composers, in­ sisted on the formal necessity of regular end-rhyme for aesthetic reasons. And many English poets, when they intend their compositions for an audience's immediate, aural appreciation (e.g., musical lyrics and light verse) under conditions analogous to the bardic tradition, still defend the enduring appeal of regular end-rhyme's primary function— audibly to define a poem's total form by means of exact rhymes. 139

V. The Welsh Tradition in English Verse

James Travis, himself a good "disciple of Ogmios," offers both a rationale for and a list of Celtic in­ fluences on subsequent English poetry:

Following the Norman Conquest, the struggle for freedom in England shifted from a contest of Celt and Saxon to a contest uniting Celt and Saxon against the Norman overlord . . . The poetry of Middle English henceforth begins to exhibit Celtic traits, at both the popular and learned levels. Sumer is icumen in has Celtic stanzaic form. It is the lyric (likely a trans­ lation, certainly an imperfect fit) to music of Celtic provenance (the Reading Rota). Layamon's Brut has obvious affiliations with Welsh literature. The verse termed Skeltonic is an English variant of a stanzaic form common to Welsh for centuries before its appearance in English. The poet of Pearl and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight combines a creative use of Anglo-Saxon alliterative versecraft with stanzaic devices whose provenance is Celtic. Shakespeare makes bantering use of Skeltonics to satirize rustic versifiers. ^

It seems likely that the mutual isolation of the Welsh and Anglo-Saxon traditions— both political and poetical— could have ended at once, in 1066. Unfortunately, the potential list for clear imitations of the bardic tradition by specific Middle English poems is just about exhausted by Travis' summary, possibly because Wales never conquered England. For example, the debt of the Alliterative Revival to Welsh precedents can first be challenged by the native Anglo-Saxon tradition; "Middle English alliterative verse is similar to Old English alliterative verse in many ways; this is likely enough, since the two kinds of verse arise at different times from a single continuous tradition. No doubt, the alliterative tradition may have adapted its native conventions to the challenge of other poetic traditions. "But it is also to be expected that over a period of several centuries significant changes in English alliterative verse will have occurred because of the force exerted by external and internal changes in the 6 7 language proper." Robert William Sapora's recent in­ vestigation of such changes modifies the Halle-Keyser theories of stress pattern in the Old English line to accommodate Middle English verse in the same tradition. Such a study of metrical rules for the composition of independent lines need not consider end-rhyme; though there are precedents for rhyming in Old English verse, their number is minimal and their availability to Middle English poets seems dubious. Furthermore, the end-rhymes of the Alliterative Revival are, at best, intermittent. The end-rhymes of either version of Layamon's Brut can hardly be considered "regular"; no rigorous system of placement has yet bee discerned. Ironically, it seems to have been 141 through the poetry of their much detested Norman overlords that the English came vicariously to imitate rhyming techniques of possibly Celtic origins. Travis argues that "Layamon's use of rime need not have been inspired exclusively by Wace."^® Still, Wace's octosyllabic couplets provided the most clearly accessible model for Layamon's own and rather idiosyncratic pursuit of form through rhyme. Similarly, the content of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has Celtic precedents that predate Norman adaptions of the Arthurian material; the familiarity of a West Midland English poet with bardic conventions in the fourteenth century is also defensible. Though the "bob'" and "wheel" does not fit any of the twenty-four traditional Welsh measures, its function in establishing closure for Gawain's stanzaic form seems to parallel bardic techniques. The number of alliterative lines in a stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight can range from twelve to thirty- eight lines; the duration of the "audible strophe" is, thus, not established prior to its completion through rhyme. For closure, a single stress bob is annexed syntactically to the final alliterative line; the annexation is most dften extremely obvious. In Part I of Gawain, all but three (i.e., in stanzas x, xiv and xx) of the bobs are adjectives or adverbs or prepositional phrases, which 142 function as such, added onto the previous line's main clause. The bob always introduces the concluding line's final rhyme. For example, the first bob-and-wheel of Gawain's first stanza begins after its fourteenth line:

wyth wynne, a Where werre and wrake and wonder b Bi sythes has wont ther-inne a And oft both blysse and blunder b Ful skete has skyfted synne. a

The bob clearly anticipates the completion of the wheel, and together they announce the conclusion of their total stanza as a formal unit. The shortness of the bob (and only its shortness, since its rhyme placement is clearly inverted) might suggest the Gawain poet's familiarity with the gair cyrch. A more persuasive parallel may be found in the epigrammatic quality of the wheel, whose function seems analogous to that of enqlvnion in the prose tales of the cvfarwvdiaid. Even so, the Gawain poet was at most adapting the rhyming tradition of the bards to his own alliterative tradition and not simply imitating. Thus, the influence of the Welsh tradition on medieval English verse must be perceived and defined in terms of formal function, but cannot be in terms of specific forms. The Alliterative Revival's potential debt to the bardic tradition has, in any event, been considered an isolated 143 phenomenon— both chronologically and geographically; the Revival did not itself become the "mainstream" of subsequent English prosody. As for the intricate rhyming of Skelton, it may be considered either idiosyncratic or inspired by the tirade tradition in French verse, rather than conscientiously modelled on awdl forms. Certainly by Shakespeare's time, the excessiveness of any medieval rhyming tradition had become a potential source of parody. The argument continues regarding origins; indeed, the tirade tradition may itself be derived from Celtic influences on the continent.^® But the appearance of extended runs of sequential end-rhymes in English verse soon became confined to poetry with a "lighter" tone, and more gradually came to be considered as ludicrous in itself as the pomposity of

Owen Glendower in Henry IV, Part X* It is possible that Geoffrey Chaucer could have communicated with Dafydd ap Gwilym— a dubious speculation. But it seems more pertinent to suggest that Chaucer and the English jongleurs before him probably had some contact with the performance of Welsh poetry in general, rather than with the specific poems of a specific bard.^l I have conceded that the "language barrier" between the Welsh and English versecrafts of the Middle Ages can be considered quite real in terms of exact imitation,- the bardic measures are too closely connected to the 144 intricacies of Middle Welsh to be readily adopted by another language. I will also concede that the twenty- four measures of the Goqynfeirdd may have been generally unknown, as such, in England. But the medieval English jongleurs, no doubt, heard some bardic verse in their travels. And the aural appeal of such end-rhymes need not be translated in order to be perceived. Nor have I argued for an exclusively Welsh influence on the flourishing of regular end-rhyme in medieval English poetry. I am willing to grant to the English jongleurs as much independence in establishing their own versecraft as I granted the Welsh bards (though this may seem much more independence than their Norman overlords were willing to grant). I hope, however, to have established that the primary function of regular end-rhyme, its informing necessity in the Welsh tradition, answers the aesthetic demands of its intended mode of appreciation. This primary function is achieved by the consistent place­ ment of a primary rhyme that unifies each of the traditional Welsh measures. And, in so far as these same conditions applied to the performance of Middle English poetry prior to the rise of an intended mode of privately read appreciation, the English poets often had to meet the same formal demands as the bards. It should, thus, be possible to sort the more popular verse forms of medieval English poetry according to an analysis of whether or not 145 they fulfill the primary formal function of regular end- rhyme as defined by the bardic tradition. All couplet forms seem to preserve the primary function of end-rhyme as an audible signal of the measure's total structure. The individual lines of Middle English couplets can have stress patterns that range from three to seven beats per line. Since Chaucer introduced the iambic pentameter couplet to English verse late in the fourteenth century, it has been common to consider the couplet as a unique entity, distinct in principle from other, more extended stanzaic patterns. And since Chaucer, there has been a certain validity to this distinction? the rhyme pattern of the heroic couplet cannot be modified without also being destroyed or, at least, transformed into blank verse. Before Chaucer, however, the "fourteener," or ballad-meter, was the most popular measure of medieval English verse; it rivalled the prestige of the pentameter well into the Renaissance, and still survives as an aesthetically viable verse form. The ballad measure is often printed as a four-line stanza (x^a^x^a^) because there is almost always a caesura after the fourth stress. Yet, in the twelfth-century Poema Morale and the thirteenth- century Judas, the "line-terminating" caesura could fall after the third stress— in which case, only the measure's twin end-rhymes audibly structured the stanza's total form. 146

Layamon's attempt to adapt the Anglo-Norman octosyllabic couplet may not have been entirely successful, but the originally French form for a shorter, four-beat couplet was consciously imitated by medieval English poets for non-alliterative verse; the quatrameter couplet's appearance in English poetry runs from the twelfth century's The Owl and the Nightingale and the thirteenth century's Land of Cokavne through the early fourteenth-century romance of Sir Orfeo to John Barbour's The Bruce and John Gower's Confessio Amantis in Chaucer's time, and beyond— these examples hardly survey the four-beat couplet's popularity in Middle English poetry, but they may indicate its chronological, geographical and tonal range. As for the "bump-and-run11 metricality of the three-beat couplet which informs the thirteenth-century romance of King Horn, it quickly becomes all too clear that "the consistent rhyme scheme is the central device of versification. (Syllabic stress is often irregular)."73 The English couplet's use of precisely two, sequential end-rhymes has become clearly distinguishable from the more involved rhyme patterns of verse forms that we now, more commonly label "stanzaic." Nevertheless, I shall attempt to demonstrate in my third chapter that the formal function of twin end-rhymes in some of the earliest Middle English romances could be considered primary and analogous to the bardic measures' 147 more elaborate conventions. The simultaneous popularity of these five major varieties of couplets in Middle English poetry {with their three-beat, four-beat, seven- beat or, after Chaucer, five-beat lines) indicates that the aural appreciation of verse in England could also accept variations in stress schemes so long as a familiar end-rhyme pattern remained constant. On the other hand, several clearly discernible stanzaic patterns that were also extremely popular in Middle English verse offer no indication of regular end-rhyme's primary function as defined by the Welsh tradition. In all twenty- four of the traditional bardic measures, the primary rhyme that links each pattern as a formal unit assumed the final position in the measure's final line. This technique is not evident in any of the following Middle English stanzas. The six-line pattern a^a4a4a^b4b4, such as in Halidon Hill from the fourteenth century, often (but not always) incorporates alliterative lines within the rhyme scheme. The rhyme royal, patterned a^b^a^b^b^c^c^, was introduced to English poetry by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde shortly before 1372. William Dunbar used an eight-line stanza, rhymed a^b5a^b5b5c^b5c^, for "On the Resurrection of Christ." Another Dunbar stanza of nine lines, patterned a5a^b^a5a5b5b5c^c5, appears in "The Golden Targe." The Pearl (over two-thirds of which also 148 has internal alliteration) offers a twelve-line stanza that rhymes a^b^a^b^a^b^a^b^b^c^b^c^. Although the b-rhyme in this stanza clearly unifies the stanza as a whole and may/ as such, be considered its primary rhyme, it does not assume the final position in the stanza's final line as it should according to Welsh conventions. On the other hand, the concatenation of Pearl's stanzas into groups of five (except for stanzas 71 to 76 which form a group of six) by recurrence between stanzas of identical c.-rhymes may suggest a measure linking technique analogous to that evident in the Armes Prydein. If each of these stanzaic groupings can be considered an audible unit within the Pearl, then each stanza's final c-rhyme can also be con­ sidered the measure's primary rhyme— and such an inter­ locking technique suggests the formal function of end-rhyme in the bardic tradition. Again, the Gawain-poet seems to excel at inventing his own formal systems by synthesizing the conventions of various traditions, that is by adaption rather than by mere imitation. Such inventiveness, however, may itself be highly unbardic. The above examples all indicate that the primary and consistent formal function of patterned end-rhyme in the Welsh tradition did not have to be maintained in the composition of medieval English stanzas. The following examples counterargue that the primary function of patterned end-rhyme could be maintained in 149 English stanzas and often with great success. The pattern of "Alysoun," from the early fourteenth century, combines a seven-line, tail-rhyme stanza with a four-line refrain that together form the pattern: d^d^d^c3. The instability of stress regularity in lines 2, 4, 5 and 6 of this measure indicates the necessity of the b-rhyme to determine line length. But it is the p-rhyme that links the two sections of this measure into a single unit and that further links the four stanzas of "Alysoun"; the -oun rhyme, the second syllable in the name of the "feyrest may in toune" (1. 32), formally functions in this poem as a primary rhyme according to the bardic conventions. Such primary rhymes can also be perceived in the twelve-line, tail-rhyme stanza patterned a^a^b^c^c^b^ d^d^b-^e^e^b^ ( as in "Lenten ys come with love to toune," c. 1330, and in William Dunbar's "Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins"). Similarly, the a-rhymes of the seven- line, tail-rhyme stanza patterned a^b2a4b2b2b4a2 { as in "Now Springs the Spray" with its introductory and con­ cluding three-line refrain patterned a2c^a2 ) seem to fulfill a primary function. Likewise, the b-rhymes of the six-line, tail-rhyme stanza patterned a^a^b3c^c^b3 (as in "Dame Sirith" from the thirteenth century) define the audible strophe. Chaucer's parody of such romance sixes in "Sir Thopas" would actually aggrevate its conventional rhyme pattern by consistently maintaining the a-rhymes in the fourth and fifth lines of the stanza as well and would, thus, convert "primary rhymes" into "excessive rhyme. In addition to such tail-rhyme stanzaic patterns, any medieval English verse form that maintains a consistent scheme of sequential rhymes seems to incorporate a primary formal function for regular end-rhyme analogous to bardic standards. For example, the Latin-French-Southwestern English love lyric, "Dum ludis floribus velud lacrima," from the Harley Miscellany is patterned a5/6a6a5/6a6.

The first four quatrains of this early fourteenth-century verse rhyme exclusively in Latin; the first line of this poem's final quatrain is also Latin, while its second line rhymes in French; the quatrain concludes with an English couplet (the student-poet1s first use of his native language) that seems particularly appropriate to its tone of exhausted bliss after a formally dizzy celebration of his foreign love: "May Y sugge namore, so wel me is./Yef Hi deye for love of hire, duel hit y s 1" The cosmopolitan artificiality of the macaronic rhymes in "Dum ludis floribus" suggests the complexity of formal options available to a Middle English poet at the start of the fourteenth century. In its content and multilingual diction, the influences of a French-Latin tradition are most apparent. But the formal function of its regular end- rhyme— to announce line termination in a mutable stress pattern and to structure the four-line measure as an audible unit— parallels the primary function of regular end-rhyme as it was preserved in the more conservative Welsh tradition. Indeed, it was primarily French models that inspired the manifestation of the primary function of regular end-rhyme in English verse. But the primary function of regular end-rhyme was also the only function of rhyme patterns in bardic verse, and its audible de­ termination of a poem's form alone justifies the simple repetition of exact rhymes in conventional patterns. There seems to be no such consistency of prosodic function among the more "literary" French forms that quickly became far more accessible than the Welsh to a Middle English poet. By the fourteenth century, the French tradition demanded far more innovativeness from its versifiers, and "Dum ludis floribus" satisfies this demand as well. Nevertheless, the influence of the Welsh tradition on English versecraft did not have to come directly from Wales. So far, we have seen various examples of medieval English verse that either clearly demonstrate or completely ignore the formal function of regular end-rhyme as evident in all twenty-four of the traditional Welsh measures. But in several Middle English verse forms, it is more difficult to determine if the pattern employs a primary rhyme in the Welsh sense or no. Such is the case with all "interlaced" rhyme patterns. For example, the basic pattern of the four-line stanza in "Christ and His Mother" should be a2b2a2b2. The omission of the a-rhyme in the first and last stanzas of this poem might suggest the b-rhyme' s primacy, but it is the a^-rhyme' s recurrence that links the poem's three middle stanzas; in either case, there is no one rhyme that links the entire poem and assumes the end-position in its final line. Thomas of Erceldoun1s basic rhyme pattern is a four- line stanza, with four stresses per line: a^b^a^b^. The second quatrain of this late fourteenth-century, Northern romance omits, however, the a-rhyme (cokke/belle? 11. 5 & 7) in such a "ballad measure," the b-rhyme becomes momentarily primary. But the four-line, normally interlaced stanza of Thomas can also be extended. For example, lines 41-48 of the romance rhyme a^b^a^b^a^b^a^b^— a pattern that matches the eight-line stanza used throughout A Love Rune by Thomas de Hales. Yet, the b-rhyme1s primacy cannot be conclusively defended in this simply alternating pattern of end-rhymes since the a.-rhyme contributes as much to the measure's total form. Furthermore, lines 9-21 of Thomas rhyme abab/acac/adad/d— a pattern in which the quatrain-linking a,-rhyme seems primary though it does not assume the end-position in the "stanza's" iir.al couplet. (Line 21 also introduces the a-rhyme of the romance's next 153 quatrain.) The intricacy of such rhyme links within Thomas of Erceldoun may reflect its suspected Celtic origins, but its random variation of patterns seems in­ consistent with the bards' original conventions. Another complex application of patterned end-rhyme in Middle English verse can be perceived in "April," a fourteenth-century, Southwestern reverdi. In the Harley manuscript, the poem was written as a series of seven- beat couplets, but Charles Dunn and Edward Byrnes have recently edited the p o e m ^ as an eight-line, tail-rhyme measure, patterned a4b3a4b3a4b3a4b3. A-rhymes at the caesurae of several seven-beat lines are indeed evident in "April." But only the b-rhymes of the poem's first four stanzas are consistent and exact. The a-rhyme positions of the measure are, however, filled by the following words: sinqes/sprinqes/gon/drvnkes: ver/syk/ ner/me; thee/wyde/leof/mouth; thee/savs/be/thee. The inconsistency of a-rhymes in this measure suggests the primacy of its b-rhymes which do assume the end-position in each stanza's final line. So far, the versification of "April" seems to follow the formal conventions of a bardic tradition. But the poem’s final stanza (perhaps separable as an envoi) introduces a new rhyme scheme that "reinforces the eight-line structure" : abababcc. The striking, but unanticipated end-rhymes of the concluding couplet 154 seem contrary to the principles of primary rhyme in the Welsh tradition. One more example should suffice to demonstrate both the complexity and the inconsistency of the formal functions of medieval English rhyme patterns. The six- line, tail-rhyme stanza of "The Five Joys of Mary" is patterned a^a^a^b^a^b^. Unlike the similar schema of "Dame Sirith," it is difficult to suggest the b-rhyme's primacy in this pattern since the a-rhyme1s repetition seems much more conspicuous within each individual stanza. However, all eight b-lines of this religious lyric's first four stanzas rhyme on -inqer they are, thus, audibly linked together into a formal unit that prefaces the poem's subsequent listing of the five joys, each in its own formally discrete stanza. Since this initial technique of b-rhyme links between measures is not maintained through "The Five Joys of Mary," the respective a-rhymes of its final six stanzas seem much more audibly conspicuous. One formal principle for the patterning of end-rhyme had consistently defined the audible strophe in all the conventional measures of medieval Welsh poetry— each measure's primary rhyme, as the end-rhyme of its final line, announces the termination of its total form. This technique I have included under the primary function of regular end-rhyme. But no such consistency can be 155 universally discovered in the plethora of Middle English verse forms that flourished from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The various informing principles evident in the above patterns make it impossible to determine the formal function of regular end-rhyme in all medieval English poetry. Secondary functions are also operative and often more conspicuous; furthermore, specific French models frequently exist for the imitation by medieval English poets of regular end-rhyme's secondary functions. In an entirely different context, C. S. Lewis offered the following distinction between primary and secondary literary forms which may help to clarify the coexistence of twin traditions for the uses of regular end-rhyme in English versecraft:

The older critics divided Epic into Primitive and Artificial, which is unsatisfactory, because no surviving ancient poetry is really primitive and all poetry is in some sense artificial. I prefer to divide it into Primary Epic and Secondary Epic— the adjectives being purely chronological and implying no judgements of value. The secondary here means not 'the second rate,' but what comes after, and grows out of, the primary.76

I would qualify Lewis' statement only by insisting that, though the label "primary" suggests historical precedence in an absolute sense (the sense that James Travis argues for the Celtic origins of rhyme), such precedence in no 156 way determines that the original literary tradition will subsequently become "outmoded." The mode of a specific poem's composition is determined solely by the individual poet in response to the formal demands of his audience, that is, by the poem's intended mode of appreciation. The "secondary" Aeneid clearly antedates the "primary" Beowulf. So too, the surviving examples of primary rhyme techniques in English poetry do not necessarily predate its secondary forms, nor was the appeal of primary rhyme necessarily diminished by the importation of secondary models from France. The appeal of primary end-rhyme diminishes only when intended for an inappropriate mode of formal appreciation— "studied" primary rhyme yields only doggerel. In complete contrast to its consistency in bardic versecraft, the formal function of regular end-rhyme in Middle English verse cannot be determined in terms of an entire "poetry," but must be induced from each specific poem. The Normans, of course, accelerated the dominance of a rhyming tradition in England over the Anglo-Saxon versecraft of yore. It took William only five years to restructure his fief's governmental system; in comparison, the forms of its native prosody seem no real challenge. The validity of Saintsbury's opinion {with which we initiated the second section of this chapter) that a thirteenth-century English poet indubitably obtained his 157 notions of rhyme exclusively from Latin-Norman sources needs some minor modification. That the Norman influence was overwhelmingly the primary source of rhyme forms for the Middle English poets remains irrefutable; Saintsbury implies that the major avenue for the influence of such specific forms was the written transmission of verse. But that the potential for a simultaneous Welsh influence on specific English poems (even if only indirectly through its vestiges in Norman versecraft) should, therefore, be considered non-existent seems an oversimplification. Parallels, however vague, to the uniquely consistent, formal function of regular end-rhyme in the Welsh tradition remain evident (at random) in certain, post-Conquest English poems. I can only suggest that the major avenue for such influence could have been predominantly aural— a medium that fosters independent adaption rather than exact imitation. But I have not sought the origins of English end- rhyme in Wales. I have merely sought to clarify the primary functions of exact, parallel (i.e., non-"chiastic") and conventionally patterned end-rhymes by investigating the prosody of the bards for whom it functioned best. The French uses of rhyme were, at once, both more artificial and less intricate than those of the Welsh tradition; the ornament ceased to be formally necessary to a poem's 158 total form. End-rhyme became in the continental tradition a local supplement to poetic form. The pattern of end- rhymes remained, however, in the bardic tradition the sole means to achieve not merely local effects within a verse form, but the total, audibly perceptible form of any poem. I have considered this bardic function for regular end-rhyme "primary" solely because such poetry's intended mode of appreciation made this function in­ dispensable to an audience's recognition of conspicuous form. I will proceed to label other functions for regular end-rhyme "secondary" solely because such functions, though they add to the formality of a specific poem, do not alone establish its form.

