112 TASSO

The reputation of Tasso in England has never, I think, stood as high as that of Ariosto, and this may seem a little surprising. We might have supposed that a nation of Puritans and a nation which has been acknowledged by a foreign critic as supreme in the energy of its moral poetry would have preferred the edifying Gerusalemme to the licentious Furioso. Yet I think the explanation is fairly simple, Ariosto has been preferred because, we must reluctantly admit, he is by almost any standard the greater poet. Nor ought we to press too far the contrast between his ribaldry and the grave loftiness of Tasso. Tragic, and even religious, elements do coexist in Ariosto with his licentiousness, his mockery, and his wonderful comic invention, That indeed is his greatness. He treats the formulae of chivalrous romance now as a burlesque, now seriously, and without discomfort enables, nay compels, us to conform to his mood. Within that particular convention totam vitae imaginem expressit. He had also the advantage of coming first. When a poet like Spenser turned to the Jerusalem his ideas of what a romantic epic ought to be had already been formed by the Furioso - I should add, by the Innamorato as well. When in The Faerie Queene, IV, iii, 45 Spenser writes

Much more of price and of more gratious powre

Is this, then that same water of Ardenne,

The which Rinaldo drunck in happie howre,

he means Boiardo's Rinaldo, not Tasso's.

At the same time there have been very few periods in which English taste has not acknowledged Tasso as one of the great masters. In Abraham Fraunce's Arcadian Rhetoric, or the precepts of rhetoric made plain by examples, published in 1588, he is mentioned on the title -page as one of the sources from which these examples are to be drawn, along with Homer, Virgil, Sidney and Sallust - who is not the author of Catiline and Jugurtha but du Bartas. Gabriel Harvey praises him for his civile ingenium et heroicus animus: (Editor's Note: Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1913), p. 168.) Sir John Harington refers to his 'excellent work'. (Editor's Note: In A Preface, or rather a Brief Apologie of Poetrie prefixed to the translation of Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591).) We do not in the Elizabethan period find him much praised for what he himself would perhaps have regarded as his greatest achievement. I mean his solution of the problem which occupies so much of his own critical writings, the problem of combining the romantic variety which popular taste demanded with the unity of action demanded by the Humanists. Thus in the dedicatory letter prefixed to The Faerie Qeene Spenser seems quite unaware of the structural difference between the Furioso and the Gerusalemme. The difference which he stresses is of quite another order, based on the assumption that epic poets teach virtue not (as le Bossu was later to think) by the general tendency of their fable but by the exemplary character of their hero. Hence comes a curious classification, distinguishing poets who teach public and private virtue in the same hero, as Virgil did in Aeneas and Ariosto in Orlando, and those who have a different hero for each, as Homer had. Agamemnon in the Iliad showed public virtue, Odysseus in the Odyssey, private. Tasso is a poet of this kind, with Goffredo for political and Rinaldo for ethical virtue. All this comes from a critical background very naif compared with that of the Discorsi.

In the seventeenth century the position is somewhat different. To Milton Tasso is one of the great models of epic mentioned in The Reason of Church Government along with Homer, Virgil, and the book of Job: but he is also, in the Tractate, one of the great critics, side by side with Castelvetro. There is no doubt that Milton fully understood the critical problem of which Tasso's epic was the practical solution: he himself was deeply concerned with it and had pondered 'whether the rules of Aristotle are to be followed'. He writes as a man of the Renaissance but one better informed than our Elizabethans. In that respect, however, he was (as I suspect great men often are) 'behind his age'. In this century trends of taste hostile to Tasso were beginning to make themselves felt. In 1634 Sir William Alexander in his Anacrisis quotes with approval from Sperone Speroni who 'thinking his exquisite work of Godfred to be too full of rich conceits and more dainty than did become the gravity of such a work, said that it was a heroic poem written in madrigals'. That is the beginning of a line of attack which culminates in Boileau's notorious denunciation. I say notorious because it seems no common insolence for a Frenchman, one of a nation that has produced no epic since the chansons de geste, to speak thus of a poem which man and boy can still read with unflagging interest for the story alone. One sees, of course, what such critics mean. What they are objecting to might be called by a modern the operatic quality in Tasso. The speech of Olindo at the stake in canto Ii - the one that begins Altre fiamme, altri nodi amor promise - is an example. But I doubt if this sort of criticism was the most serious threat launched against Tasso's popularity in the seventeenth century. Far more important, because it went down to deeper preferences and aversions, was the revolt against the supernatural and the marvellous, in that sense the counter-romanticism, which we see in Davenant, Hobbes and Rymer. (Notice in passing that in romantic England poetic rebellions are usually anti-romantic; in France it is the romantics who rebel.) Davenant thought that Tasso's errors - by which he means magicians and enchanted woods - were derived from the ancients and were 'excusable in them' but 'by being his admit no pardon'. (Editor's Note: Sir William Davenant in his preface to Gondibert (1650).) He means that the ancients, poor Pagans, knew no better than to believe in mythology whereas Tasso went in for marvels gratuitously. The same critical attitude can be seen working out to a very different result in Rymer, who says that Spenser 'though he had read Tasso suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto'. Here Tasso is the good boy and Ariosto the bad: partly, I suppose, because of Tasso's superior unity, but partly because Ariosto gives us even more of those marvels which Rymer disliked. As a result of Ariosto’s influence The Faerie Queene, Rymer complains, 'is perfect fairy land' - using in reprobation the very words which a romantic might have used as the highest praise. At the same time he treats Tasso with respect and quotes Gerusalemme, II, 96 for comparison with the corresponding descriptions of nocturnal silence in Apollonius Rhodius and Virgil. He criticizes Tasso's stanza on the characteristically Rymerian ground that 'there seems to be some superfluity of Fish'. (Editor's Note: All the quotations from Thomas Rymer come from his preface to the translation of R. Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie (1674).)