VI. Critical Principles for Assessing Primary Rhyme Patterns

The temptation remains for literary historians to investigate if the primary formal function of patterned end-rhyme suggests the original function of such rhyme— that is, if "primary to form" means "first in time." I confess that I myself believe in the historical precedence of regular end-rhyme's primary functions over its secondary functions; it seems logical to assume that the secondary functions of rhyme pattern should come after, and grow out of its primary function. But I limit this theoretical 159 chronology strictly to the general development of fixed patterns. The "evolution" of rhyme per se is a far more inclusive consideration and seems to me irresolvable because of certain semantic difficulties regarding the definition of "rhyme itself"; we cannot determine when "rhyme" emerges until we fundamentally agree on the range of phonic echoes that we wish to include in the category of "rhyme proper." William E. Rickert has recently sought to clarify our recognition of rhyme itself by analyzing the descriptive principles underlying some 229 rhyme-related terms:

Synthesis of the many uses of the term does reveal two common characteristics: first, rhyme in­ volves a repetition of sound in words; and second, the repetition reaches the level of potential reader awareness. In the larger sense, then, we may view rhyme as foregrounded phonetic repetition. This general classification of rhyme encompasses the specific poetic convention of 'rhyme' (i.e. end-rhyme) as well as 'alliter­ ation, ' 'assonance,' 'consonance,' and all phonetic repetitions that achieve prominence within the sound-structure of a poem. By ex­ tension, eye rhymes, or spelling rhymes that have mostly grown out of historical changes in sound but do not now match, are also included. The phonetic repetitions that constitute rhyme occur when two or more syllables share partial or complete identity of sound.(italics mine)

Such a synthesis of terminology, however accurate in itself, seems to extend any pursuit of rhyme's original manifestation to Genesis itself. Although Rickert does 160 review the critical vocabulary for eleven types of rhyme pattern, "pattern" itself is omitted from the defining characteristics of rhyme because his study "is concerned not with what rhyme does as a semantic component but with what rhyme is, as a phonetic phenomenon that may be structured in verse."7® it should be clear by now that Rickert's presuppositions regarding the determination of poetic structure and the appeal of rhyme are antipodal to those of a Welsh bard. Although Rickert*s system 79 for describing the individual phonic conjunction of two syllables is the most accurate and most inclusive approach currently available, several of the "rhymes" it includes seem insufficient to fulfill the primary function of patterned end-rhymes; this function requires more from its rhymes than the "potential awareness" of a "reader." Rickert*s analysis can, however, remain critically neutral by ignoring the functions of rhyme patterns. It is the function of the pattern alone, I would argue, that determines criteria for evaluating the quality of rhyme techniques within it. Critical principles for the appreciation of a poem's end-rhymes may be discovered (also in an atemporal context) by determining the interrela­ tion of its pattern's formal function and the nature of individual end-rhymes (which Rickert's system describes) employed to achieve that pattern. As a metaphor is a metaphor is a metaphor, so too the formal technique of 161 primary rhyme may be empirically recognized whenever it occurs, that is, whenever an observable pattern determines the measure's total form for an aural appreciation; subsequently, specific end-rhymes within a pattern may be assessed according to their contribution to its poetic form. Primary rhyme works "well" only when it either ful­ fills its primary function (i.e., audibly to structure a measure) or when its primary function is itself being parodied (i.e., to produce an ironic tone for more studied appreciation). In both cases, only exact rhymes produce "good" rhymes because only such conspicuous phonic links can fulfill the primary function of patterned end-rhyme. Critical principles for judging the efficacy of regular end-rhyme must acknowledge the pattern's intended mode of appreciation. Wimsatt has argued that the phonic appeal of parallel rhymes in English verse seems minimal; his criteria and, therefore, his judgment seem valid for poems whose rhyme patterns are not necessary for audibly determining their conspicuous form— that is, whose patterns fulfill only secondary functions. But the "appeal" of particular rhyme links cannot be determined in a critical vacuum, divorced from their correlation to a poem's pattern— except by the arbitrary assertions of individual taste. For the immediate, aural appreciation of a poem's total form, its rhymes must be both phonically exact and exactly placed. 162 If the critic observes that the function of a poem's rhyme pattern is primary, his assessment of its rhymes must vary accordingly; parallel rhymes become aesthetically justified. Since regular end-rhyme functions primarily as a structural technique for the aural perception of poetic form, certain principles (by which the specific rhymes used to achieve this function may be evaluated) seem logical corrolaries. Suppressed rhymes and pattern mutations, in fact, contradict the primary function of regular end-rhyme. The patterns themselves must be conventional, that is, formally familiar to their intended audience. Weak phonic links within such patterns diminish their form and may be critically assessed as formally inadequate. Since audible poetic structure does not invite "variety" for its own sake, any approximation of exact rhyme sounds sub-standard. Audible rigor is the first criterion for the primary function of regular end-rhyme. In light of this first principle, the primary function of regular end-rhyme makes very few semantic demands on the vocabulary employed to achieve its audible Structure; exactness permits nonce rhymes (though "non­ sense" rhymes contravene aural familiarity). I do not mean to suggest that variety in the vocabulary used to generate exact end-rhymes would not be appreciated, but 163 the formal demands of the primary function of regular end-rhyme override any potential delight in inexact, though semantically varied rhymes for their own sake. Wimsatt might argue that these principles comprise an apologia for the worst forms of doggerel. And indeed these principles will not salvage the aesthetic appeal of tediously predictable end-rhymes that, though they may supplement a poem's form, do not entirely define it for aural appreciation. The secondary functions of end- rhyme, we shall see, impose increased semantic demands on the vocabulary used to achieve its intended effects. Wimsatt1s argument implies that the secondary functions of regular end-rhyme have become predominant in English poetry since Chaucer. But no poet who intends regular end-rhyme to fulfill its primary function can long violate its general principles with impunity, and yet maintain a pattern that in itself would make his poem's total form audibly perceptible.

The intended mode for the formal appreciation of a poem that employs end-rhyme determines the function of its pattern which, in turn, establishes criteria for the assessment of specific rhyme words employed to achieve that pattern's function. "Bad" rhymes can, therefore, be defined as nothing more than a break in the prosodic continuum through which a poet's intended effect determines his poetic form. "Bad" rhymes seem "inappropriate" be­ cause they offer a perceptible contradiction between formal means and aesthetic ends. Such a critical perception should be exclusively aural when the sole function of a poem's end-rhyme is primary; however, the supplemental (i.e., non-structural) effects of end-rhyme's secondary functions ("chiastic" rhyme is but one example) can be perceived only by more studied means. Though the criteria for assessing the specific rhymes of a pattern's secondary functions are often the inverse of principles for criticizing their success in fulfilling its primary function, both systems recognize gratuitous rhymes as bad rhymes. Yet, when he assesses end-rhyme, the critic's task remains inductive (and therefore complicated) because the principles that follow from the primary and secondary functions of such rhyme, though often contradictory, are not mutually exclusive; an individual poem can be intended for both aural and studied appreciation, and most English poetry since Chaucer strives to resolve the implicit paradox in this hybrid format. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

Harold Idris Bell, The Development of Welsh Poetry {Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1953), p. 1. 2"Welsh Literature" by William John Gruffydd, rev. by Thomas Jones, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th Ed. (Chicago: William Benton, 1973), vol. 23, pp. 401-408, remains one of the most accessible, briefest and best surveys of this topic. The Armes Prvdein Vaur survives in the Book of Taliensen and is attributed in the Myvrian Archaeology to Golyddan. For its dating, see I for Williams, Armes Prvdein (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1955), xvii. The meaning of "Armes" is debated. 4 Certainly by the seventh century a.d., the final syllable of many Late British words had been lost and their stress placements moved to the new penultimates of late Middle Welsh; such an instability of stress pattern must have had monumental effects on the development of a rhyming prosody in Wales. For a fuller description of "The Accent Shift" itself, see Kenneth Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain: A Chronological Survey of the Brittonic Languages First to Twelfth Century A.D. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1953), pp. 682-3. ^J. A. Giles, ed. & trans., Six Old English Chronicles (London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), pp. 413-4; Nennius § 62. 6 For example, "Tad Awen" means "Father of the Muse"; Cian is also called "Guenith Guaut," or "Wheat of Song." The Black Book of Carmarthen has been reproduced by J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Pwllheli, 1906); the Canu Aneirin has been edited by Ifor Williams (Caerdydd, 1938), as has the Canu Taliesen (Caerdydd, 1960); The Poetry in the Red Book of Hergest (Llanbedrog, ^911) has been edited by J. G. Evans who, with John Rhys, also made available The

16 5 166 Text of the Mabinoqion (Oxford, 1887). The Four Ancient Books of Wales, 2 vols., ed. by w. F. Skene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1868), remains the most convenient collection of the four major manuscripts. 8The authenticity of any poem attributed to the Cynfeirdd remains highly debatable. For example, Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson has said of Y Gododdin that "If it was not, it is a 'forgery'"— in the sense that it had been affected by more than two centuries of oral presentation prior to MS. preservation. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, The Gododdin: The Oldest Scottish Poem (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1969), p. 57. Q Cf. The Poems of Taliesin, ed. and annotated by Ifor Williams, English version by J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Medieval and Modern Welsh Series, Vol. Ill (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. xxx ff. -*-8For the text of the "Trawsganu Kynan Garwyn Mab Brochfael" cf. Ifor Williams, The Poems of Taliesin, p. 1. •^Thomas Parry, A History of Welsh Literature, trans. by H. Idris Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955); cf. "Vaticination," pp. 26-33. ■^Ifor Williams, The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry: Studies by Sir Ifor Williams, ed. Rachel Bromwich (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1972), p. 126. 1 JThe1 code regarding the social status of bards survives in a twelfth century MS. and is claimed to have been formulated by Hywel Dda in the tenth century; cf. A. W. Wade-Evans, Welsh Medieval Laws (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1909). No "laws" regarding the verse forms of bardic poetry survive, but it is generally conceded that the political rigor of the bardic system applied to their prosody as well. ^Thomas Parry has clarified the conservatism of bardic verse as "the product of a tradition, flexible enough to admit developments, but in which certain customs were regarded as indispensable and handed down with pre­ cision from one generation of poets to another." Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise Attributed to Einion Offeiriad," rpt. from The Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. xlvii (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 177. 15Rhiannon Morris-Jones, J. Morris-Jones and T. H. Parry- Williams, ed., Llawysqrif Hendreqadredd (Caerdydd: 1933). 167 Ifor Williams and Thomas Roberts, ed. Cywvddau Dafydd ap Gwilym a 1i Gvfoeswyr, 2nd Ed. (Caerdydd: 1935). 1 7Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," pp. 191-2. 1 fiGwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 94. 19 The similarities between the Brahman caste of India and the filids of Ireland, of course, argue for more than just a pedagogically useful analogy; they suggest, rather, a common Indo-European heritage. But, since Wales had been thoroughly Christianized under the Roman occupation, this analogy seems to blur the uniqueness of the Gogynfeirdd. For an endorsement of the enduring validity of the analogy, see Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), pp. 16-17 and throughout. 2^There does, however, exist a good deal of medieval Welsh, religious literature, including saints' lives, A visions and apocrypha; cf. J. Morris-Jones and John Rhys, ed., The Elucidarium and Other Tracts from Llyvyr Aqkyr Llandewivrevi (oxford, 1894). For the religious poetry of the Gogynfeirdd, see Henry Lewis, Hen Gerddi Crefyddol (Caerdydd, 1931); nevertheless, the overwhelming bulk of the surviving bardic poetry is either panegyric or elegy. 21 For a brief, but full description of the Welsh system of intralinear harmony, see "Cynghanedd" in Poems of the Cywvddwvr: A Selection of Cywvddau c. 1375-1525, ed. Eurys I. Rowlands, Medieval and Modern Welsh Series. Vol. VIII (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. xxvii-xlix. For the history of its development, see Thomas Parry, "Twf y Gynghanedd" in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cvmmrodorion, 1936, 143-60. 22H. Idris Bell, "The Nature of Poetry as Conceived by the Welsh Bards," The Taylorian Lecture (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), pp. 13-15. 23H. Idris Bell, "The Nature of Poetry," p. 12. 2^Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 102. 23Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 169. 2^Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 184. 168 27 Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 232. 28George E. B. Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1923), p. 24n. 29 For a survey of the relatively late growth of Celtic studies, see "The Rediscovery of £he Gael" in Gaelic Literature Surveyed by Aodh De Blacam, 1929, rpt. with an additional chapter by Eoghan O Hanluain (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 369-78. Scholarly interest in Celtic studies was particularly spurred by General Vallancey's "Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language" (1772), in which he claimed that the origins of Gaelic could be traced to ancient Carthange. Vallancey typifies the worst aspects of amateur overstatement, but De Blacam concedes that "His extravagant theories had at least the good effect of rousing curiosity," p. 369. ^James Travis, Early Celtic Versecraft: Origin, Development, Diffusion (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), p. 2.

■3 1 Cf. James Travis, "Derivation," in Early Celtic Versecraft, pp. 86-96. JjSL. Wittgenstein offered some brilliant insights on the intellectual habit of permitting the persuasive impulse to translate a theory into a doctrine. Cf. Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations, ed. Cyril Barrett (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 26-28. 3 3Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Metrics (Dublin, 1961) .

■^According to James Travis, "native" to the Welsh tradition would mean Celtic with the following qualification: "The difference in form and ornament between early Welsh and Irish verse, although insufficient to obscure the evidence of common origin, yet signify an extended period of independent development." James Travis, Early Celtic Versecraft, p. 114.

88Cf. James Travis, "Theories of Latin Derivation," in Early Celtic Versecraft, pp. 97-98. James Travis, Early Celtic Versecraft, p. 2. 8^Cf. James Travis, "Hiberno-Latin Verse Ornament," in Early Celtic Versecraft, pp. 68-85. 169 op James Travis/ Early Celtic Versecraft/ p. 48. 39For a description of the Irish schools, see J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Traddodiad Llenvddol Owerddon (1958), 129-35; 0. J. Bergin, The Journal of the Ivernian Society, v., 153-66. 40For an exhaustive analysis of the Welsh metrical principles in theory and practice, see G. J. Williams and E. J. Jones, Gramadeqau1r Penceirddiad (Caerdydd, 1934). ^Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 178. ^Thomas Parry himself credits Dafydd Ddu rather than Einion Offeiriad with the standardization of the bardic rules; "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 180. ^ J o h n Morris-Jones, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1923-4, p. 28. Parry ("The Metrical Treatise," p. 182) points out that Morris-Jones himself modifies this statement in his preface to Cerdd Dafod (1925), p. vii. ^Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 182. 4^Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 193. 4^For the Llanstephan, Peniarth and Red Book of Hergest (the oldest) MSS., see Williams and Jones, Gramadeqau1r Penceirddiad. J. T. Jones has printed the Bangor version in The Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, ii, 184-200. ^Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," pp. 183. 48cf. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson's chapter on "Metre" in The Gododdin, pp. 53-56. 4^The twenty-four traditional Welsh measures were originally divided by Einion's treatise into two groups of twelve; the awdl measures were considered distinct as a group from the combined classification of enqlvn and cvwvdd measures. Such "class distinctions" were already being obscured at the time of the Grammar1s composition, and were eliminated further by later changes. Cf. Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 184. 50 Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, The Gododdin, p. 54. 51 Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 237. 170 52Paul Fussell, Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 114. 53 Thomas Parry, "The Welsh Metrical Treatise," p. 185. 54Thomas Stephens, The Literature of the Kvmrv (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1876), p. 475. 55H. Idris Bell, "The Nature of Poetry," p. 17. I have based my statistics and orthography on the text of Armes Prvdein; The Prophecy of Britain from the Book of Taliesin, ed. Ifor Williams, trans. by Rachel Bromwich (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1972), MMWS 6. 57'For English examples of all twenty-four traditional Welsh measures, see Rolfe Williams, Green Armor on Green Ground (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956). CO °The language changes themselves can be traced to the splintering effects of the Anglo-Saxon invasions (c. 450-600a.d.) on the parent British tongue. ^ C f . D. Simon Evans, A Grammar of Middle Welsh (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. xviii. ^Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime (Stanford University, California: Stanford Univ. Press, 1931), p. 212. 61Henry Lanz, The Physical Basis of Rime, p. 235. ^^Cf. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 49-53. ^Gwyn Williams, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, p. 244. 64john Norton-Smith, ed., John Lydgate: Poems (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. xii. 65■James Travis, Early Celtic Versecraft, p. 2. 6 6 Robert William Sapora, Jr., A Theory of Middle English Al1iterative Meter with Critical Applications, Speculum Anniversary Monographs I (The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1977), pp. 14-15. 6 7Robert William Sapora, Jr., A Theory of Middle English Al 1iterative Meter, p. 15. 171 6 Q James Travis, Early Celtic Versecraft, p. 161. ^9Cf. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages., trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 388-9. Curtius suggests also that the continental impulse for artifice may have been increased by the influx of more cultivated Iro-Scots fleeing the Danish invasions. 70 For the "comic effect" of Skeltonic verse and its tradition, see George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, pp. 240-5. 71As Kittredge argued, "Chaucer's erstwhile master, Prince Lionel, had lived in Ireland, and Chaucer knew scores of Englishmen who were familiar with Irish life. Wales was even nearer, and Chaucer was sufficiently impressed by the Bret Glascurion to assign him a conspicuous position among the harpers at the court of Fame. The poet knew plenty of Welshmen, and Sir John Clanowe, who had hereditary possessions in Wales was his friend and poetical disciple." George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1915, 1967), p. 104. 7 P Charles W. Dunn and Edward T. Byrnes, eds., Middle English Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1973); "Versification," pp. 28-33.

73Dunn and Byrnes, Middle English Literature, P* 30. 74Dunn and Byrnes, Middle English Literature, PP. 212-3 75Dunn and Byrnes, Middle English Literature, P- 32. 76 C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), p. 13. 77William E. Rickert, "Rhyme Terms," Style,12, No. (Winter, 1978), p. 35. 78 William E. Rickert, "Rhyme Terms," p. 40. 7^William E. Rickert, "Rhyme Terms," p. 42. CHAPTER THREE

THE ART OF END-RHYME IN TWO MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES

King Horn and Havelok the Dane

Numerous critical studies have already compared the narrative craft of two of the earliest, and roughly contemporary Middle English romances— King Horn and Havelok the Dane. In the following chapter, I wish, however, to contrast these otherwise quite similar works of art as diverse examples of a relatively new craft in the composition of English poetry— the craft of rhyming regular­ ly at the ends of English verse lines. My intention is to demonstrate that the couplets of King Horn fulfill the primary function of regular end-rhyme, whereas the couplets of Havelok merely imitate this function and more often strive to perform the secondary functions of such rhyme. In terms of plot, characterization and setting, many points of comparison between King Horn and Havelok the Dane can be found. And, as John Speirs has noted, "It seems natural for modern readers to associate the two romances."^ Both tales seem to incorporate fictionalized recollections of the period of the Viking invasions against Britain. Both romances were composed in rhymed couplets. And the

172 173 association of these two romances with one another does not seem to be an entirely modern convention? Horn was transcribed immediately after Havelok in the Land Miscellany 108/11 (Summary Catalogue No. 1486). Although the narrative craft of these two romances is not the primary focus of this chapter, a preliminary review of the tales themselves should prove useful to the analyses of their respective uses of end-rhyme that will follow. King Horn is generally recognized as the oldest surviving English romance; there are three extant manuscripts of it which vary in length from 1530 to 1569 lines. No one of these manuscripts can be clearly demonstrated to have been a source for the other two. Yet, the narrative divergences among them are generally considered to be slight. King Horn seems to have been originally composed c. 1225 in a Southwestern or South Midland dialect. The stress pattern of its individual lines is highly irregular 3 and can vary from two to four beats per line. Karl Brunner has, in fact, suggested that "Perhaps King Horn was first told in alliterative verse by itinerant minstrels."^ The folkloristic elements of the story of King Horn are clear:

Horn, the rightful heir to the throne of Suddenne, is cast adrift by the pirates who have invaded the kingdom and slain his father. As an exile of apparent, though unknown nobility, Horn inspires 174 the love of Rymenhild, daughter to the king of Westernesse. The treachery of his faithless companion, Ffikenhild, however, forces Horn into exile again. Having fled to Ireland, Horn wins great honor by slaying an invading Saracen giant who (mirabile dictu) slew his father. Horn is offered the daughter of the king of Ireland in marriage, but refuses. He returns in disguise to Westernesse'" after he learns that Rymenhild has been promised to King Mody of Reynis. Horn promptly kills Mody, denounces Ffikenhild and sets off to reconquer Suddenne. Meanwhile, Ffikenhild has captured Rymenhild and attempts to force her into marriage. Horn returns, again in disguise, kills Ffikenhild, and is reunited with Rymenhild. Together with their loyal friends, they thus obtain dominion over Westernesse, Reynis, Ireland and Suddenne. And live happily ever after.5

The artistic appeal of the romance of King Horn to its original audiences has been summarized by Margaret Schlauch: "the tale was probably an effective item in the repertoire of a professional minstrel earning his living by oral recitation."^ Horn's narration is generally fast-paced and often quite moving. Its plot remains remarkably faithful to the Anglo-Norman romance of Horn and Rimenhild (c. 1175).^ But Mestre Thomas' tale comprises some 5250 alexandrines rhymed in tirades; King Horn compresses much the same material into less than one-third of the space. Charles Dunn concludes that "Whatever its source, King Horn is artistically most successful" primarily because of the exemplary "economy" of its well-knit plot, its charming love-story and its convincing psychology.8 The craft of 175 Horn's couplets seems, however, to offer little for modern appreciation. John Speirs has suggested as a general principle that "Whereas the finer French romances are already literary poems, the finer English romances (apart from Chaucer's) are mostly poems that are, at least to a 9 much greater degree, of the nature of the older oral poetry." It is on the validity of this implicit assessment of the nature of King Horn's manner of composition that my analysis of its end-rhymes will focus. A complete tale of Havelok the Dane survives in only one manuscript. Its date of composition has been proposed to be as early as 1203 and as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century.George B. Jack has recently argued that c. 1272 seems to be the most probable date for the original composition of Havelok— perhaps fifty years after Horn. The text of the more or less complete Bodleian Havelok plus an additional eleven lines from a Cambridge fragment comes to 3001 lines— about twice the size of Horn. The four-stress verse lines of Havelok are generally quite regular. Its original dialect seems to have been North­ east Midland. The adventures of Havelok begin after

The kings of both England and Denmark die, leaving children as heirs. Goldborough of England is entrusted to Godrich, Earl of Cornwall? and Havelok the Dane becomes a ward of Earl Godard. 176 Both guardians prove unfaithful. Godard assigns the fisherman Grim to kill Havelok, but Grim recognizes the child's kingship by a birthmark and a miraculous light that shines from Horn's mouth. Grim flees to England where Havelok grows to be an exceptionally strong scullion in the castle of Godrich. Meanwhile, Godrich had promised Goldborough's father that she would marry the strongest man in England. The Earl of Cornwall attempts to usurp Goldborough's claim on the throne by joining her with a mere scullion (i.e., Havelok). At Grim's house, Goldborough perceives Havelok's kingly signs, and an angel assures her of his noble destiny. Havelok eventually defeats both Godard and Godrich, and rules as king of both England and Denmark, with Goldborough as his queen— happily ever after.

A comparison of the basic plots presented in both Horn and Havelok suggests that their stories are essentially the same? they both incorporate several common folklore motifs and may both be considered examples of the rite du passage tradition as well as of the expulsion-and-return formula. Though Charles Dunn considers Havelok "one of the freshest, most timeless, and most appealing of the early Middle English romances, 1,13 its popularity seems to have been more limited than Horn's. Two Anglo-Norman narrations of the story of Havelok, both in octosyllabic couplets, predate the composition of the Middle English romance. Gaimar included the tale of a Havelok, who ruled for twenty years after the defeat of Arthur, in his Estoire des Engles (11. 47-818); Gaimar's work is dated c. 1140. Furthermore, an anonymous Lai d 'Haveloc (1106 lines) was written c. 1200 in imitation of Marie de France's Breton lays. Thus, in complete contrast to King Horn, Havelok the Dane is a more extended composition than its Anglo- Norman precedents. Various, and often contradictory, critical assessments of Havelok suggest that it is, at once, both more literary and more vulgar than Horn. Karl Brunner has observed that Havelok "is far less courtly and knightly than King Horn.

The existing text is probably one recited by a minstrel on market days in town squares (cf. 11. 13-16 and the end)." Dunn suggests further that the less aristocratic status of the audience for which Havelok was apparently first intended may have yielded certain "social limitations" which 15 hampered its dissemination. On the other hand, Albert C. Baugh has noted that Havelok was apparently written by a far more conscientious artist than the composer (or, at least, recorder) of King Horn; "the closing lines of Havelok ask a silent prayer for the author: 'Say a pater­ noster stille/For him fat haueth fe rym maked,/ And ferfore fele nihtes waked.' Now no Middle English romance has a better claim to be the work of a minstrel than Havelok. and yet staying awake many nights to compose the rime 1 fi surely implies writing." I would qualify Baugh's comment with at least one exception— King Horn, I believe, has a better claim to be an accurate record of the "work of a 178 minstrel" than does Havelok the Dane. I hope to justify this claim by a detailed analysis of their end-rhyme techniques. Though the critical temptation to evaluate the artistry of Horn and Havelok by comparing one to the other remains strong, it is at least possible that they are the products of two entirely different versecrafts. Before any valid critical assessments of the artistry of a given medieval romance can be clearly established, the craft that informs the artifact must first be comprehend­ ed. Though what critical principles may or may not apply to "oral" versus "written" poetry remains hotly debated, it is generally acknowledged that the presence of repetitive formulae should be considered a positive aesthetic contribu­ tion to the formal appreciation of poetry presented in an oral mode, whereas the excessive repetition of such formulae {without their original formal function) in a written composition quickly generates only tedium. The precise effects of a probable transition from "oral" to "written" formats for the appreciation of Middle English romances has for some time baffled critics. Margaret Schlauch has summarized the prevalent understanding of the transition's effects on the art of the 1ongleurs:

In the earlier part of the period being considered (ca. 1250-1400), the long romances were evident­ ly composed for direct oral delivery by poet- entertainers in the halls of noble patrons. By 179

the end of that period, the mode of production and consumption had, so to speak, undergone an economic transformation. The English aristocracy- had grown in numbers, in wealth, and in literacy. Its representatives no longer depended exclusively on oral entertainment; they began to aspire to ownership of romance texts for private reading.

It seems only logical that prose romances should begin to appear at the end of this period, and so they do. At present, however, it remains impossible for a critic to determine (from the internal evidence alone) more than that a specific Middle English verse romance seems to be "the work of a minstrel." The next section of this chapter will review the major critical theories regarding the "oral nature" of medieval English romances, but in my third section I hope to demon­ strate that the influence of a transition from "oral" to "written" delivery of the romances (which itself needs to be clarified) began to affect English versecraft in general, and the art of end-rhyme in particular, as early as the fifty-year interim between the original composition °f King Horn and that of Havelok the Dane— approximately one century before Chaucer.

II. The Oral Theory and Middle English Romances

In 1936, Ruth Crosby outlined an entirely new perspec­ tive for the appreciation of much Middle English poetry. Her article "Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages" concluded that "oral delivery of popular literature was the rule rather than the exception in the Middle Ages ..." and "such popular literature came to have some striking peculiari- ties." 18 Two years later, Crosby expanded her studies to demonstrate the effects of this oral tradition on the fourteenth-century versecraft of England. In "Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery," Crosby reiterated the under­ lying critical significance of her initial observations, but implicity noted a major (albeit elusive) transition in the craft of "oral delivery": "Writers of Chaucer's time, realizing that their works would become known to the public through the ear fully as much as through the eye, addressed both classes of audience " 1 9 (italics mine). Though Crosby limited her analyses to demonstrating the evidence for oral delivery in Middle English poetry, her observations naturally invite speculation about the oral composition of this same poetry. The entire pursuit of an "oral theory" that may inform the popular verse of post-Conquest England gained its impetus from certain presupposed analogies with the more conclusive evidence for the "oral" traditions in Homeric and Old English poetry. Ruth Crosby initiated the analysis of the oral nature only for the popular verse of medieval England. The search has since been expanded to include continental compositions as well. But Michael 181 Curschmann has been among the most recent critics to on question whether the original analogies hold. The critical challenge that confronts a modern reader of the medieval romances remains the formulation of an aesthetic justification for their excessive repetitiousness. The simplest, though least satisfactory, justification has been to make certain generic excuses for the exigencies of extended narrative verse. Although we seldom demand a romance of some 3000 lines to employ the same compression of poetic expression which may be found in, for example, a sonnet, to confess that extended narrative verse may, for no other reason, be justifiably less crafted or "polished" than the lyric is both unpalatable and untenable as a valid critical theory. Vergil, Chaucer and Milton applied no less of their talent to their extended pieces than to their short works; we must remember that the shorter pieces, in fact, were often considered merely apprentice exercises that prepared the poet for his magnum opus, and Chaucer frequently left his early efforts incomplete. Ruth Crosby's studies were geared towards demonstrating that the intended mode of appreciation (and not the mere length) explains imaginative shortcomings of much medieval verse; 182

Direct address to an audience is then the surest evidence of the intention of oral delivery. in most works bearing such evidence, however, certain other accompanying characteristics are to be found. The first of these is excessive repetition . . . Today we attempt to avoid repetition . . . It was not so, apparently, with the medieval poet. We must bear in mind that this literature we are discussing was meant to be spoken.21

Crosby's review of the evidence for oral delivery in medieval verse, thus, focused on certain recurrent syntactic units— that is, on repetitious phrases in any given poem. She divided such repetitions into two groups. Simply to demonstrate the existence of a tradition of oral delivery in most medieval verse, Crosby considered her second group more significant, "since it consists of those types of phrases which actually further the purpose of oral delivery by showing the relation of poet or minstrel to his audience. This group consists of transitions, asseverations and oaths. 9 9

But it has been Crosby's first grouping of repetitious phrases that has proven more provocative to proponents of an "oral theory" which may have informed the productions of the -jongleurs1 craft. "Four varieties of phrases make up this group: introductory phrases, descriptive phrases, 2 3 expletives, and formulas." Crosby reduced such repetitions to secondary status because they offer no 183 direct indication of uniting the poet and his listeners during a live performance, but rather appeal to a certain "fondness for familiarity" on the part of the audience. But since then, the overriding critical question has become: to what extent can such syntactic repetitions in medieval romance be considered functionally equivalent to the formulaic half-lines, set-pieces and topoi of poetry orally composed? As potential formulae, it has not proven feasible to keep Crosby's original two groupings completely distinct in their functions, so I have chosen to conjoin them under the single designation "tag-lines." No completely acceptable explanation for the formal function of such recurrent "tag-lines" in medieval English romances has yet been achieved. Little has been written on this subject directly in reference to either King Horn or Havelok the Dane, though the debate has raged on all sides of these two romances. For example, Mildred Pope in her introduction to The Romance of Horn by Thomas analyzes the divergences among four of its apparently independent manuscripts in order to de­ termine a common source (Y) ,* she suggests:

The interest of these divergences, so slight in themselves, is , however, great, for they indicate that in Y we have to do with a versifier who was basing his version of the poem not on a manuscript copy but on his memory of the version that he had acquired, for it is in works pre­ served in this manner that one finds similar 184 unpremeditated changes of detail. They are the outcome of a memory that is in possessi^p of the poem and well stored with the cliches of traditional verse, but careless about exactitude. And, as may be seen so often in Middle English romances, the result is unfortunate, for the changes— so slight often in themselves— in their cumulative effect impair, as always, the individuality of the poem, dilute,its terseness, destroy the crispness of phrase.

On the other hand, John Speirs has commented that the recurrent "tag-lines" of Middle English romances need not be considered a detriment to their artistic quality; rather, "Those English romances which reflect a greater degree of literacy in poet and audience are not always those which show greater art."2^ Speirs implicitly seeks to justify this general impression by distinguishing medieval English romances from their French equivalents according to the differing modes of their respective composition. "Whereas the finer French romances are already literary poems, the finer English romances (apart from Chaucer1s) are mostly poems that are, at least to a much greater degree, of the nature of the older oral poetry.1,26 Speirs and Pope may be considered critically antipodal in their respective assessments of the "tag-lines" that Crosby demonstrated were indicative of oral delivery. These clear signs of oral delivery have, however, given no definite indication of its effect on the composition of 185 much Middle English literature. On the presence of "tag- lines" alone, it has proven critically impossible to distinguish an orally preserved text from mere hack-work. Albert C. Baugh has summarized the critical problem confronting any would-be student of the Middle English romances by stating that "one of the easiest assumptions to make, it would seem, and one of the hardest to prove, is that the romances were composed by minstrels." 97 In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English: 1050-1500, Helaine Newstead has underlined the fact that the surviving manuscripts of medieval romances hardly represent a homo­ genous craft. Some follow their written French sources most faithfully; others seem to suggest that an English jongleur is adapting his tale much more freely from memory. "The literary quality of English romances varies as strikingly as the other features, and it is difficult to discern any consistent trend towards improvement or de­ generation. "2® Dieter Mehl has recently expressed the new critical caution about the applicability of any "oral theory" to our appreciation of the Middle English romances because "It is not even certain that most of these poems were ever recited by minstrels." 29 The date of a given romance's "original composition" in itself gives no clear indication of its mode of composition. And yet, there still seems to have been a consistent trend in the performance 186 of English literature from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century— that is, from "oral" to "written" caused by the increase in printed publication. The most persuasive arguments for the "oral" nature of several Middle English romances remain those offered by Albert C.. Baugh. Baugh argues that the variants, which can be everywhere perceived when multiple manuscripts survive for a single Middle English romance, cannot be explained solely on the basis of scribal errors:

Such deliberate changes occur not in a few places but throughout a romance. They involve not just the substitution of a better word, but the rephrasing of a line or several lines and often the substitution of new rime-words. The scribe is no longer copyist; he has become a poet . . . The explanation, however, presents a still greater difficulty. How are we to account for the fact that many of these 1 improvements' consist in substituting banalities, cliches, and rime-tags.30

Baugh goes on to emphasize the jongleur1s role in the oral reproduction of the Middle English romances. As he transmitted the text, the minstrel frequently improvised from a convenient stock of formulaic phrases.3-*- Laura Hibbard Loomis has demonstrated, however, that such "tag- lines" endure (albeit with poetic results that are generally considered regrettable) in the hack-work of romances un­ questionably written for the Auchinleck MS.32 So, for 187

example, Margaret Schlauch observes that, in contrast to King Horn, "one of the Auchinleck romances called Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild reduces the simplicity to banality, and the language to stereotyped artificiality."33 All this, then, underlines the point that "tag-lines" alone offer no clear indication of the mode of production or reproduction for any given Middle English romance. The theoretically clear distinction between "oral" and "written" composition, and consequently the analysis of their respective effects on the art of Middle English romances, has grown increasingly complex. Dieter Mehl has attempted to clarify at least the cause of the resultant critical confusion:

The possibility that minstrels had some share in the process or that some scribes also acted as entertainers can, of course, not be ruled out,* nor can it be denied that many of those scribes just turned out haphazard, patched-up collections of tags, ready-made rhyming couplets, half­ stanzas and motifs gleaned from some other romance. Moreover, it would be unwise to make a cut-and- dried distinction between 'oral' and ’literary1 composition. The processes of copying, trans­ lating, and adapting were on the whole far less 'literary' than the modern reader might easily imagine. They left ample room for improvisation, the use of cliches and other features which we tend to associate with oral composition.34

Nor is this confusion about the manuscript preservation of a given poem confined to Middle English literature. Michael 188 Curschmann, in reviewing the applicability of an "oral theory" to the Nie be1ungenlied, asserts, "We have forgotten . . . that in a culture which is still predominant­ ly oral, in the general sense, there is no room for an absolute juxtaposition of oral and written, in a specific sense."33 Since "tag-lines" alone have proven critically impractical for determining whether a given manuscript of a romance records an "oral reproduction" or a textual transcription, subsequent evaluations of the work of art itself often appear quite contradictory. So, for example, Baugh insists that Horn was sung (probably to the ac­ companiment of a harp ) and should, therefore, be considered O g the record of a memorized, oral performance. But Mehl argues that Horn's "skillful compression and accentuation of the story-material betrays the hand of a careful and conscious artist."3^ The presence of "tag-lines" in itself does not disprove Mehl's assessment of Horn's composition. I will argue, however, that the nature of Horn's end- rhymes offers new evidence to support Baugh's theory. The "tag-lines" and ready-made couplets of Horn prove, in fact, to be but a part of the larger, more inclusive craft employed by its jongleur to improvise the form of his poem. Though intended for aural appreciation, this craft cannot be considered completely analogous to oral composition in the traditional sense because a "text" 189 of the poem precedes its performed reproduction from memory. The lack of evidence for the use of this craft (and its replacement, in fact, by several other techniques) suggests both a major transition in the formal function of regular end-rhyme in the composition of English verse, and a means to distinguish whether the manuscript of a specific romance should be considered essentially an "oral" or a "written" record.

III. The Jongleur's System of Improvised End-Rhymes in King Horn

A. C. Baugh has drawn our attention to the fact that the author of Havelok claims to have been up all night writing rhymes— a fact which of itself implies that any "oral elements" in the composition of this romance would be, at most, imitative. King Horn, however, was apparently "sung"— chanted might be a more precise description, for it remains dubious that the performer's melody varied ex­ tensively from one couplet to the next. In any event, it is likely that the text of King Horn was performed (and perhaps transmitted) from memory; whereas, it is certain that the author of Havelok intended that the text he composed should be read if only by the jongleur who would perform the romance in public (but the manuscript cannot be considered a record of such a performance). I suggest that since their respective modes of formal appreciation varied (if only this slightly) so might the functions of their end-rhymes. I confess that the following theory may seem rather circular in its argument: the presence of regular end-rhymes that fulfill a primary function suggests the oral performance of a poem that employs them, while the oral performance of a poem aesthetically justifies the primary function of such end-rhymes. But a statistical analysis of the frequency of end-rhyme recurrences within

King Horn should demonstrate empirically that this romance may be considered a reasonably faithful record of the jongleur's oral performance, whereas Havelok cannot be so regarded. There have been two traditional means by which the prosodic quality of these two Middle English romances can be compared. The critic may either obtain a general impression from "normal" reading, or he may attempt to scan carefully specific lines; there are merits to both approaches. Both methods have determined that the versification of Havelok is, by far, more regular than that of the roughly contemporary King Horn. George Kane concluded that the prosody of King Horn "sometimes looks ■3D and possibly is incompetent." The controversial irregularity of King Horn's meter has generally been 191 interpreted to be a symptom of the incomplete transition of its prosody from the Old English alliterative system OQ to the new French versecraft. Yet Donald Sands, who otherwise seems none too enamoured of the stylistic merits of Horn in comparison to Havelok, suggests that "Horn reads aloud quite as well as many other Middle English narrative poems.The all too common subordination of end-rhyme to meter within a study of versification makes it easy to assume that the end-rhymes of Horn will prove less competent than those of Havelok. And indeed the language of Horn has been called "bald and unimaginative." 41 The average reader normally finds the couplet links of Horn far more monotonous and predictable than the more varied end-rhymes of Havelok. To demonstrate this contrast, one needs only extract all the couplets in each romance that rhyme on the same phonemic recurrences. So, for example, the following four couplets from King Horn present all the words that its jongleur employed to make his end-rhymes with the phoneme -edde— his mental rhyming dictionary, as it were:

Heo sette him on bedde; VJij? AJpulf child he wedde. (299-300)

& Cutberd ros of bedde Wi£> armes he him schredde; (839-40) A king hire wile wedde & bringe to his bedde, (949-50) 192

Heo feol on hire bedde, i>er heo knif hudde, (1195-6) .

These couplets may be considered a cohesive cluster in which bedde seems to function as a "formulaic element." This label may be misleading because in no other mode of clearly "oral" composition do single words function as formulae. The recurrence of bedde in each of the above couplets does not help to construct the "metrical" lines of King Horn in any way analogous to the formulae proper of other oral traditions. But it may be equally mis­ leading to consider the lines per se of King Horn as its basic formal unit. The bedde rhymes in the above couplets may be considered "formulaic" in so far as they are re­ current and they help to complete Horn's fixed poetic form (i.e., the couplet rather than the line). The same phonemic cluster (-edde) of end-rhymes in Havelok the Dane consists of the following couplets:

He hem clothede right ne fedde, Ne hem dede richelike bedde. (420-1) Thus-gate Grim him faire ledde; Him and he genge well he fedde (785-6) That hire sholde noman wedde, Ne noman bringen hire to bedde, (1113-4) To-morwe sholen ye been weddeth, And, maugre thin, togidere beddeth. (1127-8) Por-thy from Denemark hider he fledde, And me full faire and full well fedde, (1431-2) 193

Fro Denemark full sone he fledde Intill Englond and ther him fedde (2236-7) Whan the othre sawen that, he fledden, And Godard swithe loude gredde (2416-7) And that the king hire havede wedded And haveden been samen bedded, (2770-1) That me forth broughte and well fedde And ut of denemark with me fledde, (2868-9) And dide him there sone wedde Hire that was full swete in bedde. (2926-7) Hou he weren boren and hu fedde And hou he worn with wronge ledde (2986-7).

From this single example (which is not entirely rep­ resentative since I chose it to demonstrate this romance's least use of rhyme variety and, thus, its maximum potential for improvised composition), Havelok seems in fact to be more repetitious in its end-rhymes than Horn. Whereas Horn employs five different words (eight would be the maximum variety) to generate its four couplets, Havelok uses only one word more in its eleven couplets (when twenty-two would produce the maximum variety); proportion­ ately, Havelok1s end-rhymes seem here to be twice as monotonous as Horn's. Yet, the primary difference between a suspected compositional formula and mere monotony is that the former can be demonstrated to fulfill some formal purpose, whereas the latter cannot; the latter is easy, but the former is necessary. In the examples extracted 194 from King Horn, the excessive repetition of one element in the cluster permits almost maximum variety among the other words used to compose its couplets (only wedde repeats itself twice). In Havelok the Dane, however, all but two if its six rhyme words may be criticized as conventional— fedded repeats six times; bedde, five times; wedde and fledde both four times each. In Havelok1s cluster, 67% of the rhyming vocabulary repeats itself excessively; whereas, in Horn's, only 20% does so. Furthermore, there is a certain semantic monotony to the rhyme-links in Havelok (e.g., the wedde/bedde and fedde/fledde statements) that is not so evident in Horn. Nevertheless, most readers of both romances are normally convinced that the rhymes of King Horn are far more predictable than Havelok1s, and I would argue that this impression is essentially correct. One may anticipate the recurrence of bedde in Horn1s couplets that rhyme on this phoneme far more readily than the recurrence of any word in Havelok's cluster. The above comparison, I will suggest, demonstrates the art of end-rhymes in King Horn at its best, but the quite different craft of Havelok1s rhymes at their worst. Whereas the performer of the former generally improvised his couplets with a formulaic vocabulary of available end rhymes (a process that did tend to generate conventional lines), the author of the 195 latter merely imitated this tradition by randomly in­ corporating the sort of tag lines that had been thus produced (but not the process that produced them). A. C. Baugh has theorized that the main challenge confronting a Middle English jongleur when he performed his poem from memory was simply not to falter formally— or stop. "To a minstrel verbal accuracy is not so important so long as he keeps the meter . . . The important thing for him is to keep going.The jongleur was, thus, frequently forced to improvise, and Baugh's evidence for this theory focused on the recurrence of what I have labelled "tag-lines" with their ready-made end-rhymes in attendance. But Baugh acknowledged that "tag-lines" in themselves do not necessarily indicate that a romance's manuscript records an improvised live performance. It is my contention that the nature of a given romance's end-rhyme recurrence will, however, internally determine whether that romance were orally transmitted to paper "from memory" or no.