But even in the late seventeenth century opposite forces were present. Dryden never shared the anti-romantic bias of his age. He always admired and often tried to contribute to what he called the 'enthusiastic parts of poetry' and 'the fairy way of writing'. (Editor's Note: In his dedication to King Arthur: or, The British Worthy. A dramatick Opera (1691), Dryden speaks of that Fairy kind of writing, which depends only upon the Force of Imagination'. It may be that Addison is misquoting Dryden when, in The Spectator (1 July 1712), no. 419, he says 'This Mr Dryden calls the Fairy Way of Writing'.) Many of his worst miscarriages indeed result from his efforts to do what nature had disqualified him from doing: a thing worth notice for we are too apt to assume that what a writer likes and what he can do coincide. Nor was Dryden romantic only in the sense of loving marvels: he was also romanesque, he desired the grandiose and the heroic. Accordingly it is not surprising to find him defending his own Alma by the precedent of Homer's Achilles, Tasso's Rinaldo, and Calprenede's Artaban and even declaring that these were his models. The third is significant. The heroic prose romances are now unread, but they were once most intimately connected in men's minds with the romantic epics. Scaliger and Tasso himself both mention Heliodorus among epic writers and Sidney, with some reservation, treats Amadis as a heroic poem. The huge French successors of these romances continued to enjoy great popularity throughout the seventeenth century: prose like that and poetry like Tasso's must have given one another mutual support. There must have been - and Dryden partly reveals it to us - a continuous possibility of escape into such regions from the prison of 'good sense'.

Whether the taste ever quite died out I do not know; but if it did, the revival was not long in coming. The desire for the 'gothick' begins almost with the beginning of the eighteenth century and grows steadily. And the 'world of fine fabling' which a critic like Hurd denied is found in Spenser and Tasso. To a modern critic the differences between Tasso and real medieval poetry may seem very much more important than the similarities: is not the Gerusalemme rooted in the Counter-Reformation? But we must remember, firstly, how ignorant these early medievalists were of the true Middle Ages, and secondly how ill provided the Middle Ages are with the sort of poetry they wanted to read. They wanted chivalry, not scholastic philosophy; enchanters, not allegory. They wanted, quite simply, knights in armour, castles, and love stories. They wanted precisely the imaginary Middle Ages which Boiardo had created, Ariosto perfected, and Tasso delivered from their satiric elements. Hence the romantic young lady asking Waverley to help her over her translation of Tasso. Since then there has been a decline in his fame. The herald of this new decline was perhaps Vernon Lee. That gifted lady wrote under the spell of not the imagined Middle Ages but the imagined 'Renaissance' - the glorious, coloured, full-blooded, Pagan phantasmagoria of poisoning cardinals and Machiavellian Popes and wicked beauties which so enchanted our fathers. Tasso is not at all like that: Harvey had noted his civile ingenium. According to Vernon Lee we find in him 'the pallor of Autumn'. (Editor's Note: Vernon Lee (pseudonym for Violet Paget), The School of Boiardo', Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance , II (London, 1884), p. 113.) At the moment, we live in the full tide of the most violent counter-romanticism that has ever been seen, and Tasso's English readers are few. We can only guess where he will be found when this tide also ebbs.