If Baugh's assessment of the primary professional challenge facing a paid jongleur is correct (and from the thirteenth century there is no evidence to the contrary), the function of regular end-rhyme in his performance seems analogous to the primary function of such rhyme in the bardic craft of Wales; the rhymes of both versecrafts 196 have to be both phonically exact (in order to be audibly conspicuous) and exactly placed (in order to be perceptibly formal). In King Horn, for example,where the meter is so highly irregular, end-rhyme alone defines the audible strophe (albeit an apparent adaption of a more literary French form, the octosyllabic couplet). Thus, the end- rhymes in King Horn alone maintain its conspicuous form which may be aurally appreciated in an oral performance. The Welsh bards had faced an identical challenge since the sixth century. A medieval English jongleur, however, never attained the bard's rigorous training. The only question that would seriously bother a thirteenth-century public performer of King Horn would be how to make its 765 couplets, not why. I am in fundamental agreement with Baugh that the minstrels were often forced to im­ provise in order that the poetic form of their performance might be maintained. The form of Horn, however, is primarily its end-rhyme recurrence (like traditional Welsh verse) and not its stress pattern (like that of the more "literary" French romances or, as we shall see, of Havelok). In theory, the formulaic system for such a romance as King Horn would (by analogy to our traditional understanding of other compositions in the oral mode) have to provide a system of formal conventions. The formulaic elements, I would argue, are its exact end-rhymes and not 197 • its almost "metrical" lines. I would qualify Baugh's original theory by asserting that an improvisational system of end-rhymes in King Horn generated its all too familiar "tag-lines"— and not the other way around. Although the ready-made end-rhymes of such "tag-lines" can often be found in more "studied" compositions {like Havelok; witness the -edde cluster above), a proportionately small sub-grouping of "formulaic end-rhymes" within each of its phonemic clusters cannot. A truly formulaic system that would allow the medieval 1onqleur to perform his craft should provide him with an improvisational means of composition by which he could formally supplement his memory of the poem— and no more. On the one hand, the 1onqleur1s system should prove not entirely "compositional" in the traditional sense proposed by oral theories— a "text" has been composed prior to performance. On the other hand, a 1onqleur1s mem­ ory seldom struggled for the exact preservation of his previously composed poem— this lack of rigorous fidelity distinguishes the English minstrel from the Welsh bard. I belieye that the improvisational system of end-rhymes employed in King Horn can be considered neither completely "oral" nor completely "written," and to consider the system simply an "evolutionary transition" between the two seems a historical oversimplification. The earliest English 198 jongleurs {who recited an unseen text from memory) found themselves in a largely unique prosodic situation:

-The formal demands of a foreign versecraft were rather suddenly imposed on their native language, the largely uninflected vocabulary of which made the achievement of these demands that much more difficult. -They lacked the elaborate training that produced a Welsh bard or, for that matter, a scop. -The also lacked the "literary" means for revisable composition that more sophisticated French poets of the time already had at their disposal.

If the C-manuscript of King Horn may be considered rep­ resentative of a much larger {though largely lost) field of jongleur performance, these itinerant poets who first employed consistent end-rhymes in English verse adapted to the new formal demands of their imported versecraft in some rather peculiar ways, but still they established the first critical principles for the enjoyment of regular end-rhyme in English poetry. In general, it seems that English end-rhyme has been appreciated from the very beginning as a difficult skill; Wimsatt's theory of the tradition of "chiastic rhyme" in English prosody simply fails to perceive the difficulty of parallel end-rhyme when it fulfills its primary function in the oral performance of verse. And it should seem no wonder that even' the 199 composer of Havelok should highlight the difficulty of his craft by complaining of his "fele nightes waked"(1.2999). In order to maintain the audibly conspicuous form of King Horn, its 1onqleur had to keep his end-rhymes exact. Although the audible strophe structure of Horn may seem laughably simplistic in comparison to the traditional Welsh measures, their respective factors of difficulty could be considered comparable and were, most probably, appreciated with equal awe. It seems, furthermore, trivial to have stated that the formal unit of composition in King Horn (i.e., its audible strophe) remains always the simple couplet. But in fact we shall see that such is not necessarily the case in Havelok the Dane (for which the metrical line seems to have already become the author's major unit of composition)— and so this trivial observation bears reiteration. In both Old English and Homeric verse, it has been proposed that the formulaic half-lines help the performer to complete his formal unit— the metrical line. By analogy, I propose that the "formulaic elements" of the jongleur's craft must help him to complete the formal units of his romance— its phonically exact couplets. Just as either the a or b half lines of poems that were orally composed in the traditional sense may contain a formulaic element, so too the formulaic end-rhymes of King Horn may be found in either the preliminary or terminal line 200

of a couplet. And, of course, both halves of a formal unit may be formulaic,* such couplets in Horn usually provide familiar transitions in the poem's narration, such as "The sea began to flowe/And Horn began to rowe." Such "tag-lines," however, do not account for the bulk of the romance. Only a thorough sorting of the end- rhymes themselves in King Horn would demonstrate that the repetitiveness of their vocabulary generates a truly improvisational system— and not merely oral hack-work. The C-manuscript of King Horn, which Joseph Hall considered prosodically to be the most primitive of the 43 three extant versions, consists of 1530 lines. If maximum variety were an operative principle in its composition, 735 different rhyme elements should have been employed; Horn employs only 152 different rhyme sounds (but compare the mere five used to compose the 199 lines of the Armes Prvdein). Of Horn1s total number of phonemes, 72 (.47.3%) occur in only one or two couplets (cf. Part III of Appendix C). This is to say that the words employed by the 1ongleur to make these rhymes recur with insufficient frequency to determine any formulaic pattern in their use. Furthermore, the existence of 85 couplets in King Horn based on these 72 different rhyme elements should indicate that the principle of rhyme variety was not, in itself, entirely hostile to the 1ongleur1s original artistic 201 intentions (although 85 different rhyme sounds would, of course, have been the maximum variety for these 85 couplets). The 72 rhyme elements in King Horn that offer no evidence of an improvisational system for its performance are the following:

Final Phoneme Number of Lines

able 2 ace 4 a7te 2 aille 4 aid 2 ale 4 alke 2 an 2 ang 2 anne 2 ape 2 ard 2 areme 2 arne 2 arpe 2 as 2 asse 2 ate 4 atere 2 atte 2 egge 4 el 2 elf 2 elte 2 erne 2 emei> 2 engjpe 2 eo 4 eose 2 epe 4 epest 2 erin 2 erke 2 e£>e 2 eved 2 evene 2 202

evre 2 ewjpe 2 ibbe 4 if 2 igge 2 ike 2 ikke 2 imme 2 inde 2 ipe 4 ippe 2 ires 2 ishe 2 ite 4 ixe 2 le 2 nes 2 ole 2 ome 2 orewe 2 orte 2 ote 4 ove 2 eirs 2 ros 2 runge 2 2 ude 2 ughten 2 ume 2 unge 2 uppe 4 urche 2 urs 2 u£e 4 ward 2

It might be argued that these 85 couplets do not provide evidence against the existence of an improvisational system of end-rhymes in King Horn; they simply provide no evidence at all. Furthermore, these 72 phonemes (about half of the total range of rhyme variety in King Horn) account for only 170 lines, or 11.1% of the poem's total length. 203 But it is at precisely this point that I think the analogy between the oral performance of medieval romances and "oral compositions" in the traditional sense begins to break down. The jongleur is also striving to remember his text as a preconceived entity. The proposed system for improvising end-rhymes seems to have been used to aid a 1onqleur1s memory of a "text" (whether orally or visually transmitted), but not to have been used to replace it. The remaining 1360 lines of King Horn all employ only 80 recurring rhyme elements. And it seems that, with very few exceptions, the greater the rate of a given rhyme's recurrence, the more evidence exists that the jongleur possessed a formulaic vocabulary (that is, a proportionately minute sub-group of words within each phonemic cluster) with which he could improvise his end- rhymes and, thus, formally, complete his couplet. It should also be noted that the rhymes of such a system could hardly be considered a "memory aid," as is so common in discussing the merits of regular end-rhyme, because they are intended to function precisely when the memory falters. As soon as any given rhyme element begins to recur with sufficient frequency in King Horn, so does— not the entire vocabulary that makes up the rhyme cluster (though 204 this seems to be the case in Havelok where the conventional thought patterns of its author, or a certain "fondness for familiarity" on the part of his audience, or just compositional sloth may be considered the cause) but— a remarkably small number of words; only these words recur with disproportionate frequency in the cluster, and at least one of them will help to make the 'jongleur1s formal unit when necessary by appearing in either line; together these words seem to generate the majority of couplets that are formed on a specific rhyme element. I propose that these sub-groupings of a recurrent vocabulary for each of King Horn's rhymes may be considered formulaic in the sense that these words are intended primarily to maintain the romance's poetic structure rather than to advance its narrative. Normally, these subgroupings comprise less than 10% of the total vocabulary employed in a given rhyme cluster of King Horn, and they seldom exceed more than three, readily remembered words. The evidence that demonstrates this theory for a formulaic vocabulary, with which a jongleur could have improvised many of his couplets, should be accepted inductively and cumulatively. Few phonemic clusters in Horn demonstrate an improvisational system so neatly as its -edde cluster discussed above (in which "bedde" can be considered its formulaic element). It seems rather that whenever rhyme 205

variety was possible, the jongleur of King Horn would strive for it. And certain final phonemes in the English language can be considered more readily rhymable than others; such rhymes in Horn are normally participial end­ ings, common suffixes or homophonic inflections. Such relatively "easy" rhymes in English eliminate the jongleur1s

need for any improvisational system. But few of King Horn1s rhyme elements offer the jongleur such readily available rhyming words, so an improvisational system of some sort seems warranted. I have chosen, strictly for organizational reasons, to sub­ divide the end-rhyme clusters of King Horn that do recur with any frequency into two further categories. The first category (cf. Appendix III, Part B) consists of the final phonemes that recur in three to nine couplets? the second category (cf. Appendix III, Part C) consists of the final phonemes which recur in ten or more couplets. Both categories are listed below. With each of these final rhyme elements, I list the total number of lines from King Horn in which it recurs, the vocabulary ("Major Formulae") that seems to comprise a formulaic subgrouping within the cluster, and the percentage of the total number of couplets that seem to be improvised around this sub­ grouping. For the purposes of my analysis, this last feature seems the most important since it indicates just how often the suggested subgrouping of improvisational rhyme words in each, rhyme cluster recurs in (and thus helps formally to complete) the cluster's total number of couplets. Under the appropriate individual listings of Appendix III/ I discuss the possible presence of certain readily available rhymes or other minor formulae for certain clusters; both of these features are statistically counterproductive to demonstrating the formulaic subgroupings within King Horn's phonemic clusters. In the following tables, I have based my percentages entirely on the recurrence of readily discernible, malor formulae. But I have noted with an asterisk when the percentage of couplets that seem improvised would be significantly increased if these two other means of improvising rhymes were to be considered part of a 1Onqleur1s "formulaic" system. Category JE

The 60 final phonemes included in the following category recur in 3 to 9 couplets of the C-manuscript of King Horn. These 60 different rhyme elements (or 39.5% of Horn's total variety of end-rhyme sounds) appear in 618 lines (or 40.4% of the poem's total length). In all but two cases (-age and -ie), an improvisational subgrouping of words seems to be operative in the formation of the majority of Horn's couplets. The ". . ./. . ." entries represent "closed systems" of formulaic elements that rhyme with each other almost exclusively.

Rhyme Element Number of Lines Major Formulae % of Couplets adde 10 hadde 80 age 6 ----- 0 * ake 14 take, sake 86 ame 8 name 75 are 12 Aylmare, j are 100 aste 8 caste, laste 100 awe 10 drare, felave 100 ay 10 lay ^ 60 * eche 16 speche 67 * edde 8 bedde 100 eide 10 seide 80 elle 12 telle, felle 66 enche 10 benche, adrench 100 ende 16 wende 75 * enne 10 Suddenne 100 ente 16 wente, sente 100 erde 10 herde 60

207 208 Rhvme Element Number of Lines Maior Formulae % of Couplets erne 6 3erne/werne 100 erte 6 nerte/smerte 100 erve 6 serve 100 esse 18 Westernesse 78 * ete 10 swete 60 ette 10 sette 80 * eve 8 bileve 75 * ewe 18 trewe 56 * iche 8 iliche 100 ie 14 ----- 0 ighe 8 i^e, isijje 100 ike 6 like 100 ile 10 while, mile 100 ille 18 wille, stille 100 ime 8 time 75 * ine 18 pine 67 inke 8 drinke 100 inne 14 inne, winne 100 is 6 ywis 67 ise 10 wise 80 * isse 10 wisse 100 iste 10 wiste 100 ithe 18 blijpe 78 itte 8 sitte 75 o 16 wo, t»o 75 of 6 £>eof/leof 67 of te 6 softe, ofte 100 olde 18 wolde 67 * oke 8 toke, loke 100 orde 8 borde 100 ore 14 sore, more 86 * orn 16 horn 100 othe 8 lojpe, wrojpe 100 other 10 o£er 100 ulle 6 schulle 67 une 14 dune 57 under 6 wunder 100 unne 8 sunne 75 urne 8 turne 75 urste 6 furste 100 use 6 huse 100 uste 6 custe, luste 100 ute 6 abute 100 Category II

The most convincing evidence for the presence of certain improvisational subgroupings of words, with which the jongleur of King Horn could have improvised his couplets within each rhyme cluster, seems to come from the following category of 20 rhyme elements (only 13.2% of the total variety) that recur in ten or more couplets of King Horn. This remarkably small category of rhyme sounds nevertheless generates 742 lines of King Horn (or 48.5% of the entire poem). It should be noted that, despite the markedly increased recurrence of some of these rhyme elements, the number of words in their respective sub­ groups does not seem to increase proportionately (though there is frequent evidence for the existence of minor formulae as well).

Rhyme Element Number of Lines Major Formulae % c^f Couplets alle 26 halle, alle 92 * ede 34 lede, rede 47 eie 26 tweie, pleie, deie 77 * elde 22 felde, helde 82 * ene 24 kene 50 ere 76 were, jbere, fere, dere 71 * este 30 beste, feste 80 * ide 30 ride, side 86 * ighte 56 kni-jte, ri^te, ni-ite 85 *

209 210 Rhyme Element Number of Lines Major Formulae % of Couplets ild 24 child 75 * inge 86 kinge 51 * ive 30 live, arive 80 * ode 20 gode 70 oghte 20 bro^te, iio^te 80 * one 40 one 45 onde 64 londe, honde 84 * onge 28 fonge, longe, onge 93 * owe 50 knowe, inoje, flowe/rowe 60 unde 30 grunde, stunde 74 * ure 26 bure 77

On the one hand, the more complex variety of certain rhyme clusters in King Horn (including the -ede, -ene, -inqe and -one clusters) indicates that the proposed improvisational system was, at most, supplemental to his craft; only half of the couplets in these more complex clusters seem improvised. On the other hand, the observable fact that almost every end-rhyme which recurs in six or more lines of King Horn employs some sort of formulaic sub-grouping of rhyme words demonstrates that an improvisational system (as Baugh suggested) did in fact exist for the oral performance of Middle English romances. Such a theory has been argued and occasionally overstated^ because of the system's superficial similarities to "oral composition" in a conventional sense. And I wish to underline the fact that the system of improvisation in King Horn works by means of words, not phrases. But that the signs of a truly improvisational system peculiarly 211

attuned to the formal exigencies of the oral performance of a more or less memorized text exist in King Horn seems irrefutable. The actual 'jongleur (and not his more literary imitators) apparently possessed a mental grab-bag of two or three formulaic rhyme words per rhyme element; from this proportionately small subgroup of his rhyming vocabulary, he could (but did not always) extract a sufficiently appropriate word for either the preliminary or terminal line of his formal unit, the phonically exact couplet. Most of King Horn's verbal formulae seem semanti­ cally quite flexible— such as hadde, seide, herde, like, alle, were, one. Only Avlmare, Suddenne and Westernesse could not be used by the i ongleur in almost any context of his narrative. Such peculiarly limited formulaic words, as well as the romance's double-formulae (discussed below), frequently produce Horn's "tag-lines." But it is the pervasive presence of a formulaic subgrouping within each rhyme cluster of a given romance that determines the theoretical plausibility of its being transmitted by oral performance. Despite its frequent "tag-lines," all the evidence from an analysis of Havelok1s end-rhymes seems to refute the notion that its manuscript may be the transcription of an oral performance. Though the end-rhymes of Havelok the Dane are indeed conventional, I can find no consistent 212 evidence for the existence of proportionately small sub­ groupings of words within each phonemic cluster (i.e., formulae around which the romance1s couplets have been improvised). The repetition of conventional rhymes in Havelok that often comprise almost an entire cluster can be occasionally demonstrated, but nothing more "formulaic" than this. Rather, one need simply consider the following passage from Havelok in order to perceive that the crafting of its end-rhymes differs significantly from the performance of King Horn:

He was the best knight at nede That eyere mighte riden on stede Or wepne wagge or folk ut lede; Of knight ne havede he nevere drede That he no sprong forth so sparke of glede, And lete him knawe of his hand-dede— Hu he couthe with wepne spede; And other he refte him hors or wede, Or made him sone handes sprede And "Loverd, mercii" loude grede. He was large and no wight gnede. Hayede he non so good brede Ne on his bord non so good shrede, That he ne wolde thorwith fede Povre that on fote yede— Porto haven of Him the mede That for us wolde on rode blede, Christ that all can wisse and rede That eyere woneth in any thede. (11. 87-105)

There are nineteen consecutive, exact end-rhymes in the above tirade from Havelock, and not one verbal repetition— a remarkable tour de force in English. This run of 213 end-rhymes may have been memorized by its intended performer, but would be numerically impossible for a iongleur to improvise according to the proposed system (i.e., around a formulaic subgrouping of only two or three rhyme words). In the above excerpt from Havelok, I am not primarily concerned with the length of the run of its end-rhymes, though their number is extraordinary. Consecutive couplets that rhyme together appear quite regularly in this romance; such consecutively rhyming couplets seem to exploit near-rhyme as well as exact runs. Nor are such linked couplets entirely absent from Horn (cf. lines 43-6, 227-30, and 291-4 for exact runs; lines 115-8, 127-30, and 235-8 for near runs). In Havelok such runs of end-rhyme frequently reach six lines without verbal repetition (cf. 11. 240-5, 326-31, 402-7, 673-8, 825-30, 1684-9, 174Q-5, 2903-7). But in Horn such runs (with the dubious exception of the kni^te/brijtte/whit/ilik/ wi-st/kn^t sequence in lines 499-504) never exceed two couplets. Such consecutive couplets remain rare in Horn, whereas in Havelok they seem to appear on the average of once every fifty lines. Furthermore, there seems to be some evidence in Havelok for the intentional placement of intermittent couplets that still conjoin, like the slo/fro- (bour/tour)-qo/wo-(bltwene/wene)-wowe/lowe sequence of lines 2070-9. In general, the end-rhymes of Havelok seem 214 far more consciously crafted than those of King Horn. It seems more important to note, however, that such runs of consecutive rhyme in King Horn are always divisible by two, whereas the above excerpt of nineteen lines from Havelok, as well as its bothe/rode/blode sequence (11. 430-2), possibly the faste/unwraste/fnaste rhymes (11. 547-9) and perhaps such consecutive couplets as the (sawe)/lowe/ slowe/flowe run (11. 2430-3) do not. Since regular tetrameter meter also provides Havelok with an audibly conspicuous form, its author no longer seems so doggedly concerned with maintaining the phonically exact couplet as his formal unit. But this is an entirely relative assessment of Havelok1s secondary rhyme features (i.e.,

"studied," but supplementary ornamentation of its pre- established form). In so far as Havelok1s couplets were meant to be aurally appreciated, the function of their end-rhymes remains overwhelmingly primary. But they do not seem to have been orally improvised; and, therefore, do not suggest that the manuscript preserves a jongleur1s actual performance. Syntax provides one more general indication of the difference between the formal priorities of an improvised text like Horn1s MS. and the more studied composition of Havelok1 s. All of King Horn's couplets, and most of its lines are significantly end-stopped. This phenomenon 215

might suggest that its improvised lines could, thus, be readily annexed to one another, but it also occurs in mere hack-work. its absence, however, indicates always more skillful composition (that is, a revised text). The first twenty-six lines of Havelok seem to be more or less discrete phrasal units; they form the traditional "come hither" of a minstrel ("Herkneth to me, gode men,"). But the very first narrative sentence of this romance runs over two couplets:

It was a king by are dawes, That in his time were gode lawes He dede maken and full well holden; Him lovede yung, him lovede olde, (11. 27-30).