It would appear, then, that ever since he wrote, with some few eclipses - none of them complete -Tasso has been a major star in the poetical sky visible from this island. But when we come to look for traces of his influence on our own poetry, they are not so marked as we might perhaps have expected. Compared with the traces of Petrarch they are insignificant. It would even be difficult to point to any one book so continuously affected by Tasso as The Water Babies is by Rabelais, or Chaucer by Boccaccio. This does not mean that he has not been taken to our hearts: it may even mean the opposite. It is not the greatest authors who are most directly imitated, or, if they are, not for their true greatness. Petrarch in the shades might envy Tasso for having escaped the tasteless imitation which Elizabethan England lavished on himself for what could give one less idea of the drugged yet golden melancholy, the rapt immobility of the Rime than the conceits which our sonneteers are always stealing from them and making frigid by the theft?

There is in Spenser one long passage very recognizably derived from the Gerusalemme and there are, of course, a number of sonnets. The sonnets hardly matter: this amatory Italianate vein in English poetry always sounds exactly the same whoever it is taken from. But the passage in The Faerie Queene is of some interest. Both poets are doing the same thing: they are describing the rescue of a young man from an enchanted garden, a garden of erotic enchantment in which he is held captive by a beautiful female figure. And both poets, by modern standards, lie open to the same charge: at any rate, at first sight. We are told that they both make the thing which was meant to be evil too beautiful: so beautiful that all the reader's sympathies go out to it, and it may be supposed that the poets' sympathies did the same. This would be a serious charge, if true: not on moral grounds, which are not my concern at the moment, but on artistic. There would be a fatal discrepancy between the profound and the superficial meaning of the poetry. I do not myself believe that the charge is true. As regards Tasso I believe it proceeds from a misunderstanding both of his mind and of his art, and first as regards his mind. Professor Tolkien, lecturing at St Andrews not many years ago, remarked how the idea of the beautiful but evil fay has disappeared from the modern imagination. (Editor's Note: Professor J. R. R. Tolkien's Andrew Lang Lecture was delivered at St Andrews in 1940. It was expanded and published under the title On Fairy-Stories' in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford, 1947). Lewis is thinking of a passage in On Fairy-Stories' in which Professor Tolkien says (p. 79): It is part of the essential malady of such days - producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery - that we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. So that to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming: goodness is itself bereft of its proper beauty. In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose - an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king - that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not - unless it was built before our time.') Perhaps in the world built by industrialism beauty has become so rare and evil so undisguisedly ugly that we can no longer believe ill of beauty. With the old poets it was not so. They believed that a thing might be perfectly beautiful, might be of a beauty to break the heart, and yet be evil. As for their art, it must be allowed that in one respect art has become more integrated since their times. The old poet, or painter, or musician does seem to have aimed simply at giving each part of his work the greatest beauty. The speeches of wicked characters were made as plausible as the poet could make them, the alluring temptations as alluring as he could make them. He did not feel it necessary to sow hints of falsity in the villain's speech. Perhaps this change is seen most clearly in the history of opera. A modern composer underlines his evil characters or places with discords. An old composer was content with making a courtesan's song soft and melting or a tyrant's song loud and declamatory; within that very general limit he then made each simply good of its kind. Thus Wagner gives Alberich ugly music to sing: but Mozart gives to the Queen of Night music as beautiful as he gives to Sarastro.

That would be my defence of Tasso. But the point is that no such defence is needed for the passages borrowed from Tasso in The Faerie Queene. Elsewhere I have already analysed them at some length and it would be tedious to repeat the details. I will here content myself with saying that though Spenser's Bower of Bliss is closely copied from Tasso's garden of Armida, everything in Spenser's Bower is deliberately contrasted with his garden of Adonis which comes about six cantos later: everything therefore has a significance in him which it had not in Tasso. Tasso, quite innocently, and following a well established tradition, frequently uses the contrast of art and nature E quel che il bello e il caro accresce all'opre

L'ane che tutto fa, nulla si scopte.

(Editor's Note: Gerusalemme Liberata, XVI, ix, 7-8.)

Spenser reproduces these passages for a different purpose. He emphasizes the art of the evil garden in order that, six cantos later, he may contrast it with the naturalness of the good one. In the one all is imitation, arrangement and sterility; in the other all is spontaneous and fertile. Thus Spenser's poem contains, as Tasso's does not, the answer to the evil garden on its own ground. In Tasso we have merely the conflict between sensuality and valour. In Spenser we have the answer to depraved and artful sensuality given by innocent and natural sensuousness. Armida is defeated only by virtue she could never understand: Acrasia is answered by something which does much better what she professed to do - beaten, as we say, on her home ground. This will be very surprising to those who expect to find Spenser differing from Tasso by his Puritanism' in the popular modern sense of the word. But in reality Puritanism and the Counter-Reformation, or even Puritanism and the Middle Ages, were on this point in positions almost opposite to those that moderns imagine for them. Asceticism is far more characteristic of Catholicism than of the Puritans. Celibacy and the praise of virginity are Catholic: the honour of the marriage bed is Puritan. Milton was being typically Puritan when he wrote, something too excessively, of the loves of Adam and Eve. Comus is his least Puritan poem.

Poetically the chief contrast between Spenser and Tasso at this point is one of complexity. Tasso does a very simple thing and does it extremely well. Spenser builds up a contrast which will be lost unless the reader can carry it in his head for six cantos - that is, for thousands of lines. I don't think that means that Spenser is more modern; I think it means that he is more medieval. For surely intricacy is a mark of the medieval mind: intricacy in scholastic philosophy, in Gothic architecture, in dress, in the rhyme schemes of poetry, and (what here concerns us most) the intricacy of allegory. It is not fanciful to see an analogy between the superior intricacy of Spenser's fable over Tasso's and the difference between his stanza and the ottava rima. Both are things of untiring beauty, but how different they are. The Italian stanza is all clear bell-like music; it carries you on with untroubled speed through the whole length of some of the longest poems in the world. The Spenserian is labyrinthine and meditative, turning back upon itself in the centre where the two rhymes meet and then pausing again, either for recapitulation or thundering defiance, or for a dying fall in the final alexandrine.

Professor Mario Praz has justly pointed out how Milton's abstinence from the particular, his lunghezza de' membri e de' periodi, and his verses entering l'uno nell'altro, conform to Tasso's precepts.' (Editor's Note: 'Milton and Poussin', Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938), p. 295) Yet it is extraordinary how little recognizable Tasso we find in Milton. The councils in Heaven and Hell, the descent of Gabriel and Michael, and other such 'machines' (as the old critics would have called them) are part of the Homeric and Virgilian tradition as Christianized by Vida amidst the tasteless absurdities of the Christiad. There is possibly a closer connexion in these two pictures: Quando dall' alto soglio il Padre Eterno,

Ch'e nella pane piu del Ciel sincera,

E quanto e dalle stelle al basso inferno,

Tanto e piu in su della stellata spera,

Gli occhi in giu volse, e in un sol punto, e in una

Vista miro cio, ch'in se il mondo aduna(Gerusalemme Liberata, I, vii, 3-8)

and

Now had the Almighty Father from above,

From the pure empyrean where he sits

High throned above all highth, bent down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view. (P.L. III, 56-9)

But even here the similarity is not of the closest. Where Milton explicitly recalls the Italian epics it is usually Tasso's predecessors he thinks of. Thus at the very outset he challenges comparison with Ariosto by promising

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme (Editor's Note: Paradise Lost, I, 16)

a direct translation of

Cosa non detta in prosa mai ne in rima. (Editor's Note: Paradise Lost, I, 16)

And in the severest of all his poems he turns aside to remember, of all people, Boiardo:

Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp

When Agrican with all his Northern powers

Beseig'd Albracca, as Romances tell

The City of Gallaphrone, from thence to win

The fairest of her Sex, Angelica,

His daughter, sought by many prowest Knights,

Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemagne. (P.R. III, 337-43)

How closely he had read the Innamorato may be seen from a passage in Paradise Lost where he reproduces a passage from it, I suppose unconsciously. Boiardo has said (II, xxx, 44-8)

Da l'altra parte anchora i Saracini

Facean tremar di stridi tutto il loco,

Correndo I'un ver l'altro, son vicini,

Scema il campo in mezzo a poco a poco;

Fossa non v'e, ne fiume, che confini..

Part of this comes in P.L. VI at line 68

On they move

Indissolubly firm; nor obvious Hill

Nor straitening Vale, nor Wood, nor Stream, divides

Their perfect ranks.

The other part comes about thirty lines later in the form

for now

'Twixt Host and Host but narrow space was left.

This is not conscious imitation: it is the involuntary reminiscence of a man steeped in another author. Yet who would have thought a priori that Milton delighted in the winning absurdities of Boiardo? It raises our opinion of both poets.