And random enjambment is not very difficult to find in Havelok; for example, "Thanne mighte chapmen fare/Thurhut Englond ..." (11. 51-2). Yet, in reading Horn, one constantly senses that it is only the end-rhyme which ties two consecutive lines together. Again, this is an entirely relative assessment of the two romances. Donald Sands has commented it is unfortunate that Horn and Havelok should be "Discussed together, often as though they were of equal literary value . . . because the latter is really a better piece all around. Applying one set of critical principles by which the art of end-rhyme may be evaluated inevitably reaches this 216 conclusion about the relative merits of these two romances. Yet, if King Horn’s text is. the record of a 1ongleur's performance while Havelok1s text composes a tale intended for an oral performance, their respective manuscripts present the critic with two substantially different commodities. Both romances will strive to main­ tain the primary function of regular end-rhyme since both were intended to be aurally appreciatedr the end-rhymes of both must be exact in order to be good. But the "tag- lines" of the two romances must be assessed by different principles because of the differing compositional methods t that produced them. In Havelok, the "tag-lines" are largely a compositional short-cut— prefabricated conventions, as Baugh suggested, but not improvised during an oral performance. Such "tag-lines" seem to be justifiable when they signal a transition or give the audience some familiar point of reference, but they may be mere cliches (and, in general, the Havelok poet did relatively well in avoiding them). Such written "tag-lines" did not strive to exceed the achievements of a truly improvised art which preceded them, but were not justified by its formal difficulty. They are the vestiges of a fading craft, but not the craft itself. And, as Ruth Crosby first noted, we occasionally find eyen "in Chaucer the line or half line added for no apparent purpose but the rhyme. Such 217 superfluous phrases as these, however, are not common."47

In King Horn, however, the majority of "tag-lines" are indeed improvised for the sake of the rhymes; they prevent the jongleur from hesitating. But the lines them­ selves are the formulaic elements in the jongleur1s improvisational system; their final rhyme words are. To demonstrate that the tag-lines (often tag-couplets might be the more accurate term) of King Horn are indeed a by­ product of its formulaic subgroupings of rhyme words, I have listed the line numbers of repetitive phrases in its C~manuscript below. In the overwhelming majority of these "tag-lines," one of the rhyme words proves to be a major formula of its cluster in King Horn. That is, the word alone recurs far more frequently (and, thus, completes more couplets) than these repetitious lines; such words, or formulae, have been underlined.

hadde/ladde; 19-20; 1045-6 halle/alle: 71-2; 223-4; 255-6; 625-6; 893-4 halle/falle: 779-80; 1221-2 halle/walle; 1041-2; 1383-4 ^are/ifare; 467-8; 1355-6 bare/Avlmare; 505-6; 1493-4 dra^e/fela-yes; 1289-90; 1419-20 day/may: 29-30; 727-28 biseche/speche; 453-4; 579-80 bedde/weddei 299-300; 949-50 shelde/felde: 53-4; 513-4; 557-8; 1301-2 Suddenne/kenne: 143-4; 175-6; 985-6; 1517-8 hende/wende: 371-2; 1117-8 wende/ende; 911-2; 1211-2 wende/shende: 679-80; 1401-2 sente/wente: 525-6; 919-20; 1337-8 feere/jere: 523-4; 731-2; 917-8; 1139-40 were/pere; 297-8; 765-6; 1167-8; 1245-6; 1353 ^erne/werne: 915-6; 1085-6; 1403-4 herte/smerte: 875-6; 1389-90; 1481-2 serve/sterve; 775-6; 909-10 feste/geste: 477-8; 521-2; 1217-8 pleie/tweie: 23-4; 345-6 tweie/deie: 887-8; 1345-6 side/ride; 32-3; 135-6 iliche/riche: 313-4; 339-40 ije/is^ei 755-6; 975-6 child/mild: 79-80; 159-60 child/wild; 251-2; 295-6 stille/wille: 287-8; 541-2; 999-1000 wille/telle: 365-6; 943-4 pine/bine: 635-6; 539-40

ringe/rymenhilde: 613-4; 873-4; 1483-4 springe/kinge: 211-2; 495-6; 1427-8 drinke/think; 971-2; 1055-6; 1151-2 winne/inne; 603-4; 1071-2; 1357-8 wise/servise; 237-8; 989-90 wisse/misse: 121-2; 1457-8 knixte/mijte: 435-6; 935-6 niyte/miste: 123-4; 1199-1200 knijite/nijfte: 447-8; 491-2 blibe/sibe: 355-6; 1347-8 swibe/blibe: 273-4; 791-2; 1225-6 sitte/witte: 651-2; 108304 live/wive: 559-60; 693-4 ■s flode/aode: 139-40; 1183-4

so^te/brojte: 39-40; 465-6; 599-600 toke/loke: 1099-1100; 1141-2 wolde/golde: 1037-8; 1163-4 anon/gon: 45-6; 285-6; 1231-2; 1351-2 stronde/londe: 35-6; 125-6 sonde/londe: 809-10; 933-4; 1179-80 honde/londe: 59-60; 81-2; 215-16; 1109-10; 1299-1300 1327-8; 1413-4 honde/stronde: 111-2; 1137-8; 1499-1500 fonge/longe; 719-20; 737-8 borde/worde: 113-4; 253-4; 827-8 sore/more; 69-70; 1193-4 Horn/born: 9-10; 137-8; 509-10 Horn/unorn: 329-30; 1525-6 hote/bote: 201-2; 767-8 ober/brober: 283-4; 577-8; 821-2; 1291-2 funde/grunde: 103-4; 133-4 stunde/grunde: 333-4; 739-40; 1159-60 cuppe/iperuppe: 449-50; 1125-6 bure/aventure: 325-6; 649-50; 709-10 turne/murne: 703-4; 963-4 furste/burste: 661-2; 1191-2 Athelbrus/hus: 225-6; 1501-2 220

For each of the above rhyme links, certain syntactically and semantically similar phrases are improvised that may occur in either the preliminary or terminal line of a couplet. All together, the above couplets account for some 348 lines, or a mere 22.5% of King Horn's total length. But the couplets' major formulae (that is, the proportionately small subgroupings of excessively recurrent rhyme words in all clusters) account for approximately 80% of the romance. So, such "tag-line" repetitions may be a by-product of the jongleur1s "formulaic" rhyme- words, but may not themselves be considered the "formulae" of his improvisational system. As for isolated "tag-lines," such as "Bi dales & bi dune" (11. 154 & 210), that repeat independently of such recurrent couplets in King Horn listed above, they have already been included in the proposed system by virtue of the recurrence of their final phoneme's rhyme word. And these individual lines, in themselves, do not complete Horn's formal unit— the couplet; their final words do. Among the three manuscripts of King Horn, there exist numerous variants that Joseph Hall has analyzed exhaustively.48 Two types of variants are of particular interest now. In the first type, the rhyme phoneme of all three manuscripts remains the same. For example, all three of the following lines rhyme with knight: 221 L 1222 worbi men & lyhte O 1257 Hyrische men wy»te C 1214 Redi to fijte

And all three of the following variants rhyme with town: L 1294 & lerne kynges roune 0 1329 And wite of kynges owne C 1286 & bere kinges crune.

The town and knight phrases in all three manuscripts are roughly equivalent. Baugh argued that "tag-lines" like "There is my knight" would explain the improvisation of such variants during oral performance. But consider the second type of variant that commonly occurs among the three manuscripts: in the following examples, the narrative sense of a couplet remains the same, but the conjoining rhyme phoneme changes entirely.

L 483 Ich be rede mid al my myht 484 bat t>ou make horn knyht 0 499 Ich £>e wolde rede ate lest 500 |>at pou horn knict makedest C 479 Hit nere no^t for loren 480 For to kni^te child horn

L 1353 he louede horn wib mihte 1354 & he him wib rhyte O 1382 He louede horn wel derne 1383 And horn hym also ^jerne

C 1343 He luueb him so dere 1344 & is him so stere. 222 I do not see how the improvisational insertion of a "tag- line" alone can explain the existence of such variants. Rather, the true jongleur could apparently commit himself to the sense of one line; it may have been, as Appendix III indicates, either the preliminary or terminal line of the couplet which he anticipated as a formal unit; he then improvised his other line in front of a formulaic rhyme- word taken from his mental subgrouping of available words for that phonemic cluster. Only some of these lines were, then, recollected as ready-made tags. The performer of King Horn was indeed, as his French title implies, a juggler of words. The author of Have1ok, however, did not need to improvise his rhymes in any sense that differs significantly from a modern versifier's (though his subsequent performer may have had to). The end-rhymes of King Horn had to be both exact and readily available to its public performer, but the end-rhymes of Havelok had only to be exact (for subsequent oral recitation). Any flagrant repetitiveness in the rhyming vocabulary of Havelok the Dane may, thus, be considered an artistic weakness; whereas, similar repetitiveness in King Horn may be considered to have been aesthetically justifiable. The implicit transition that seems to have affected the art of making end-rhymes in English verse as early as the middle of the thirteenth century should help us to establish critical principles for the assessment of such poetry# since it helps us to distinguish orally preserved manuscripts from more literary compositions (a vague distinction that needs to be clarified, not ignored). A recognition of the effects of this transition should also help us to comprehend more fully the original appeal of regular end-rhyme in English prosody (and, perhaps, the subsequent history of its appeal as a significant formal craft). CONCLUSION

The adjectives "oral" and "written" may clearly distinguish the Iliad from the Aeneid, but they seem too antipodal to accommodate most of the literature of post- Conquest England. Still, an awareness of distinction between an improvised and a studied mode of composition cannot be entirely dismissed from our evaluations of medieval literature. Evidence for the influence of an "oral" tradition in Middle English verse would not merely excuse conventions that become artistic mistakes when incorporated into more studied modes of composition. Rather, the oral performance of a poem establishes its own principles for evaluating poetic skill by anticipating the audience's ability to perceive this skill aurally. The differing intended modes of appreciation establish differing limits (and opportunities) for aesthetic perception. And these differences between the two modes are crucial to our evaluation of the merits of regular end-rhyme in a specific poem. There is, however, no evidence for the "oral composition" of verse, in the traditional sense, for the narrative poetry of England from King Horn to the Canterbury Tales. I

224 225

propose, therefore/ the following "medial" modes of poetic production— between the "oral" and "written" extremes— that account for both the nature of composition and the intended mode of appreciation in establishing the critical principles with which a specific poem may be evaluated:

ORAL: a formulaically improvised composition for simul­ taneous public performance; there exists no dis­ tinction in this mode between the author and the performer. By definition, these works cannot exist in written form. The manuscripts of even the Iliad or Beowulf are, at most, the written records of one such performance; the "fixed" texts are preserved after the oral composition (and, in so far as they may have been subsequently edited, do not accurately reflect the mode).

MEMORY ABSOLUTE: the composed (though perhaps not written) text is fixed prior to public performance, and is intended to be reproduced exactly as composed by its subsequent public performer (who may have been its author as well). This was the traditional craft of the Welsh bards (and is still used for punishment in some high schools). 226 SUPPLEMENTED MEMORY: The public performer approximates fidelity to a poetic composition that exists prior to his performance, but improvises locally to maintain his form when his memory of the "fixed" text fails (his alterations would be considered artistic failure if attempted by a Welsh bard). Two subgroupings need to be made within this mode: 1) the preexistent composition was aurally committed to memory by its future performer; the King Horn C-manuscript seems to have been a record of the reproduction of such prior transmission. The jongleur is implicit­ ly illiterate. 2) the preexistent composition was visually committed to memory by its future performer. The text of Havelok the Dane seems intended for this purpose. Its jongleur would implicitly be literate and was probably ex­ pected to approximate MEMORY ABSOLUTE by its author, if not by his future audience. Studied revision becomes possible.

PUBLIC READING: A clear distinction still exists between the roles of author, performer and audience. The first two are necessarily literate, and the 227 performer is expected to maintain absolute (i.e., visual) fidelity to his fixed text. If the audience is literate, it may eliminate the role of the performer privately, but the author still intends that his craft should be appreciated aurally. (Such counter-intentions on the part of poet and audience have led to much discussion of the "inner ear.")

WRITTEN: This is the most common mode employed by English literature of the twentieth century. Like ORAL, it seems to be an extreme on the critical spectrum between the eve and the ear for the in­ tended appreciation of poetic skill. The main distinction between "skillful" composition and mere "hack-work" in this mode seems to be the result of studied revision that subsequently may be visually perceived as such.

To consider the historical development of these modes as some sort of "evolutionary process" in the development of English prosody seems an oversimplification because there is a clear break between Old and Middle English (the latter of which presents no records of a strictly ORAL mode). The general trend from "oral" to "written" phases in English 228 literature should be considered a technological progression of discrete prosodic inventions. The lightbulb did not evolve from the candle— and both still have their merits. So, too, the proposed "medial modes" of versecraft (MEMORY ABSOLUTE, SUPPLEMENTED MEMORY, PUBLIC READING) were invented to meet the formal demands of their audiences and to exploit the means that their intended mode of performance provided towards this aesthetic end. We have seen, most clearly in the traditional Welsh measures, that regular end-rhyme maintains the conspicuous form of a poem intended for aural appreciation; the technique is not mere "artifice" in a pejorative sense. The regularity of such exact rhymes is not a supplemental ornamentation; rather, it defines aural form. This same principle should apply to the three "medial modes" of Middle English versecraft since their productions were all intended for aural appreciation. The principles for evaluating the compositional skill with which this formal intention is achieved, however, vary from mode to mode. The primary function of regular end-rhyme justifies the presence of its simply parallel rhyme-links in the oral performance of poetry; the first skill that rhymed verse must demonstrate in the three medial modes of Middle English performance is the coordination of phonemic exactness and regular placement. The compositional differences 229

between the three modes of Middle English poetry determine, however, what other skills must be evident in its intended mode of appreciation in order to be evaluated as "good" by an audience. As Baugh suggested, the first skill of an illiterate •jongleur was his ability to maintain a continuous flow of formally conspicuous, exact rhymes; the uninterrupted presentation of audible strophes was applauded as his primary skill. His improvisational system was a supplemental means to this formal end. Although the end-rhymes of Havelok may remain improvisable for an intended future performance, they already seem much more varied than Horn’s. Variety, I would argue, has always been valued in the composition of rhymed English verse. If end-rhyme ful­ fills its primary function (that is, if its regularity alone defines the audible strophe), only the vocabulary may provide such variety; phonemic variety (e.g., near- ^rhymes, off-rhymes, eye-rhymes, etc.) remains counter­ productive to end-rhyme's primary function. It should be reiterated that even the jongleur of King Horn was attempting to be as varied as possible in the completion of his skill, so long as it did not interfere with the form of his performance. The beautiful is difficult; I confess that the converse of this axiom is not necessarily true. But I have not been analyzing "Beauty," so much as a conspicuous skill. And the factor of difficulty in a given task determines the skill of the performer in completing it. Variety may be taken as a case in point: less verbal variety in the end-rhymes of King Horn does not necessarily indicate a less skillful composition. Rather, the mode of composition and performance must first be determined in order to establish valid principles for the evaluation of its end-products. King Horn's rhymes may, thus, be considered more "skillful" than Havelok1s though they were both intended for the same mode of performance; we have no record of Horn1s original composition— X believe we do for Havelok. The performance of most Middle English poetry pre­ served both the exactness and the regularity of its end- rhyme crafts. But the increased literacy of both authors and audience generated new criteria for evaluating the skill of a composition— aurally. Other aural indications of the skillful use of a rhyming craft that distinguish Havelok from Horn would be the former's more extensive runs of rhymes and occasional macaronics; yet, the presence of these features in a more advanced phase of composition (if not performance) need not be critically detrimental to an appreciation of the improvised phase; it remains most important that the two phases be distinguished. 231 The artistic efficacy of regular end-rhyme would completely disappear as a valid skill in English prosody only with a complete transition from the mode of PUBLIC READING to WRITTEN (a transition that has not, as yet, been completely effected). Within the aural "medial modes" of regular end-rhyme, however, new skills were generated in response to increased compositional opportunities for revision. So, for example, medieval English poets experiment with extensive runs of rhymes, with more complex patterns and with semantically ironic links— none of these skills are counterproductive to the primary function of regular end-rhyme, whereas phonemic suppression of the rhyme words and irregular patterns (both post- medieval developments) indicate the abandonment of regular end-rhyme's primary function (but only in a specific poem). There has been no significant "change of taste" between the Middle Ages and today in terms of appreciating skillful poetic compositions. What has changed has been the critical means of perceiving such poetic skills. None of the following theoretical excuses for the evolution of regular end-rhyme has any critical relevance to the appreciation of a specific poem that employs the technique: — Regular end-rhyme is not a natural (physical, psychological, anthropological, or otherwise) development from primitive prosody. It was and 232 remains frequently invented formal patterns for artificial ends. — Regular end-rhyme is not simply harmonically appeal­ ing? random rhyme itself or alliteration or assonance may be so justified in theory, but not the "monotony" of its regularity. — Regular end-rhyme is not an eidos in the sense that it truly generates poetic content? it merely fixes form, a process which tends to reject content. — Regular end-rhyme is not a memory device (though it may be so employed). — Regular end-rhyme is not inherently humorous (though it may be so employed). Regular end-rhyme is, however, a valid means of giving poetry intended for aural appreciation conspicuous form by defining its audible strophe. In order to truly appreciate King Horn we must hear it performed aloud from memory. In order to truly appreciate Havelok the Dane we must attempt to perform it ourselves. There is no need to appreciate a reading of the hack-work romances in the Auchinleck MS. We cannot evaluate the art of end-rhyme in Chaucer by reference to Alexander Pope's couplets any more than we can criticize Alexander Pope for not employing the symbolic complexity of Ezra Pound. Only works generated by the same means for the same intended mode of 233 formal appreciation may be validly evaluated by reference to one another. And the quality of end-rhymes in a specific poem may only be determined by reference to the function of their pattern and the compositional process that fulfills this formal function. End-rhyme itself cannot be rejected as an abstract whole that is no longer formally viable in the production of English poetry. More precisely, the majority of poets are simply not composing in the "medial modes" of formal versecrafts that, until the nineteenth century, remained highly attuned to the aural perception of a poem's studied construction. Modern poetry often seems more "studied" in its composition than medieval verse; in terms of re­ vision, it can be. But regular end-rhyme was always in­ tended to be appreciated as a difficult craft. Whether this formal intention was fulfilled can only be determined by evaluating individual pieces within their equally in­ tended modes of appreciation. NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

•'■John Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: The Non- Chaucerian Tradition (London: Paber § Faber, 1957), p. 191.

The three manuscripts of King Horn are: MS. Harleian, 2253 (L), MS. Laud, Misc. 108 (0) and MS. Gg. iv. 27. 2. All of my line references and quotations of King Horn refer to the C-manuscript as edited by Joseph Hall in King Horn: A Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Pres's, 1901) . 3 For a detailed description of King Horn's irregular stress pattern, cf. "Metre," pp. xlv-1, in Joseph Hall's edition of the romance.

^Karl Brunner, "Middle English Metrical Romances and Their Audiences," in Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor Albert Croll Baugh, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), p. 221.

^For a more detailed synopsis of King Horn's narrative, cf. J. Burke Severs, ed., A Manual of the Wri tings in Middle Engli.sh: 1050-1500 (New Haven, Conn. : The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967), p. 19.

^Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval Literature and Its Social Foundations (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956, rpt. 1967), p. 177. 7 Mildred K. Pope, ed., The Romance of Horn by Thomas, Anglo-Norman Text Society 9-10 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955).

Q Charles W. Dunn, "Romances Derived from English Legends," in J. Burke Severs, ed., A Manual, p. 20. q Speirs, p. 109.

l^The Laud Misc. 108 manuscript of Havelok seems to have suffered from an abnormal number of graphemic

234 235 irregularities ascribed to an Anglo-Norman scribe. I have taken all my citations of "Havelok the Dane" from Donald B. Sands regularized edition in Middle English Verse Romances (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966), pp. 55-129.

■^George B. Jack, "The Date of Havelok," Anglia 95 (1977), 20-33.

l^For a more detailed synopsis of Havelok1s narrative, cf. J. Burke Severs, ed., A Manual, pp. 22-3.

■^Dunn, p. 25.

^Brunner, p. 23.

■^Dunn, p. 24.

■^Albert C. Baugh, "The Middle English Romance: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation," Speculum XLII No. 1 (January, 1967), p. 7.

■^Schlauch, pp. 175-76.

■^Ruth Crosby, "Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages," Speculum 11 (1936), p. 110. 19 Ruth Crosby, "Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery," Speculum 13 (1938), p. 414. 2 0 For a review of the growing influence of "the oral theory" and implications for medieval literature, cf. Michael Curschmann, "The Concept of the Oral Formula as an Impediment to Our Understanding of Medieval Oral Poetry," Medievalia et Humanistica (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), N.S. 8, pp. 63-76.

21Crosby, "Oral Delivery," p. 102.

^^Crosby, "Oral Delivery," p. 106.

^ C r o s b y , "Oral Delivery," p. 102.

24Pope, p . xlv.

2^Speirs, p. 107.

2^Speirs, p. 109.

^Baugh, p. 3. 236 2 Q Helaine Newstead, "Romances: General," in J. Burke Severs, ed., A Manual, p. 12.

^Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries-"(London: Routledge 6 Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 7.

^Baugh, p. 29.

^Albert C. Baugh, "Improvisation in the Middle English Romance," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959), 413-54.

S^Laura Hibbard Loomis, "The Auchinleck MS," PMLA 57 (1942), 595-627.

33Schlauch, p. 177.

34Mehl, p. 10.

33Curschmann, p. 71.

•^Baugh, "The Middle English Romance," p. 18.

37Mehl, p. 50.

3®George Kane, Middle English Literature (London, 1951), p. 49.

S^Hall, ed., pp. xlv-xlvi.

^Sands, ed., p. 16,

4*Hall, ed., p . lvi.

4^Baugh, "The Middle English Romance," p. 29.

43Hall, p. xlvi.

44Albert C. Baugh, who otherwise led the way in in­ vestigating how the minstrels' improvisational conventions affected the transmission of romances, offers two examples ("The Middle English Romance," p. 2) of the critical overstatement of the role of oral performers in the authorship of such literature: Edith Rickert, The Romance of Emare (EETSES, 99), p. xxvii; and Mary I. O'Sullivan, Firumbras and Otuel and Roland (GETS, 198), p. xxv. In defense of Both Rickert and O'Sullivan, I would note that the distinction between improvisational reproduction and 237

the role of authorship is an inherently vague distinction and easily overstated for the sake of rhetorical emphasis. I hope that the proposed analytic techniques for de­ termining the nature of a romance's reproduction based on an investigation of its rhyme craft will help us to determine the greater or less influence of an individual jongleur (not the entire tradition) on the composition of a specific manuscript.

4^The faste-1ine has been supplied by the "Cambridge Fragment" of Havelok; cf. Donald B. Sands, p. 72.

^Donald B. Sands, p. 55.

^ R u t h Crosby, "Chaucer," p. 423.

^Hall, ed., pp. xi-xiv. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1971.

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953.

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Walley, Harold R., and J. Harold Wilson. The Anatomy of Literature. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934.

Warren, Alba H., Jr. English Poetic Theory 1825-1865 . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950.

Whitehall, Harold. "Sprung Rhythm." The Kenyon Critics, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. John Crowe Ransom. Norfolk! Cohn.: New Directions, 1944. 28-54.

Whitehall, Harold, Seymour Chatman, Arnold Stein and John Crowe Ransom. "English Verse and What It Sounds Like." Kenyon Review, 18 (1956), 411-77.

Whitehall, Harold. "From Linguistics to Poetry." In Sound and Poetry. English Institute Essays, 1956. E d ”! Northrop Frye. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957.