But it is time to draw to a close an inquiry which is already proving itself so negative. Of Tasso's minor works we find traces in English, but usually so much of a piece with the general Italian influence as to be hardly worth picking out. Of his great poem we find much praise and constant enjoyment and one translation which is very well worth reading on its own merits. Perhaps the truth is that what is best in the Gerusalemme is not very imitable. Its conceits, those conceits which led Speroni to call it an epic in madrigals, could be copied; we may be thankful they were not. But its virtues do not easily flow over into other men's work. No poem is more completely, and in a sense severely, the poem it set out to be and no other. And that, I suggest, is its abiding merit. A certain kind and degree of artificiality, a certain very skilful balance of unity and variety, a certain tone of disciplined ardour - these prevail from the first line to those wholly satisfactory last words e scioglie il voto which Tasso had in mind before he put pen to paper. Those words may be applied to the poet as well as to the hero. Scioglie il voto: he did what he meant, he made good his promise. The actions and the characters are far removed from reality as a modern critic understands it. But then they are all at exactly the same distance from it and thus all real in relation to one another - the shepherds who entertain Erminia being neither nearer to nor further from actual rusticity than the great deeds of Argante and Rinaldo are from actual war or Clorinda herself from the Countess in Froissan at the siege of Hennebont who 'had a glaive in her hand and was that day as good as a man'. In this perfect keeping, which enables us to accept Tasso's world as real while we are reading, lies the great charm of the poem; in that and in something better. I mean that quite unforced and quite sincere elevation of sentiment which makes us feel that Tasso is, in a very serious and even reverent sense of the word, the most boyish of the poets.

113 THE ALLITERATIVE METRE

'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste

Of all beyond itself. KEATS

In the general reaction which has set in against the long reign of foreign, syllabic metres in English, it is a little remarkable that few have yet suggested a return to our own ancient system, the alliterative line. Mr Auden, however, has revived some of its stylistic features; (Note: Readers will find numerous examples in two volumes of verse published by Auden prior to the appearance of this essay. They are Poems (London, 1930) and The Orators (London, 1932). The former contains 'Paid on both Sides' which is mentioned in Herbert Howarth's Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (London, 1965): "'Paid on both Sides" and such a poem as "Doom is dark" [both by Auden] showed Eliot how powerful the "consonantal rhymes" (so C. L. Wrenn, who tutored Auden, used to call them), and the terse phrases they encourage, speak to the English ear. In 1934, electing the story of Becket for his Canterbury play, he acted on Auden's example and went to English alliterative poetry for a medium' (p 338)) Professor Tolkien will soon, I hope, be ready to publish an alliterative poem; (Note: Professor Tolkien tells me that Lewis was probably referring to his poem, 'The Fall of Arthur', which has never been completed or published. Though Professor Tolkien's alliterative poem, 'The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son', was in existence when Lewis wrote this essay, Professor Tolkien does not recall showing it to him before it was revised and published in Essays and Studies, vol. vi, new series (1953), pp 1-18) and the moment seems propitious for expounding the principles of this metre to a larger public than those Anglo-Saxon and old Norse specialists who know it already.

Alliteration is no more the whole secret of this verse than rhyme is the whole secret of syllabic verse. It has, in addition, a metrical structure, which could stand alone, and which would then be to this system as blank verse is to the syllabic.

Latin verse is based on quantity (= the length of time taken to pronounce a syllable). Modern English is based on stress-accent (= the loudness with which a syllable is pronounced). Alliterative verse involves both.

In order to write alliterative verse it is therefore necessary to learn to distinguish not only accented from unaccented syllables, but also long from short syllables. This is rendered difficult by our classical education which allows boys to pronounce ille so that it rhymes with silly, and nevertheless to call the first syllable long, which, in their pronunciation, it is not. In dealing with English quantity the reader must learn to attend entirely to sounds, and to ignore spelling.

DEFINITION A long syllable is one which contains either a long vowel (as fath(er), fame, seek, pile, home, do); or, a vowel followed by more than one consonant (as punt, wind; helm, pelt). (Note CSL: That two or more consonants make the syllable long is not a metrical rule but a phonetic fact; that they make the preceding vowel long, as some say, is neither a rule nor a fact, but false)

CAUTION (A) It is here that the trouble from spelling occurs. In modern English spelling, for reasons which need not be discussed here, such words as silly, pretty, merry, sorrow, attraction, show a double consonant in spelling where there is no shadow of a double consonant in pronunciation. The reader can convince himself of this by comparing the pretended double T in pretty with the real double T in hot toast: and he will then hear how a real double consonant renders the first syllable of hot toast long, while that of pretty, though accented, is short. So, in distiller the pretended two L's are one, while in still life we have a real double L, disguised as a triple L. True double consonants can be heard in palely (f. Paley), fish-shop (cf bishop), unnamed (cf unaimed), midday (f. middy), solely (cf holy). (Note CSL: -NG in English usually represents a single consonant (G nasalized), but sometimes it represents this consonant followed by a pure G in addition. Hence the first syllable is short in singer, ringer: long in linger, finger.)

CAUTION (B) In modern English many words, chiefly monosyllables, which end in a single consonant are pronounced differently according to their position in the sentence. If they come at the end of a sentence or other speech-group - that is, if there is a pause after them - the final consonant is so dwelled upon that the syllable becomes long. If the reader listens carefully he will find that the syllable man is short in

'Manifold and great mercies'

or 'The man of property',

but long in

'The Invisible Man'

or 'The Descent of Man'.

With this caution, the reader will be glad to hear, the serious difficulties in the re-education of our ear are over.

Each line consists of two half-lines, which are independent metrical organisms, connected only by the alliteration.

The half-line consists of Lifts and Dips.

DEFINITIONS

A Lift = either (a) one syllable both long and accented (as the first syllable of ogre, mountain, Repton); or (b) two syllables whereof the first is short but accented, and the second unaccented (as the first two syllables of merrily, vigorous, melancholy, evident). (Thus in vary the first syllable is a Lift: in very the whole word is a Lift.) A Dip = any reasonable number of unaccented syllables whether long or short.

In the following sentences the syllables printed in capitals are Lifts, the rest Dips.

of COURSE we assuME.

When a phiLOLOGist is a FOOL.

RhadaMANTHUS in his MISERy.

Every half-line must contain neither more nor less than two Lifts. (The ancient poetry sometimes introduces a three-lift type which stands to this metre much as the Alexandrine stands to decasyllabics: but the beginner will be wise to neglect it.)

The five different types of half-line depend on the five ways in which Lifts and Dips are combined. Before learning these, however, the reader should 'work his ear in' with the following:

We were TALKing of DRAGONS, | TOLkien and I

In a BERKshire BAR. | The BIG WORKman

Who had SAT SILent | and SUCKED his PIPE

ALL the EVEning, | from his EMPTY MUG

With GLEAMing EYE | GLANCED toWARDS us;

'I SEEN 'em mySELF', | he SAID FIERCEly.'

(Note: I have been asked by many people if these lines were part of a longer poem. The answer, I regret to say, is No. They were written simply for the purpose of illustrating the alliterative line. Professor Tolkien, when I asked if he knew the origin of these lines, kindly favoured me with the following note: 'The occasion is entirely fictitious … A remote source of Jack's [C.S.L.'s] lines may be this: I remember Jack telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman'a voice was heard to say, "I have seen a dragon." Silence. "Where was that?" he was asked. "On the Mount of Olives", he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.')

The 'A' type of half-line is arranged Lift-dip, Lift-dip.

e.g. GREEN and GROWing.

MERRY were the MINSTrels.

COME from the COUNTry.

LICENCE One or two unaccented syllables may be added before the first Lift, forming what is technically known as an Anacrusis.

e.g. And green and growing.

And so merry were the minstrels.

He came from the country.

WARNING But this licence should he very seldom used in the second half-line. In the first half-line (i.e. at the beginning of the whole line) it may be used freely.

B type = dip-Lift, dip-Lift.

e.g. And NUMBED with NIGHT.

Where MAIDS are MERRY.

And to the PALACE of PRIDE.

WARNING The first dip may contain 'any reasonable number' of unaccented syllables: but the second should normally consist of a single unaccented syllable. In all circumstances a predominantly 'anapaestic' movement is to be avoided.

C = dip-Lift, Lift-dip.

(NOTE Here we reach a rhythm of daily occurrence in our speech (e.g. 'I can't stand him') which has been allowed no metrical recognition for centuries.)

e.g. The MERRY MASTer.

In the DARK DUNGeon.

Through CLOUDS CLEAving.

It is EVER-OPen.

And with GOD'S BENISon.

LICENCE In this type a single short, accented syllable may serve as the second Lift, giving us:

A cold kipper.

But they're hard-headed.

A proud palace.

D = Lift, Lift-dip.

Here there is only one dip, whereas A, B, and C have two. To compensate for this, in D types the dip must he strengthened by a syllable (Note CSL: Or, of course, two syllables whereof the first is short. The rules for 'compensating elements' are, in this respect, identical with the rules for Lifts.) nearly (but not quite) as strong as the Lifts.