Willcox, William B. The Age of Aristocracy 1688 to 1830. wnd ed. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1971.

Williams, Gwyn. An Introduction to Welsh Poetry: From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1953.

Williams, Ifor. Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry. Dublin: Institute for Advanced- Studies, 1944.

Williams, Ifor, ed. Armes Prydein. Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1955.

Williams, Ifor, ed. and annot. The Poems of Taliesin, trans. by J. E. Caerwyn Williams. DuETlin Institute for Advanced Studies, Medieval and Modern Welsh Series, Vol. III. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968. 256

Williams, Rolfe. Green Armor on Green Ground. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956.

Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington, Ky.: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954.

Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction." PMLA, 74 (1959), 585-98; rpt. in Hateful Contraries. Lexington, Ky.: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1965.

Wimsatt, W. K., Jr. Vers ification: Major Language Types: Sixteen Essays. New York: Modern Language Assoc., 1972.

Winters, Yvor. Primitivism and Decadence: A Study in American Experimental Poetry. New York: Arrow Editions, 1937.

Winters, Yvor. On Modern Poets. New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1959.

Winters, Yvor. Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Form of the Short Poem in English. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1967.

Wood, Clement. The Craft of Poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929.

Wood, Clement, ed. The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book. Garden City, N.YTi Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1936.

Wood, Clement. Woodr s Unabridged Rhyming Dictionary. Cleveland: World, 1943.

Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966.

Young, George. Ari Engl ish Prosody on Inductive Lines. London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928. APPENDIX I

Examples of the Traditional Welsh Measures

The "second part" of the Gramadeg provides specific examples from Welsh verse itself with brief commentaries regarding their relative merits or difficulties in terms of the language. In Chapter Two, however, I analyze schematic representations of these twenty-four Welsh measures in order to determine a consistent function in their use of regular end-rhyme during oral performance.

In order to demonstrate how my schemae represent Einion's actual verse examples, I have superimposed in this appendix an appropriate schema on each of the following examples provided in the Bangor MS. (cf. John T. Jones,

"Gramadeg Einion Offeiriad," Bulletin of- Celtic Studies 2

(1923-25), pp. 191- 9).

Among the examples of englynion, the Gramadeg offers the following:

257 258

Englyn unodl union (cf. #3, p. 116):

• .... « . • E ^ Pei kawn o gyflwr gyfle proui rin

• • * • * ad Kyt bai ron vynghrogi • • • ■ * * 3 Vyn (eg) es oed venegi • • • • • • fiL Vynggovec dyn tec i ti.

The Gramadeg does not seem clearly to distinguish the

Ecywydd and awdl measures as separate categories. Gwyn

Williams (cf. An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, pp. 236-

243) clarifies the distinction. The following two examples from the Bangor MS. are included within the awdl category:

Toddaid (cf. #19, p. 119):

...... a b Nyt digeryd (td. 34) duw neut digariat kyrdd . .b.... .a Neut llai gwyrd y vyrd o veird yn rat * • * • » « £3- « « O Nit neut lliaws brwyn kwyn kanwlat y gystud * * * C « i « cL Oth atall ruffud waewrud rodiat.

Cyhydedd Naw Ban (cf. #17, p. 118):

* * • « ■ * • • ci Wrthyt greawdyr byt bit vyngobeith

Wrthyf byd (td. 16) drugar hywar hywaith

The Bangor example continues for four more lines 259

One final example from the Bangor MS. will demonstrate how my schema represent the cywydd measures:

Cywdd deuair hirion:

• « • • ■ *3 Kyflwdd Kofleit kyrch amkaff • * i * * * H Kyflymgefn vyrgarn gen graff

Since the "audible strophe" of this measure is the couplet, two lines should be sufficient to demonstrate its structure.

The Bangor example, however, offers two more lines in its demonstration of the verse form:

• t • * i • 3- Kyflawn o gallon a chic • » « • • • • 3 Kyfliaw blodeu banadyl vric.

It should be obvious, particularly from the above example, that my schematic representations completely ignore the stunning effects of systematic cynghanedd. It is hoped, however, that my schema highlight the function of regular end-rhyme within the Welsh measures without distorting its audible conspicuousness. APPENDIX II

The -YN Rhymes of the Armes Prydein

adrodynt; 1. 97 allmyn; 11. 7, 52, 94, 106 bryn; 1. 87 creinhyn; 1. 63 cwynnyn; 1. 4 7 degyn; 11. 5, 95 dichlyn; 1. 92 diffyn; 1. 6 discyn; 1. 89 discynnyn; 1. 16 disgyn; 1. 57 dully; 1. 61 Dulyn; 1. 9 dybydyn; 1. 14 dychynnullvn; 1. 21 dygobryssan; 1. 1 dyorfyn; 1. 12 ebryn; 1. 101 ffohyn; 1. 66 geffyn; 1. 103 genhyn; 11. 2, 11, 88, 102 genyn; 1. 90 Glywyssyg; 1. 99 gorescyn; 1. 14 gryn; 1. 57 gwehyn; 1. 8 gwynyn; 1. 19 gynt; 1. 98 herchwyn; 1. 93 hyn; 11. 17, 23

260 kilhyn; 1. 65 kyferuyden; 1. 54 kylchyn; 11. 15, 64 kymodynt; 1. 50

lleferynt; 1. 49 llithryn; 1. 67

mechteyrn; 11. 18, 100 mehyn; 1. 4

oechyn; 1. 62

peurllyn; 1. 58 Phrydyn; 1. 10 Prydeyn; 1. 105 Prydyn; 1. 66

ryn; 1. 104

syrthyn; 1. 60

techyn; 1. 96 telhyn; 1. 22 terdyn; 1. 4 5 trefdyn; 1. 52 unbyn; 1. 91 vnbyn; 11. 3, 46 ymorchymynynt; 1. 51 ymprofyn; 1. 56 ymwrthryn; 1. 5 5 ymwrthuynnyn; 1. 20 ynt; 1. 48 APPENDIX III

The End-Rhymes of King Horn

In. this appendix I have sorted the line-terminating vocabulary of King Horn's C-manuscript into discrete clusters, each of which brings together all end-rhymes

in the poem that share a common rhyme-element. For ex­ clusively organizational reasons, I have further sorted these clusters into three categories according to the relative frequency of their respective rhyme-elements' total recurrence.

Part A of this appendix merely lists the individual rhyme-elements, the vocabulary employed for each, and the line numbers of these end-rhymes that occur in only one or two couplets of King Horn. Since the recurrence of the end-rhymes in these clusters is so minimal in proportion to the length of the entire romance, no definite system of word frequency can be induced for any of them. Part A of this appendix has been included solely for the sake of completing a survey of King Horn's end-rhymes.

However, both Part B (in the clusters of which a rhyme-element recurs in three to nine couplets) and Part C

(in the clusters of which a rhyme-element recurs in ten or

262 263 more couplets) provide evidence for a conventional vocabulary of end-rhymes used by Horn's original jongleur to complete his couplets. In both Parts B and C of this appendix, I have attempted to demonstrate which words in each cluster may be considered its "formulaic" subgrouping as described in Chapter Two. Therefore, in addition to listing the end-rhymes themselves and their line-numbers for each rhyme-element, I describe the rate of recurrence of certain words in each cluster.

Thus, having observed the "Frequency" of each word in a given cluster, I attempt to determine what percentage of that cluster's total number of couplets seem to be formally "completed" by its most recurrent rhyme words-- that is, quite simply, in how many couplets of the cluster's total number do these recurrent words provide either the preliminary or terminal end-rhyme. A determination of the percentage of couplets thus completed by a "formulaic"

(i.e., "readily remembered") subgrouping of rhyme-words for each cluster is complicated, however, by the fact that such "formulaic" words frequently rhyme with each other to produce an entire couplet. An end-rhyme's frequency of recurrence cannot in itself be taken to indicate statistically the percentage of couplets it actually completes. In King Horn, it is not uncommon, for example, to have a cluster of six couplets in which one word recurs five times, twice in conjunction with another word that

recurs three times. If the recurrence of each of these words should be taken to indicate the percentage (and not merely the number) of the cluster's couplets formally completed by each, together they would total 133%--a figure that is statistical nonsense, although it seems quite valid to argue that one word in itself completes 83% of the couplets while the other, as a separate system, completes 50%. Since, however, I am primarily interested in determin

ing what percentage of the entire cluster may be improvised around a formulaic sub-grouping, I have rather arbitrarily decided that the frequency of the most recurrent rhyme word divided by the total number of couplets in its cluster shall equal the percentage of couplets it completes. To this figure I add the percentage of additional couplets (i.e., those couplets not yet included in the previous count) that the next most frequent rhyme-word helps to complete, and so on to the least recurrent rhyme-word of the formulaic subgrouping. In the above example, for instance, I would attribute the formal completion of 83% (i.e., 5/6) of the cluster's couplets to its most recurrent end-rhyme, and 17% (i.e., 3/6 minus the 2/6 already included in the previous percentage) to its less recurrent end-rhyme. If, however, both words in such a cluster should recur four times each, the decision as to ' 265 which accounts for 67% of the cluster's couplets and which for the remaining 33% seems completely arbitrary. But, so long as the decision is consistently maintained through­ out all computations, the choice becomes ultimately in­ significant. Together, the two words that recur four times each account for 100% of their cluster's couplets. It is under the "Formulae" that I extract the words (based on the analysis of their recurrence in "Word

Frequency") which seem to provide a formulaic sub­ grouping of rhymes for each cluster listed in Parts B and C. I then determine the total percentage of couplets in each cluster that have apparently been improvised around this readily recalled (and, to that extent, "formulaic") vocabulary.

Throughout the following listings, I have considered homonyms to be separate words (i.e., they will not be counted as a single member of their cluster's subgrouping). But compounds that share the same, final semantic root (e.g.: "uphold," "withhold," "hold," etc.) are considered to be a formulaic unit ("(-)hold") if they recur with sufficient frequency in their cluster. I have not ex­ cluded the relatively rare occurrences of "off-rhymes" in King Horn from my computation of a given cluster’s percentage of improvised couplets, though I do consider such phonically inexact end-rhymes to be clearly "mistakes" 266 in the j ongleur's craft and excludable as such; nevertheless, I have included them although they are frequently the source of "variants" (i.e., couplets that do not employ formulaic end-rhymes). When in doubt as to the nature of a specific rhyme word, I have attempted to describe its ambiguity, but I have not (unless otherwise noted) included such a word in the determination of a cluster’s major formula. Similarly, "minor formulae" or common suffixes, though they often account for a significant percentage of couplets in certain clusters, do not themselves recur with sufficient frequency in proportion to the overall size of their respective clusters to be demonstrably part of their formulaic subgroupings. All in all, I have sought to present for each rhyme-element listed below the minimum possible percentage of couplets that may be considered improvised around its formulaic subgrouping of rhyme words-- that is, the total percentage of its couplets completed by "major formulae" alone. And it is only this minimum figure that I have used in Chapter Two (though I do consider such "minor formulae" and common suffixes to be supplementary evidence for the improvisational system I propose). Finally, to avoid unnecessary debates regarding the precise pronunciation of King Horn's language, I have chosen not to convert its rhymes into the International Phonetic 267

Alphabet. For the purposes of my analysis, it is sufficient to assume that a jongleur's pronunciation (if not a scribe's orthography) would be consistent without precisely determining what that pronunciation was. I have arranged the listings of rhyme - elements under each category of this appendix alphabetically according to a modernized and standardized spelling. But the orthography of the rhyme-words themselves under each listing follows that of Joseph Hall's edition in so far as was typographically possible. I hope I have not been un­ necessarily rigorous in separating albeit similar rhyme clusters (e.g., -ede and -edde) into discrete listings. I have attempted to crossreference such possible over­ lappings of rhyme words when they occur. But there is little evidence from the clusters themselves that such

"near" rhymes were considered by Horn1s jongleur to be truly valid equivalents. Part A: End-rhymes that occur in only one or two couplets of the C-manuscript of King Horn.

268 269

Rhyme Element Preliminary Terminal

ABLE table 587 stable 588 ACE grace 571 place 572, 718 lace 717 AGHTE la^te 243 ta^te 244 AILLE assaile 637 assaile 856 bataille 855 faille 638 A (L) D Admirad 89 bald 90 ALE sale 1107 ale 1108 tale 1031 brudale 1032 ALKE halke 1087 walke 1088 AN beran 575 lemman 576 ANG sprang 493 lang 494 ANNE wynunane 67 banne 68 APE slape 1417 rape 1418 ARD gateward 1067 hard 1068 ARME arrae 705 barme 706 ARNE warne 689 berne 690 ARPE harpe 231 scharpe 232 AS was 13 glas 14 ASSE Christesmasse 799 lasse 800 ATE late 1473 gate 1474 xate 1043 late 1044 ATERE watere 1019 latere 1020 ATTE smatte 607 hatte 608 EGGE legge 1057 rigge 1058 ligge 1275 wib segge 1276 EL grauel 1465 castel 1466 ELF twelf 489 him self 490 ELTE pelte 1415 hilte 1416 EME fleme 1271 reme 1272 Rhyme Element Preliminary Terminal EMEj? iqueme£> 485 bisemej? 486 ENGfcE strengfce 899 lengjpe 900 EO heo 1439 beo 816, 1440 t>reo 815 EOSE leose 663 cheose 664 EPE kepe 1103 aslepe 658 wepe 657 wepe 1104 EPEST kepest 1307 slepest 1308 ERIN £>erin 1241 ferin 1242 ERKE derke 1431 werke 1432 ETHE e£e 835 de]?e 836 EVED heued 621 bireued 622 EVENE steuene 665 sweuene 666 EVRE eure 1101 neure 1102 EWTHE rewjpe 409 trewjpe 410 IBBE libbe 63 libbe 316 ribbe 315 sibbe 64 IF strif 407 wif 408

IGGE abugge 1075 brigge 1076 IKE (cf. ICHE) ilike 289 biswike 290 IKKE iJikke 1239 nekke 1240 IMME swymme 189 brymme 190 INDE binde 191 bihynde 192 IPE gripe 51, 605 smite 52 wype 606 IPPE scrippe 1061 lippe 1062 IRES ires 959 tires 960 ISHE fisse 1143 ♦ disse 1144 271

Rhyme Element Preliminary Terminal ITE lite 1131 lite 932 write 931 white 1132 IX (T) E sixe 391 nixte 392 - LE sle 1369 fie 1370 NE S MI Reynes 951 enemis 952 OLE foie 589 cole 590 OME nome 1173 come 1174 OR(E)WE amore e 837 sor e 838 OR(S)TE schorte 927 dorste 928 OTE hote 767 bote 202, 768 ihote 201 OVE(D) houe 1267 proued 1268 RIS/EIRS heirs 897 pris 898 ROS aros 1313 gros 1314 RUNGE sprunge 1015 irunge 1016 THEE jbe 895 t>e 896 UDE crude 1293 lude 1294 UGHTEN fu ten 1375 u ten 1376 UME(S) gumes 161 icume 162 UNGE tunge 1259 sunge 1260 UPPE cuppe 449, 1125 fcer uppe 450, 1126 URCHE wurche 1379 chirche 1380 (O)URS harpurs 1471 gigours 1472 UTHE cutse 353 Mujpe 354 rufc>e 673 tru£>e 674 WARD stuard 451 foreward 452 Part B: End-rhymes that occur in three to nine couplets of the C-manuscript of King Horn.

272 273 Rhyme Element: ADDS______

Preliminary Terminal hadde 19, 1045, 1165 amad 574 nadde 863 dradde 1166 ofdrad 573 harde 864 ladde 20, 1046

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 5 couplets. Hadde or its negative recurs in four of these couplets (80%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

The ofdrad/amad rhyme seems a valid and original variant, though (-') drad may be considered another formula in the system; nevertheless, it recurs only twice.

FORMULAE: (ne)hadde = 80S 274 Rhyme Element: AGE

Preliminary Terminal heritage 1281 age 1324 homage 1497 baronage 1282 passage 1323 trewage 1498

WORD FREQUENCY:

There is no apparent word recurrence for this end-rhyme cluster. The common suffix -age (indicating condition, residence or collectivity) does, however, appear in all three couplets. FORMULAE:

Common Suffix: -age = 100& 275 Rhyme Element: m JEL

Preliminary Terminal blake 1319 awake 1306 make 1409, 1453 forsake 1320 spake 535 gate 1078 take 553, 1305 rape 554 tobrake 1077 sake 1454 take 536 itake 1410

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 7 couplets. The verb (i-)take recurs in 4 of the couplets (57%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster'.

The recurrence of (for-)sake accounts for two additional couplets (29%).

The single anomaly (tobrake/qate) may be considered an "off-rhyme" and outside the system.

FORMULAE: take and sake = 86% 276 Rhyme Element: AME

Preliminary Terminal blame 1265 cam 586, 788 man 787 game 198 nam 585 name 1266 name 197

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Nam(e) recurs in three of these couplets (75%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Cam recurs twice and accounts for the remaining couplet by rhyming with man (25%) ; this couplet may, however, be considered an "off-rhyme" and excludable from the system.

FORMULAE: nam(e) = 75% Ill Rhyme Element: &pp______

Preliminary Terminal

Aylmare 1243 Aylmar 506 bare 891 Aylmare 1494 fare 1355 ifare 468 jpar 505 kare 1244 bare 1493 -rare 892, 1356 £are 467 J

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 6 couplets. The proper noun Aylmar(e) recurs in three of these couplets (50%), twice in conjunction with bare (e). ^are accounts for the remaining three couplets (50%) . FORMULAE: Aylmare and are = 100%. 278 Rhyme Element: ASTE______

Preliminary Terminal caste 841 caste 1014 icaste 659 faste 842 haste 615 laste 616 maste 1013 ilaste 660

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 4 couplets. The verb (i-)caste recurs in three of these couplets (75%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. (I-)laste recurs twice and accounts for the remaining couplet (25%). FORMULAE: caste and laste = 100% 279 Rhyme Element:

Preliminary Terminal aslaxe 1491 asla^e 860 dra^e 1289 dra^e 1420 felaxe 1419 fela^e 996 haue-^ 995 fela^es 1290 withdraxe 859 todraje 1492

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 5 couplets. Variants of the verb (— )draxe recur in four of the couplets (80%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

Felaxe(s) recurs 3 times and accounts for the single couplet that does not employ dra^e (20%) . The haue/felaxe couplet may, however, be considered excludable from the system as an "off-rhyme."

FORMULAE: dr axe and fela~xe = 100% 280 Rhyme Element:

Preliminary Terminal

bitraie 1251 laie 1252 day 29, 727 may 30, 728 lay 1303, 1477 walalay 1478 way 1304

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 5 couplets. The day/may rhymes duplicate each other. Lay accounts for the remaining three couplets (60%) and may be considered the cluster's primary "improvisational element." FORMULAE: Major: lav = 60 as Minor: day/may = 40% 281 Rhyme Element: ECHE______

Preliminary Terminal biseche 453, 579 areche 1220 fecche 351 recche 352 efreche 1283 speche 170, 454, seche 169 580, 1368 speche 387 teche 388 teche 1219, 1367 wreche 1284

WORD FREQUENCY;

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of eight couplets. Speche recurs in five of these couplets (63%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Both (— )reche and teche recur three times each. (— )Reche alone may be taken to account for the remaining three couplets (37%), whereas teche rhymes twice with speche and once with areche and, in itself, accounts for no new couplets.

FORMULAE; Major: speche = 63% Minor: reche (and teche) = 37% 282 Rhyme Element; •pnnm______

Preliminary Terminal bedde 299, 839, 1195 bedde 950 wedde 949 hudde 1196 schredde 840 wedde 300

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme clustfer produces a total of four couplets. Bedde recurs in all four (100%) and may be taken as the primary element of the cluster (including one couplet with hudde that may, however, be excluded from the system as an "off-rhyme").

FORMULAE: bedde = 100% 283 Rhyme Element: EIDE______

Preliminary Terminal deide 1185 bitraide 1270 leide 379 leide 692 sede 691 maide 272 seide 271, 1269 preide 1186 seide 380

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Se(i)de recurs in four of these couplets (80%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. The deide/preide couplet accounts for the remaining 20% of the cluster and must be considered a variant.

FORMULAE: seide = 80% 284 Rhyme Element: p t .t.t?______

Preliminary Terminal belle 1253 felle 62, 1254 pelle 401 fulle 402 quelle 61 quelle 618 snelle 1463 spelle 1030 telle 617, 1029 wille 1464

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of six couplets and seems unusually varied.

Telle recurs in two of the couplets (33%). Felle accounts for an additional two (33%).

The pelle/fulle and snelle/wille couplets may be considered variants or may be excluded from the cluster as "off-rhymes" (cf. ILLE or ULLE).

FORMULAE: telle and felle = 66% 285 Rhyme Element: ENCHE______

Preliminary Terminal adrenche 105 adrenche 1412 benche 369/ 1105, 1475 clenche 1476 blenche 1411 ofjpinche 106 schenche 370, 1106

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Benche recurs in three of the couplets (60%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Adrenche accounts for the remaining two couplets (40%), though its rhyme with ofbinche may be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme."

FORMULAE: benche and adrenche = 100% 286 Rhyme Element: ENDE

Preliminary Terminal ende 733 ende 912, 1212 hende 371, 1117 schende 680, 1402 sende 1001 sende 734 wende 679, 911, 1401 wende 372, 1118 ywende 1211 yrlonde 1002

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of eight couplets. Wende recurs in six of these couplets (75as) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Ende recurs three times in the cluster; two of these couplets have been accounted for by wende, but the third rhymes with sende (13%) which may, however, be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme." Hende also recurs twice in the cluster, but always in conjunction with the primary element, wende.

FORMULAE: Major: wende - 75% Minor: ende, sende, hende = 25as 287 Rhyme Element: ENNE

Preliminary Terminal kenne 985 kenne 144, 176, Suddenne 143, 175, 1365 1518 suddenne 1517 Suddenne 986 menne 1366

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Suddenne recurs in all five (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

It seems to make more sense that the common verb kenne, which recurs four times (80%), should be considered the formulaic element in this cluster as a predictable link to the "proper name" Suddenne. And it should be noted that Suddenne occurs primarily in the first line of couplets that kenne then completes (60% of the total cluster). (cf. -USE and -ESSE)

FORMULAE: Suddenne (and kenne) = 100% 288 Rhyme Element: -e m t ?;______

Preliminary Terminal adrent 977 rente 914 biwente 321 schente 322 dunte 609 sente 726 rente 725 isent 978 sente 525, 919, 1337 wente 526, 610, wente 913 920, 1338

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of eight couplets. (— ) wente recurs in six of these couplets (75as) and may be considered the primary element of this cluster (from which, however, the dunte/wente couplet may be excluded as an "off-rhyme").