(NOTE This again rescues a genuine English speech rhythm from metrical nonexistence.)

e.g. HARD HAYmaking.

It will be heard that the syllable mak is as long as, but just less accented than, hard and hay.

e.g. BRIGHT QUICKsilver.

MAD MERRYmaking.

SHODDY SHIPbuilders.

GRIM GLADIator.

HELL'S HOUSEkeeper.

In all these examples the strengthening element of the dip stands first in the dip: e.g. in 'Hell's housekeeper', keepcomes before -er. Obviously the reverse order may be used, giving us:

ALL UNDerclothes.

MAD MULTitude.

EATS ARTichokes.

POOR DESTitute.

LICENCE I In D, as in C, a single short, accented syllable may serve as the second Lift, giving us, instead of Hard haymaking, such forms as:

SHEER SHOTover.

PURE PALimpsest.

LICENCE 2 The compensating element in the dip may also he a single short, accented syllable, giving us:

MAD MELANCHOly.

HEAV'N'S WAR-Office.

BORN BOOT-legger.

LICENCE 3 The sub-type Mad multitude maybe extended by inserting a single unaccented (and preferably short) syllable between the two Lifts, so as to give:

MAD the MULTitude.

EATing ARTichokes.

E = Lift-dip-Lift.

Here again we have only one dip, and again the dip must contain a compensating element. E, in fact, is a rearrangement of D.

e.g. HAYmakers HEARD.

SHIPbuilders SHOW.

GLADiator GRIM.

LICENCE The compensating element in the dip may be a single short, accented syllable, giving us:

NEW-College KNOWS.

(21) 12

For the reader's convenience, I add a recapitulation of the five types.

A 1 Green and growing.

2 (With Anacrusis) The grass is growing.

B And life runs low.

C 1 A dark dungeon.

2 (With single short for 2nd Lift) The gray gravel.

D 1 Hell's housekeeper.

2 (With compensating element last in dip) Earth's antidote.

3 (With single short for 2nd Lift) East Abingdon.

4 (With single short for compensating element in dip) Heav'n's war-office.

5 (Extended) Evil antidote.

E 1 Shipbuilders show.

2 (With single short for compensating element in dip) New-College knows.

In every line both the Lifts of the first half-line may, and one must, alliterate with the first Lift of the second half-line. As

In a Berkshire Bar. The Big workman

(both Lifts in the first half alliterating with the first of the second) or,

We were Talking of dragons, Tolkien and I

(one Lift of the first half alliterating with the first of the second). An alliteration on all four Lifts as in

And walks by the waves, as winds warble

is regarded not as an added beauty, but as a deformity. (Its use in Middle English, it will be found, radically alters the character of the metre.)

Where only one Lift in the first half-line alliterates, it should normally be the first.

All vowels alliterate with one another.

WARNING Do not be deceived by spelling. Union alliterates with yeast, yellow, &c., not with uncle.

No half-line of any type should end in a pure dactyl. Noble Norbury, with trash and trumpery, glancing gloomily, &c., are unmetrical.

17 Structure

(1) The medial pause which divides the first from the second half of the line must be strictly observed, so that the two halves fall apart as separate speech-groups.

(By speech-groups I mean those units - rhythmical, rhetorical, emotional, and to some extent syntactical, units - out of which our actual conversation is built up. Thus if the reader says 'The big workman who had sat silent and sucked his pipe all the evening', he will (I hope) find that the speech-groups coincide with the half-lines in the example given under para. 6. A good deal of re-education is here necessary, for the chief beauty of syllabic verse lies in a deliberate clash or contradiction between the speech-groups and the 'feet', whereas in alliterative verse the speech-group is both the metrical, and the aesthetic, unit. See below, para. 18.)

Examples. Thus, he will stand as a stone till the stars crumble, is metrically good. The laugh of the lovely lady is silent is bad. But Lost is the laugh of the lovely damsel is not a line at all: for it pretends metrically to be:

LOST is the LAUGH of the LOVEly DAMsel

(A-type + A with anacrusis): and in this the first half is so impossible as a speech-group that a poet could have written it only because he was really still thinking in feet and syllables, and not in speech-groups and half-lines.

(2) But while we cannot run across the medial break, we can run across the end of a line. In other words, the last half of a given line and the first half of the next are more intimately connected than the two halves of a single line. Hence we may write

There stands a stone. Still'd is the Lady's

Peerless laughter.