If the dunte/wente couplet is excluded from the cluster, (-)sente recurs as often as wente (5 times) and accounts for the remaining two couplets (25%).

FORMULAE: wente and sente — 100% 289 Rhyme Element: mRnm

Preliminary Terminal

answerde 199 answarede 42 ferde 751 ferde 938 herde 937 herde 200 ofherde 41 hurede 752 swerde 623 orde 624

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme produces a total of five couplets. (Of)herde recurs in three of the couplets (60%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. The remaining two couplets (swerde/orde; ferde/hurede) may be excluded from the system as "off-rhymes."

FORMULAE: herde = 60* 290 Rhyme Element: e r n e

Preliminary Terminal

^erne 915, .1085, 1403 werne 916, 1404 wurne 1086

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 3 couplets There is no variety in this cluster. The 7erne/werne link accounts for all the occurences of this rhyme phoneme (1002).

FORMULAE: terne and werne = 1002 291 Rhyme Element: e r t e ______

Preliminary Terminal herte 875, 1389, 1481 smerte 876, 1390, 1482

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 3 couplets. There is no variety in this cluster. The herte/smerte link accounts for all the occurrences of this rhyme ■ phoneme (100%).

FORMULAE: herte/smerte = 100% 292 Rhyme Element: KRVE

Preliminary Terminal

kerve 233 serue 234, 776 serue 909 sterue 910 sterue 775

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 3 couplets. Serue recurs in all three of the couplets (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

FORMULAE: serue = 100% 293 Rhyme Element: e s s e ______

Preliminary Terminal agesse 1181 blesse 584 blesse 555 blisse 158 fairnesse 213 cusse 1208 kesse 583 meeknesse 1496 posse 1011 pruesse 556 Westernesse 157, 921 sorinesse 922 westernesse 1207, 1495 Westernesse 214, 1012 westernesse 1182

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of nine couplets. Westernesse recurs in seven of these couplets (78%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster: The westernesse/cusse couplet may, however, be excluded from this cluster as an "off-rhyme," as may the posse/Westernesse link. (Cf. -ENNE & -USE.) Though blesse recurs only twice, its occurrences account for the remaining two couplets (22%). FORMULAE: MAJOR: Westernesse = 78% Minor: blesse = 22% 294 Rhyme Element: ETE

Preliminary Terminal grete 889 ete 1258 schete 939 forlete 218 swete 217, 1407, 1257 lete 890 suete 1257 imete 940 mete (dream) 1408

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Swete recurs in three of these couplets (60%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. (— ) lete recurs twice and accounts for one additional couplet (20%).

The schete/imete couplet seems a clear variant.

FORMULAE: Major: swete = 60% Minor: lete = 20% 295 Rhyme Element: ETTE______

Preliminary Terminal mette 1027 biflette 1396 sette 383, 757, 1201, grette 384, 1028 1395 kepte 1202 sette 758

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Though sette recurs five times, it accounts for only four couplets (80%); the rsette/sette rhyme of lines 757-8'is the one of the few examples in King Horn that demonstrates the reduplication of the same word to make a couplet. The sette/kepte may be excluded from the cluster as an example of "off-rhyme." Nevertheless, sette may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Grette recurs twice in this cluster and accounts for the remaining couplet (20%).

FORMULAE: Major: sette = 80% Minor: grette = 20% 296 Rhyme Element: -rvr

Preliminary Terminal

bileue 363, 1321 bileue 742 leue 463, 741 eue 364, 464 reue 1322

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Bileue recurs in three of these couplets (75%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Both leue (always in the first line of a couplet) and eue (always in the second line) recur twice. Each rhymes with bileue once, but together they account for the remaining couplet (25%) .

FORMULAE: Major: bileue = 75% Minor: leue and eue = 25% 297 Rhyme Element:

Preliminary Terminal

fewe 55 fewe 1462 knewe 1441 to hewe 1312 rewe 1521 leue 562 schewe 1311, 1461 newe 746 trewe 377, 561, 745, nywe 1442 1171 rewe 378 schrewe 56 trewe 1522 £>rewe 1172

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end--rhyme cluster produces a total of nine couplets. Trewe recurs in five of these couplets {56%) and may.be considered the primary element of the cluster. Of the remaining four couplets, fewe accounts for two {22%). Both schewe and newe recur twice in the cluster, and each accounts for one of the remaining couplets (11% each).

FORMULAE: Major: trewe = 56% Minor: fewe, schewe and newe = 44% 298 Rhyme Element: i c h e ______

Preliminary Terminal un bicomelich 1065 iliche 18, 340 kinge riche 17 ilich 1066 riche 339 riche 314

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 4 couplets. Ilich(e) recurs in all four (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

FORMULAE: ilich(e) = 100% 299 Rhyme Element:

Preliminary Terminal

brunie 591 denie 592 companye 879 derie 786 enuye 687 folye 688 lie 1451 hendy 1336 Murry 1335 hi*e 880 *serie 1385 merie 1386 werie 785 twye 1452

*Hall (p. 223) considers serie a scribal error for ferie ("carry"). WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of seven couplets. There are no apparent formulaic elements in this "cluster." Rather, this grouping demonstrates the greatest possible variety in the composition of end-rhyme— seven couplets employ fourteen different rhyme words. It may be argued that the -ie ending provides one of the more readily available end-rhymes in the English language. But it should also be noted that only three of the above couplets employ "exact" rhyme: brunie/denie, serie/merie and werie/ derie; these three links alone match identical consonants followed by The remaining four couplets are linked solely by the assonance. The assonantal link between Murry and hendy is reduced to ; and it should be noted that CQ is never considered equivalent toCl'*“5^D* Since none of the "exact" rhymes in this cluster recurs with sufficient frequency to determine any formulaic . 300 Rhyme Element: IE (continued)

Preliminary Terminal

elements, and since none of the remaining couplets employs "exact" rhyme, this entire cluster may be excluded from our consideration on the grounds of either insufficient evidence or "off-rhymes."

FORMULAE: 0 301 Rhyme Element: IGHE

Preliminary Terminal adrize 1035 isi^e 756, 976 isi^e 1157 iye 1036 ize 755, 975 lije 1158

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Both i^e and isize recur in three couplets each; twice they rhyme with each other. If one of these elements is taken to account for 75% of the cluster's end-rhymes, the other accounts for the remaining 25%.

FORMULAE: ige and isi^e = 100% 302 Rhyme Element IKE

Preliminary Terminal biswike 667 ilik 502 mis lyke 425 mislike 668 whit 501 sike 426

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. (— )like recurs in all three couplets (100%) and may.be considered the primary element of this cluster.

FORMULAE: like = 100% 303 Rhyme Element: ti.f

Preliminary Terminal

(seint) gile 1175 bigile 320 Mile 319 bigiled 958 while 595, 957, 1317 ille 1318 Mile 1176 myle 596

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. While recurs in three (60%) of these couplets and may be considered the primary element of the cluster; the while/ille couplet may, however, be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme" (cf. -ILLE). Mile also recurs three times in the cluster and may be taken to account for the remaining two couplets (40%).

FORMULAE: while and mile = 100% 304 Rhyme Element: ILLE______

Preliminary Terminal ille 675 duelle 374 stille 287, 373, 541, spille 194 999 stille 676 wille 193, 365, 943, telle 366, 944 1315 wille 288, 542, 1000 ylle 1316

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of nine couplets. Wille recurs in seven (78%) of these couplets (including an "off-rhyme" with telle twice that may be excluded-from the cluster). Stille recurs five times and accounts for the remaining two (22%) couplets (including an "off-rhyme" with duelle; cf. -ELLE).

FORMULAE: wille and stille = 100% 305 Rhyme Element: i m e

Preliminary Terminal paynyme 803 bi me 534 rime 1363 pryme 966 time 533 ryme 804 bitime 965 time 1364

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. (Bi)time recurs in three of these couplets (75%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Rime recurs twice and accounts for the remaining couplet of the cluster (25%). FORMULAE: Major: time = 75% Minor: rime = 25% 306 Rhyme Element: twt?

Preliminary Terminal

Arnoldin 1443 bischine 12 birine 11 cosin 1444 lyne 681 fine 262 myne 1053 in 974 pin (door-bolt) 973 pilegrym 1154 pine (n. anguish) 261 pine 540, 682 pine (v. to torture) 635 sclauyne 1054 fcine 539 J>ine 636 wyn 1153

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of nine couplets and demonstrates exceptional variety from the norm in King Horn. Pine recurs in four of these couplets (44%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Five of the above couplets (56%) do not seem to demonstrate any system of rhyme repetitions. Perhaps, the pin/in, wvn/pileqrvm and Arnoldin/cosin couplets should be considered a separate cluster because of the shortened vowel in their rhyme phonemes. If so, there are only two variant couplets in this cluster (birine/bischine and myne/sclauvne) ; pine would thus account for 67% of the cluster.

FORMULAE: pine = 67% 307 Rhyme Element: tnetr______

Preliminary Terminal adrinke 971 drinke 1152 brinke 141 nadrinke 142 drinke 1055 efbinke 972, 1056 binke 1151

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Drinke recurs in all four (100%) couplets (three times in conjunction with — binke) and may be taken as the' primary element of the cluster.

FORMULAE: drinke (and binke) = 100% Rhyme Element: tnwr

Preliminary Terminal awynne 1071 ginne 1456 biginne 1277 her inne 312 inne 1455 linne 992 lynne 311 inne 604, 1358 winne 991, 1357 t>erinne 1072 wynne 603 winne 1278

*

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of seven couplets. {— ) inne recurs in five of these couplets {11.%) as does (— )winne which can be taken to account for the remaining two couplets (29%).

FORMULAE: inne and Winne = 100% 309 Rhyme Element:

Preliminary Terminal his 1255 blis 1234 ywis 517, 1233 is 518 palais 1256

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. Ywis recurs in two of these couplets (67%) and may be considered the primary element of this cluster. The his/palais variant may be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme."

This -IS cluster may be merely a subgrouping of the -ISSE cluster in which (-)wisse is the primary element.

FORMULAE: ywis « 67% 310 Rhyme Element: T.qre______

Preliminary Terminal

agrise 867 arise 868 arise 359 deuise 930 wise 237, 929, 989 seruise 238, 990 wise 360

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Wise recurs in four of these couplets (80%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Both arise and seruise recur twice and may be considered formulaic elements though the evidence remains insufficient. Arise accounts for the single remaining couplet (20%).

FORMULAE: Major: wise — 80% Minor: arise = 20% Rhyme Element: tsbt;

Preliminary Terminal

kesse 431 blisse 414, 1210 wisse 121, 413, 1457 misse 122, 1458 ywisse 1209 ywisse 432

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. (Y)wisse recurs in all five couplets (100*) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. The kesse/ywisse may, however, be excluded as an "off-rhyme." (Cf. -ESSE)

FORMULAE: wisse = 100* 312 Rhyme Element: t s t e ______

Preliminary Terminal

criste (Christ) 77 vpriste 1436 liste 235, 1459 wiste 78, 236, miste 1361 1362, 1460 wiste 1435

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of five couplets. Wiste recurs inwall five couplets (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

FORMULAE: wiste = 100% Rhyme Element: t t h r

Preliminary Terminal blibe 1, 355, 967, blibe 274, 792 1225, 1347 bliue 472, 968 swibe 273, 471, 791 dibe 58 ybe 57 lybe 2 sibe 356, 1348 swibe 1226

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of nine couplets. Blibe recurs in seven of these couplets (78%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Swibe recurs four times and accounts for one additional couplet (11%).

The vbe/dibe couplet seems.a clear variant.

FORMULAE: Major: blibe = 78% Minor: swibe = 11% 314 Rhyme Element: TTTT]

Preliminary Terminal flitte 711 anhitte 712 sitte 627, 651, 1083 mitte 628 witte 652, 1084

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Sitte recurs in three of these couplets (75%)- and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Witte recurs twice in the second lines of couplets rhyming with sitte.

The flitte/anhitte couplet.is a clear variant.

FORMULAE: sitte {and witte)= 75% 315 Rhyme Element: o ______

Preliminary Terminal fro 367 also 98 go 97 do 268, 276 to 267 two 430 two 49 fco 50, 116, wo 115, 263, 275, 264, 368 429

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of eight couplets. Both wo and joo recur four times each. They rhyme with each other twice? if one is taken to account for four- couplets <50as) , the other accounts for an additional two (25%). Although two and do recur twice each, the go/also and to/do couplets do not seem- to demonstrate any system of recurrence and must be considered variants.

FORMULAE: wo and jog = 75% 316 Rhyme Element: OF *

Preliminary Terminal

drof 119 leof 324, 708 Jpeof 323, 707 £>erof 120

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. The freof/leof link recurs twice in that order and accounts for two of the cluster's couplets (67%).

The drof/frerof couplet seems a clear variant in this minimal system.

FORMULAE: beof/leof = 67% 317 Rhyme Element: rip>rg

Preliminary Terminal dorter 697 bri;?te 390 softe 389, 1069 ofte 698, 1070

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. Both softe and ofte recur twice, forming one couplet together; if one Is taken to account for two couplets {61%) , the other completes the system (33%) . The do^ter/ofte and softe/bri^te couplets may, however, be excluded from the cluster "(and thus eliminate it) as examples of "off-rhyme."

FORMULAE: softe and ofte = 100% 318 Rhyme Element: o l d e ______

Preliminary Terminal bolde 375 golde 1038, 1164 golde 459 holde 376 holde 307, 1249 scholde 1250 Molde 317 wolde 308, 318 scholde 395 woldest 396, 644 wolde 1163 i*olde 460 nolde 1037 J ijolde 643

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of nine couplets. (-)wolde recurs in six of these couplets (67%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Holde recurs three times and accounts for two additional couplets (22%) . Golde also recurs three times and accounts for the single remaining couplet (11%).

FORMULAE: Major: Wolde = 67% Minor: holde and golde = 33% 319 Rhyme Element: OKE______

Preliminary Terminal a soke 65 loke 748, 1100 forsoke 747 toke 66, 1142 loke 1141 toke 1099

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Toke and loke both recur three times. They link with each other twice. If one is arbitrarily selected to account for 3 of the cluster's couplets (75%), the other accounts for the remaining one (25%).

FORMULAE: toke and loke = 100% 320 Rhyme Element: q r d e

Preliminary Terminal borde 113, 253, 827, orde 1486 1485 worde 114, 254 wordes 828

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Borde recurs (10030 in all four couplets and may be considered the primary element of the cluster; three'times (75%), it is linked to worde (s.).

FORMULAE: borde (and worde) = 100% 321 Rhyme Element: o r e

Preliminary Terminal

more 95, 441, 1193 deole 1050 namore 1193 lore 442, 1510 ore 1509 more 70 jpinore 655 sore 656, 1194 sore 69, 1049 ^ere 96

\

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of seven couplets. Both sore and (— )more recur four times each; if one is taken to account for four couplets (5.7%) , the other ' accounts for an additional two (29%). The sore/deole and more'/jsre may, however, be excluded from the cluster as "off-rKymes."

Both ore and lore recur twice in this cluster and they account for the single remaining couplet by rhyming with each other (14 as) .

FORMULAE: Major: sore and more = 86% Minor: ore and lore = 14% 322 Rhyme Element: q r n ______

Preliminary Terminal forloren 479 biforn 532 horn (Horn) 9, 137/ 329, born 10 509, 531, 1525 iborn 138 horne (v. "to drink") 1145 iboren 510 horn 480 i^orn 1146 unorn 330, 1526

4

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of eight couplets. Horn(e) recurs in all eight (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. (I)bor(e)n recurs three times to complete the rhymes of couplets whose first lines end in Horn and may also be considered a formulaic element in this cluster.

FORMULAE: horn = 10035 323 Rhyme Element: ______

Preliminary Terminal clobe 1215 bobe 1198 clobes 1059 lobe 1060 lobe 1197 wrobe 348, 1216 obe 347

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Lobe accounts for two couplets (50%). Both clobe(s) and wrobe recur twice; they link with each other once. Since the second recurrence of clobes links with lobe and by itself covers no words extraneous to the hypothetical formulae, I would argue that wrobe accounts for the remaining two couplets (50%).

FORMULAE: lobe and Wrobe (clobe) = 100% 324 Rhyme Element: OTHER------

Preliminary Terminal

anojper 283 anober 578 ojper 187, 821 ober 1292 brober 577, 1291 brober 284, 822 rober 188

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 5 couplets- (An)ober recurs in all five couplets (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Four ' times, (an)ober is linked with brober (80%).

FORMULAE: (an)ober (and brober) = 100% 325 Rhyme Element: u l l e

Preliminary Terminal fulle 1155 hulle 208 schulle 207, 847 telle 1156 wulle 848

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 3 couplets. Schulle recurs in two of the couplets {61%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. The fulle/telle variant may be excluded from the system as an "off-rhyme" (cf. -ELLE). Though apparently not exploited in King Horn, the phonemic similarity of the modal auxiliaries in English provides one of its more readily available rhyme links.

FORMULAE: schulle = 61% 326 Rhyme Element: UNE

Preliminary Terminal

adun ("down") 1121 adune 1488 crune 475, 1487 brun 1122 galun 1123 crune 1286 sune 209 dune ("upland" ) 154, 210 Tune 153 glotoun 1124 tune 1285 tune 476

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 7 couplets. Adun and dune share the same etymological root .(OE dun, "hill") and may be considered a semantic unit in this cluster; together they recur in four couplets {SIX) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Both tune and crune recur three times in this cluster; each rhymes with the other twice (29%) and with the dun-root once.

The qalun/qlotoun variant may be excluded from the system as an "off-rhyme."

FORMULAE: Major: dune = 57% Minor: tune and crune = 29% 327 Rhyme Element: UNDER______

Preliminary Terminal

hundred 1329 tunge 1248 vnder 1421 wunder 1330, 1422 wunder 1247

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets, though, two of these incorporating hundred and tunqe may be excluded from the system as "off-rhymes." Wunder recurs in all three couplets (100%) and may be considered the primary element of this tentative cluster.

FORMULAE: wunder = 100% Rhyme Element: nrcfgp

Preliminary Terminal bigunne 1433 birunne 654 kunne 865 cunne 568 sunne 567 Suddene 866 sunne ("window-seat") 653 sunne 1434

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Sunne recurs in three of these couplets (75%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Though cunne recurs twice in the cluster and accounts for the remaining couplet (25%), the kunne/Suddene link may be excluded from the system as an "off-rhyme."

FORMULAE: sunne = 75% 329 Rhyme Element: urne______

______Preliminary Terminal sturne 877 Murne 704 turne 703/ 963, 1073 murne 964 vnspurne 1074 vrne 878

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of four couplets. Turne recurs in three of these couplets {75SS) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

FORMULAE: turne = .75* 330 Rhyme Element: UR5TE______

Preliminary Terminal furste 661, 1119, 1191 berste 662, 1192 of£>urste 1120

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. Furste recurs in all three (100%) though two of the couplets rhyming with berste may be considered "off-rhymes." (Cf. -ERSTE)

FORMULAE: furste = 100% 331 Rhyme Element: us(E)______

Preliminary Terminal ai>elbrus 225 hus (n.) 226, 1502 AJpelbrus 1501 huse (v.) 994 spuse 993

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. Hus(e) recurs in all three (100%), twice to complete couplets rhyming on the proper name Afaelbrus, and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.

FORMULAE: huse = 100% 332 Rhyme Element: USTE

Preliminary Terminal

custe 4.05, 1189 beste 1264 luste 1263 luste 406 reste 1190

*•

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. Both custe and luste recur twice; they rhyme with each other for one couplet (33%), and each appears in an "off-rhyme" couplet (cf. -ESTE) which may be excluded from the cluster (67%).

FORMULAE: custe and luste = 100% 333 Rhyme Element: u t e

Preliminary Terminal abute 343, 1081 abute 246 vte 245 dute 344 snute 1082

•

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of three couplets. Abute recurs in all three of these couplets (100%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster:

FORMULAE: abute = -100% Part C: End-rhymes that occur in ten or more couplets of the C-manuscript of King Horn.

334 335 Rhyme Element: a l l e ______

Preliminary Terminal alle 171 alle 72, 100, 224, bi falle 99 256, 626, 894 falle 455 bifalle 420 halle 71, 223, 255, biualle 172 625, 779, 893, falle. 780, 1222 1041, 1221, 1383 halle 456 jpralle 419 walle 1042, 1384

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 13 couplets. The noun halie recurs in 10 of the couplets (77%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster.- Alle, which recurs 7 times, accounts for two additional couplets (15%) with biualle (or bi falle), which recurs 3 times and accounts for the single remaining couplet (8%).

FORMULAE: Major: halie and alle = 92% Minor: : bifalle - 8% 336 Rhyme Element: e d e

Preliminary Terminal bede 907 bede 462 dede (dead) 1523 dede 826 dedes 537 drede 258 fairhede 83, 797 lede 184, 908, lede 293, 1393 1524 makede 165 makede 84 nede 469 mede 470 ofdrede 291 misrede 292 rede 183, 825, 1051 nede 48 spede 461 sedes (said) 538 stede 47, 257, 715 spede 798, 1394 sprede 716 verade 166 wede 1052 ^ede 294

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of seventeen couplets; it demonstrates unusual variety in its vocabulary. ' Lede recurs in five of these couplets (29a;) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. (Mis)rede recurs four times and accounts for three more couplets {18ss) . Stede recurs three times and accounts for an additional three couplets (18%)'. Spede recurs three times and accounts for an additional two (12%). The remaining four couplets may all be considered variants (23%). Dede, makede, fairhede and nede all recur twice in this cluster and, among them, will account for the remain­ ing four couplets. But they provide insufficient recurrence to demonstrate any systematic repetition.

FORMULAE: Major: lede and rede = 47% Minor: stede and spede = 30% 337 Rhyme Element:

Preliminary Terminal deie 109 abeie 110 galeie 185 biwreie 362 he 331 deie 332, 888, pleie 23, 345, 361 1346 preie 763, 1235 Galeie 1008 tueie 1345 leie 302 tweie 301, 887 pleie 186 weie 759, 1007 seie 764 tweie 24, 346, 760 weie 1236

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 13 couplets. Tweie recurs in six of the couplets (46%) and may be considered the cluster's primary element. Pleie and' deie both recur four times, and each accounts for two additional couplets (15% each). Weie recurs three times and accounts for two additional couplets (15%). preie recurs only twice in the cluster, but accounts for the single remaining couplet (7%).

FORMULAE: Major: tweie, pleie and deie = 77% Minor: weie and preie = 23% 338 Rhyme Element: e l d e ______

Preliminary Terminal bihelde 601, 1147 belde 602 elde 1391 bihelde 846 • felde ("field") 557, 845, 987 chelde 1148 scheld 513 feld ("field") 514 scheide 53, 1301 felde 1302 welde 481, 901 helde 902, 1392 quelde 988 scheide 558 yfelde ("slay" ) 54 ^elde 482

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of eleven couplets. Felde recurs in five of these couplets (45%) and may be considered the primary element of this cluster. Although vfelde is a homonym, it is not etymologically related to felde and they may not be considered a semantic unit in this system. Bihelde and helde may be considered a semantic unit and, as such, it recurs five times and accounts for an additional four couplets (36%). Although scheide recurs four times in this cluster, it accounts for only one additional couplet (9%) by rhyming with vfelde. Welde recurs only twice, but accounts for the remaining couplet by rhyming with ^elde (9%).

FORMULAE: Major: felde and helde = 82% Minor: scheide and welds ~ 18% 339 Rhyme Element: ENE

Preliminary Terminal

fiftene 37 sen 8 grene 851 Dene 508 kene 91/ 507 Deon 1520 kyn 633 Elen 86 quen 7 isene 92, 684 quene 1519 kene 38, 164, slen 85 852, 1128 tene 349, 683 Men 634 frrottene 163 quene 350 wene 1127

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of twelve couplets. Kene recurs in six couplets (50%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Quene and various forms of ben recur three times in the cluster. They rhyme with one another twice and thus account for two additional couplets (17%). Each accounts for one additional couplet alone (8% each). Tene and isene both recur twice in the cluster. Together they account for one new couplet (8%). The other occurrences of tene and isene have been accounted for by quene and kene respectively. The Men/kvn variant may be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme."

FORMULAE: Major: kene = 50% Minor: quene, ben, tene and isene = 42% 340 Rhyme Element: r r r

Preliminary Terminal

beggere 1133 chaere 1261 banere 1374 chere 403, 1063 ber 1112 damesele 1169 bere 570 dere 433, 677, 789, dere 222, 1130, 1343 1204 fer (whole) 149 if ere 102 fere (companion) 743, 941, 1349 yf ere 242 if ere 221, 1129 fisser 1134 yf ere 497 her (here) 150 here (here) 227 here 790, 942, here (hear) 397 1350 ihere 1469 ihere 678, 1262 ire 309 lere 228 lere 241 lubere 498 mestere 229, 549 manere 550 nere 87 palmere 1170 squier 1111 riuere 230 stere 101, 1373 stere 434, 1344 swere 1203 swere 404, 744, her 523 1064 here 731, 917, 1139, here 298, 766, 1353 1168 , 1246 were 297, 569, 765, were 88, 310, 1167, 1245 398, 1354, 1470 • zer 524 fere 732, 918, J 1140

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of thirty-eight couplets. Were recurs in ten of these couplets (26%). here recurs nine times, but five times in conjunction with were, so it accounts for only four.additional couplets (11%). (Y)fere recurs eight times, but never in conjunction with were or here, so it accounts for eight additional couplets (21%). Dere recurs seven times and accounts for five additional couplets (13%). Here (here) recurs five times and accounts for two additional couplets (5%). Swere recurs four times and 341 Rhyme Element: (r.on+_-ijn.ne^)

Preliminary Terminal

accounts for two additional couplets in conjunction with chere (5as) . (Y) here (hear) recurs four times and accounts for one additional couplet (3%). Stere recurs four times and accounts for one additional couplet (3%). Although ere also recurs four times, it is always in conjunction with here and so accounts for no additional couplets. The five remaining couplets (13as) may. be considered variants from the system. But it should be noted that all five couplets employ the agent suffix (-er) to mafce their end-rhymes; they are: mes tere/riuere & mane're, beggere/ fisser, sguier/ber and damesele/paimere (which may be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme").

FORMULAE: Major: were, here,' fere and dere = 71% Minor: here, swere, stere and gere = 16% Common Suffix: -er = 13% 342 Rhyme Element: e s t e ______

Preliminary Terminal beste 27, 997 beste 174, 474, (bi)este 1135 770, 824, bieste 1325 1178, 1326 faireste 173 feste 1136, 1218 feste 477, 521 geste 478 geste 1217 gestes 522 leste 473 laste 6 reste 861 leste 862 strengeste 823 treweste 998 weste 1177 werste 28 biweste 5, 769, 945 Westernesse 946

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 15 couplets. Beste recurs in eight of the couplets (5330 and may b.e considered the primary element of the cluster. Feste accounts for an additional four couplets (2 7 30— three times in conjunction with qeste. Forms of the verb leste ("to continue") recur three times and account for an additional two couplets (14%). (Bijweste recurs four times and accounts for the single remaining couplet (6%), though this bi we s te/We sternesse variant may be considered an "off-rhyme" and excludable from the system, as may the beste/werste conjunction. It should also be noted that the superlative suffix (-est) offers one of the easier rhyme links in the English language; of the thirty recurrences of this rhyme phoneme King Horn, twelve are achieved by means of superlatives. An additional six are filled by the compass points este/weste.

EORMULAE: Major: beste and feste (qeste) = 80% Minor: leste, este, weste = 20% 343 Rhyme Element: ______

Preliminary Terminal

abide 1023 abide 854', 1048 biside 853 tabide 1446 bistride 749 biside 962, 1426 bitide 543, 961 bridei 772 glide 1047 ride 34, 136, 544, ride 771, 1511 750, 850 Ride 1425 side 954, 1024 side 33, 135, 203 tide 204 tide 849, 1445 wide 1512 wide 953

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of fifteen couplets. Ride recurs in eight of these couplets (53%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster; the ride/ bridei couplet may, however, be excluded from the cluster as an "of f - r h y m e '(Bi) side recurs eight times and accounts for five additional couplets (3.3%) . Abide recurs four times and accounts for the two remaining couplets (14%). :(Si)fide recurs five times, but accounts for no new couplet's.

FORMULAE: Major: ride and side = 86% Minor: abide (and tide) = 14% 344 Rhyme Element: ______

Preliminary Terminal bri^te 1429 brijte 382, 500 fi^te 811, 1331 Dri^ te 1310 knijt 447, 935 f i^te 552, 830, kni^te 435, 491, 499, 1004, 1214 515, 551 f lijjte 1398 kni^tes 885, 1213 knijt 504 lijt 519 kni^te 458 lijte 1003, 1309, 1397 kni*tes 520, 812 ni*t 123 lijyt 124 ni?te 259, 1199 li^te 386 miadelnizte 1297 700 pliste ' 305 1117 te 260, 436, arijte 457 9 3 6 , 1200 rirt 699 nijjte 492 rfjte 381, 829 biniyte 1430 si^te 385 plryte 672 wi 503 306, 516, wi^te 671 1298, 1332 wijte 886

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of 28 couplets. Kni te recurs in thirteen of the couplets (46a;) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Ri^te recurs eight times and accounts for an additional six couplets (21%). Compounds of ( — )nijfte recur seven times and account for an additional five couplets (18%) . Both fi?te and lijte recur six times each. Fi?te accounts for thr-ee additional couplets (11%), and li?te>^fills the single remaining couplet (4%). ^

FORMULAE: Major: kni?te, ri^te and (— )ni^te = 85% Minor: fi^te and lijyte = 15% ' 345

Rhyme Element: t t .d

Preliminary Terminal child 25, 79, 159, 247, berild 762 251, 295, 1359, child 648 1515 ffikenild 26 ffikenhild 647 Godhild 1360 fikenhild 1449 Mild 160 harild 761 my Id 80 Rymenhild 947 Rymenhild 248, 1450 reynild 1516 wild 252, 296, 948

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of twelve couplets. Child recurs in nine of these couplets (.7.5-as) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Wild recurs twice in conjunction with child, but its third recurrence accounts, for one additional couplet (8%). The remaining two (17%) couplets (harild/berild and fi kenhi 1 d/Rvmenhi-1 d) may be considered variants. But it should be noted that six proper names all ending in (H)ild (0E "war") recur a total of ten times; the suffix itself may be considered a formulaic rhyme element in this cluster and can be taken to account for the four couplets C 2 5 % ) that do not employ child.

FORMULAE: child - 75% -HiId - 25% 346 Rhyme Element: t h r (m)______

Preliminary Terminal

bringe 641, 979 blessing 156, 1530 comynge 1093 bringe 582, 1094 derling 723 derling 488 dubbing 487, 629 dubbing 438, 564 erndinge 581 euening 206 fissing 1149 fundlyng 220 fi3tinge 817 gleowinge 1468 king 31, 155, 437, huntinge 646 925, 1507 , 1529 king 424 kinge 843 kinge 4, 496, 642, kyng 147, 195, 205, 1288, 1428 219, 341, 805, kyng 782 981 kynge 212 knewelyng 781 lokyng 342 (gold)ring 563 Nijping 196 ringe 613, 1381 , 1483 noting 1150 rynge 873 pleing 630 Rymenhilde 1287 piecing 32 singe 3, 129, 1467 rirrfenilde 614 springe 211, 495, 593, Rymenhild 1034 645, 1017 , 1229, Rymenhilde 874, 1484 1427 risinge 844 fcing 443 singe 594, 1382 wedding 423, 1033 springe 130, 818 sweuening 724 swooning ■ 444 * tecning 1508 tijping • 982 tibinge 1230 tybyng 806 wedding 926 weddinge 1018 wiipering 148 wringe 980 WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of forty-three couplets; -inqe is the most frequent rhyme phoneme in King Horn. Kinge recurs in twenty-two of these couplets ( 5 1 as) and may be considered the primary element of this cluster.

Springe recurs nine times and accounts for six additional couplets (14%). Rinqe recurs five times (always in the 347 Rhyme Element: INGE (continued)

Preliminary Terminal

first lines of couplets) and accounts for five additional couplets (12%). The -inq suffix provides one of the most readily available rhyme phonemes in English, and nine of the remaining couplets (21%) can be accounted for by present participles and participial gerunds. Bringe recurs four times and accounts for the single re­ maining couplet (2%). But such recurrence seems proportion­ ately insignificant to this cluster, and the: brinqe/wrinqe couplet may be considered a variant. Other recurrences that may be observed in this cluster are: singe (five times), dubbing and wedding (four times each) and tibinq (3 times); but none of these repetitions accounts for any additional couplets. Less than three recurrences in this cluster seem not worth noting. The five couplets that incorporate Rymenhilde in their end- rhymes (three times with rinqe, once with both hinge and wedding) may be excluded from this cluster as "off-rhymes" (cf. -ILD). FORMULAE: Major: kinge =51% Minor: springe and rinqe = 26% Common Suffix: -inq = 21% 348 Rhyme Element: i v e (D)______

Preliminary Terminal aliue 107, 619 ariue 1296 ariue 179, 923, 1505, aryue 778 ariued 807 driue 1424 bliue 721 dryue 796 driue 1333 fiue 808 f iue 1295, 1423 kniue 108 lyue 559, 777 liue 1334 (on) lyue 131, 693 lyue 180 wyue 795 ryue 132 sire 1506 jpriue 620 wyue 560, 694, 722, 924

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of fifteen couplets. (— )liue recurs in eight of these couplets (53%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. Ariue recurs six times and accounts for an additional four couplets (27%); the ariue/sire couplet' may, however, be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme." Wvue recurs four times and accounts for two additional couplets (13%). Driue recurs three times and accounts for the single remaining couplet (7%).

FORMULAE: Major: liue and ariue =; 80% Minor: wvue and driue = 20% 349 Rhyme Element: ODE______

Preliminary Terminal blode 177 blode 1406 f lode 139, 1183 fode 1340 gode (God) 75 forbode 76 gode (good) 1339 god (good) 530 mode 281, 1405 gode 140, moder 145 178, stod 529 1184 hralhod 439 kni^thod 440

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of ten couplets. Gode recurs in seven of the couplets (70%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster; the moder/ gode couplet may, however, be excluded from the cluster as an “off-rhyme."

Both blode and mode recur twice and, by rhyming with each other, produce one additional couplet (10%). The very common -hod suffix accounts for one additional couplet: bralhod/knighthod (1Q%) . The gode (God)/forbode couplet seems a clear variant since homonyms cannot be considered formulaic equivalents.

FORMULAE: gode = 70% 350 Rhyme Element: OGHTE______

Preliminary Terminal bijpo^te 411 bojte 884, 1388 brojte 883 brojte 40, 466, 600 doster (sic. , daughter) 249 lofte 904 dorter 903 mijte 412 sojjte 465, 599 Ipojjte 250, 1274 isbj^te 39 bujte 278 }po*te 277 wro^te 1387 iwrojte 1273

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of ten couplets. Both bro*te and (-)bo^te recur four times, and each account?for four”couplets (40% each) . The bibo-?te/ • mi^te and bo^te/bu' te couplets, may, however, be excluded from the cluster as "off-rhymes." Both dorter and ('-)wro?te recur twice, and each accounts for one additional couplet (10%). Although (i ) so=?te recurs three times in this cluster, it accounts forno new couplets.

FORMULAE: Major: brojte and bozte = 80% Minor: dorter and wroarte (and so te) = 20% 351 Rhyme Element: nwnp

Preliminary Terminal anhonde 1109 fonde 730, 832 fonde 151 fondede 1514 honde 81, 215, 1137, honde 60, 112, 152, 1299, 1327, 266, 338, 1413, 1499 400, 598* hunde 831 londe 36, 82, 126, husebonde 415, 735, 1039 216, 416, londe 59, 511, 701, 754, 810, 713, 729, 753 870, 934, sonde 265, 809, 933 1022, 1040, stonde 399, 597, 869, 1110, 1180, 1021, 1179 1300, 1328, stronde 35, 111, 125 1414 wonde 337 schonde 702, 714 yrlonde 1513 stonde 512 stronde 1138, 1500 wonde 736

*The C MS. of King Horn reads "He fond o schup stonde/ Wit> hejpene honde" (11. 597-598)— a phrase difficult to interpret unless .we accept Joseph Hall's gloss of honde as hounds, "a frequent expression of contempt" (Hall, n. 1.. 598, p. 133) . This interpretation matches the use of "hounde" in the1 t MS. (1. 596). The spelling of the final rhyme in line. 598 is, however, a unique orthography for the C MS.; elsewhere, "hound" is spelled hund (cf. 11. 601, 881). The 0 MS. omits a parallel, couplet. Since it is at least possible to interpret the line as meaning "with. heathen hands (i.e., crew),", I have included the rhyme with the other uses of "hand" rather than noting a variant (like 1. 831) and camouflaged off-rhyme. WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of thirty-two couplets. (Yr)londe recurs twenty-three times, but rhymes with, itself once (lines 753-4) ,• nevertheless, it accounts for twenty-two couplets (69%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. (An)honde recurs fifteen times and accounts for an additional eight couplets (25%). 352 Rhyme Element: 0MDE (continued)

Preliminary Terminal

»

Stonde recurs six times in this cluster, and stronde five times, but neither of these accounts for any additional couplets. Fonde recurs four times and accounts for one additional couplet (8%), but the hunde/fonde couplet may be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme." Husebonde recurs only three times, but accounts for the single remaining couplet (835) . FORMULAE: Major: ' londe and honde = 8435 Minor: ’ .fonde and husebonde (stonde and stronde) = 16% 353 Rhyme Element: o n e (S)______

Preliminary Terminal anon 45, 285, 1231 anon 1352 gon 1351 icome 1448 gone 611 done 784 one 527 idone 446, 484 alone 1025, 1113 vndone 1238 al one 833 gomes 22 none 801 gon 46, 286, slone 43 1232 sone (soon) 357, 445, 483, mone (comrade) 528 783, 1237 ymone("?, complaint?) 834 sone (son) 1447 mone (share) 1114 sones 21 on 820 stone 73 alone 74 i>urston 819 al one 612 none 358 sone (soon) 802 stone 1026 vpon 44

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of twenty couplets. One and its compounds (alone and none) recur in nine of these couplets (45%) and may. be considered the primary element of this cluster. Sone ("soon") recurs six times, and (— )dohe recurs four times in this cluster; together they account for four additional couplets (2095) Gon and anon rhyme exclusively with each, other, to produce four more couplets (20%). Sone (s) recurs twice and accounts for two more couplets by rhyming with icome and gomes which may, however, be excluded from' this cluster as "off-rhymes." The remaining slon/vpon couplet seems a clear variant.

FORMULAE: Major: one =45% Minor: sone, done. gon and anon = 40% 354 Rhyme Element: PNG______.

Preliminary Terminal among 1527 anhonge 328 fonge 327, 719, 737 bringe 280 longe 303 long 94 ringe 565, 1187 longe 720, 738, songe 1097 1098 strong 93 song 1528 vnderuonge 239 songe 240 wronge 905 isprunge 548 j^onge 127, 279, 547 stronge 304 ti£>inge 128 vnderfonge 906 ^onge 566, 1188

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of fourteen couplets. In this cluster, ;(vnderlfonge, longe and xonge each recur five times. Fonge and longe rhyme with ehch other twice; if one is taken to account for five couplets (36%), the other accounts for another three (21%). xonae by itself accounts for another, five couplets (36%), but it is most curious that all of these couplets may be excluded from the cluster as 11 off-rhymes" (cf. -INGE and -UNGE) . Songe recurs three times and accounts for the one remaining couplet (7%). '

FORMULAE: Major; fonge. longe and ynqe = 93% Minor: songe =7% ^ 355 Rhyme Element: OWE

Preliminary Terminal blowe 1009, 1371 droy 872 bo5 e 1227 droze 1006 buxe 427 flowe 632 toaro^e 181 gloue 794 wijs droze 1399 knowe 418, 670, felawe 1089 1090, 1206 flowe 117, 1095, 1503 iknowe 1372 iknowe 983 louze 1480 ino^e 857 (his) oze 984 lowe 417 inoje 182 lo5e 1079 Inoje 1228 (Min) oje 335 ynoze 1400 jpinowe 669 roWe 118, 1096 |>±no3e 1205 Rowe 1504 proue 545 rowe ("queue") 1080 Rowe 631 iswojje 428, 858 a rowe 1489 t>rowe 1490 slo^ 871 broje 336, 1010 yswoze 1479 woye 546, 970 fcroye 969 wo^e ("woo") 793 WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of twenty-five couplets. (-)knowe recurs in six of these couplets *(24%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster; the felawe/knowe couplet may, however,, be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme." Both flowe and the verb rowe recur four times in conjunction (apparently in a closed formulaic system) and account for four additional couplets (16%) .• ‘ Tnoze recurs five times (three times with dro^e) and accounts for five additional couplets (20%) . broze recurs four times and accounts for four additional couplets. (16%) . (-) -droze also recurs four times, but accounts for only one additional couplet (4%). (-) o?e similarly recurs four times, but accounts for no new couplets. Woze and iswoze recur three times each, and each accQunt£f for two additional couplets (8% each); the proue/woze, huze/iswoze and isoje/louze couplets may, howeyer,be excluded ■from the d u s t e r as "off-rhymes. " 356 Rhyme Element:: OWE '______(continued)

Preliminary Terminal

Both lowe and the noun rowe ("line") recur twice, and by rhyming with each other account for the single remaining couplet (435) . But the recurrence is insufficient to demonstrate any systematic repetition, so this couplet seems a clear variant.

FORMULAE: Major: knowe, ino^e and flowe/rowe = 60% Minor: : bro?e, wo=re, iswo'ye and droze = 36% 357 Rhyme Element: ttmhv______

Preliminary Terminal cunde 421, 1377 bunde 422 funde (hasten) 103, 133 ibunde 1116 ifounde 773 funde (discover,reach) 882 ifunde 955 ifunde (hasten) 1280 grunde 639, 1115 grunde 104, 134, hundes 881 334, 740, stunde 167, 333, 739, 1160 1159, 1279 londe 168 sund 1341 stunde 956 astunde 774 bende 1378 wund 1342 wunde 640

WORD FREQUENCY:

This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of fifteen couplets. Grunde recurs seven times (47%). (-) stunde also recurs seven times and may be taken to account for an additional four couplets (27%); the stunde/londe couplet may, however, be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme." (Cf. -ONDE) (I)f(o)unde recurs three times and accounts for one additional couplet (7%). Cunde recurs twice and accounts for two more couplets (13%)— once with bunde (which itself recurs twice) and once with bende (which may be excluded from the cluster as an "off-rhyme"). Wund recurs twice and accounts for the single remaining couplet (7%).

FORMULAE: Major: grunde and stunde = 74% Minor: funde, cunde and wunde = 26% 358 Rhyme Element: URE

Preliminary Terminal bur 325 auenture 650 bure 269, 649, 695, mesauenture 326 709, 1161, 1223 messauenture 710 f lur 15 bure 394, 686, sture 685 1438 ture 1091, 1437 colur 16 vre 393, 813 couerture 696 foure 1162 lure 270 pure 1092 ture 1224 ^oure 814

WORD FREQUENCY: This end-rhyme cluster produces a total of thirteen couplets. Bure recurs in ten of these couplets {11%) and may be considered the primary element of the cluster. (— )auenture recurs in three couplets, but always in conjunction with bure. Ture recurs three, times and accounts for one additional couplet (8%). Vre recurs twice and accounts for one additional couplet (8%). The flur/colur couplet may be excluded from the cluster because it does not incorporate the final -,e in its rhyme. But neither does bur in line 325, so the flur/colur should probably be considered a clear variant rather than a separable "cluster."

FORMULAE: Major: bure = 11% Minor: auenture, ture and vre = 16%