Corollary. Hence, though the poem begins and ends with a full line, yet within the poem a new paragraph or sentence should usually begin in the second half of a line.

18 Aesthetics

It follows that whereas syllabic poetry primarily uses the evocative qualities of words (and only secondarily those of phrases), alliterative poetry reverses the procedure. The phrase, coinciding with the half-line, is the poetic unit. In any English country taproom the student may hear from the lips of labourers speech-groups which have a certain race and resonance in isolation. These are the elements of our native metre.

Such are the rules. Where no tradition - at least no modern tradition - exists it is rash to offer advice, but perhaps two counsels may be given. In the first place, if any one is attracted by the metre in general, but disposed to omit the rules of quantity and produce a merely accentual adaptation, I would like to save him disappointment by warning him that he will almost certainly produce rubbish. Torture the language, or the thought, as he will, the result will be thin. The thing to aim at is richness and fullness of sound, and this cannot be attained without quantity: with quantity, the metre opens possibilities of resonance which have not been exploited for a thousand years. In the second place, I would advise him to be on his guard against too many B types. His iambic training will probably be tempting him to them at every turn: but if he yields his poem will sound like octosyllabics. And lastly, I would advocate to all who have a taste for such things some serious contention with the difficulties of this metre. A few successful specimens would be an excellent answer to the type of critic (by no means extinct) who accuses the moderns of choosing vers libre because they are not men enough for metre. For if syllabic verse is like carving in wood and vers libre like working with a brush, this is like carving in granite.

A man who preaches a metre must sooner or later risk his case by showing a specimen: and if the fate of Gabriel Harvey deters me, that of Campion invites. In order to avoid misunderstanding I must say that the subject of the following poem was not chosen under the influence of any antiquarian fancy that a medieval metre demanded medieval matter, but because the characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols - to provide a Phanomemologie des Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation. of Saturn we know more than enough. But who does not need to be reminded of Jove?

THE PLANETS

Lady LUNA, in light canoe, A:B

By friths and shallows of fretted cloudland B:C

Cruises monthly; with chrism of dews A:B

And drench of dream, a drizzling glamour, A:B

Enchants us - the cheat! changing sometime A:A

A mind to madness, melancholy pale, A2:E2

Bleached with gazing on her blank count'nance A:C

Orb'd and ageless. In earth's bosom A:C2

The shower of her rays, sharp-feathered light B:E2

Reaching downward, ripens silver, A:A

Forming and fashioning female brightness, A:A

- Metal maidenlike. Her moist circle D2:C

Is nearest earth. Next beyond her B:A

MERCURY marches; - madcap rover, A:A

Patron of pilf'rers. Pert quicksilver A:D

His gaze begets, goblin mineral, B:A

Merry multitude of meeting selves, D2:B

Same but sundered. From the soul's darkness, A:C

With wreathed wand, words he marshals, B:A

Guides and gathers them - gay bellwether A:D4

Of flocking fancies. His flint has struck C:B

The spark of speech from spirit's tinder, B:C

Lord of language! He leads forever A:A

The spangle and splendour, sport that mingles A2:A

Sound with senses, in subtle pattern, A:C2

Words in wedlock, and wedding also A:C

Of thing with thought. In the third region B:C

VENUS voyages ... but my voice falters; A:C

Rude rime-making wrongs her beauty, D:A

Whose breasts and brow, and her breath's sweetness B:C

Bewitch the worlds. Widespread the reign B:E

Of her secret sceptre, in the sea's caverns, A2:C2

In grass growing, and grain bursting, C:C

Flower unfolding, and flesh longing, A:C

And shower falling sharp in April. C:A

The metal of copper in the mine reddens B:C2

With muffled brightness, like muted gold, C:B

By her finger form'd. Far beyond her B:A

The heaven's highway hums, and trembles, C:A

Drums and dindles, * to the driv'n thunder A:C

Of SOL'S chariot, whose sword of light C:B

Hurts and humbles; beheld only A:C

Of eagle's eye. When his arrow glances B:C

Through mortal mind, mists are parted B:A

And mild as morning the mellow wisdom A2:C

Breathes o'er the breast, broadening eastward E:A

Clear and cloudless. In a clos'd garden A:C

(Unbound her burden) his beams foster A2:C

Soul in secret, where the soil puts forth A:B

Paradisal palm, and pure fountains E:C

Turn and re-temper, touching coolly A:A

The uncomely common to cordial gold; B:B

Whose ore also, in earth's matrix, C:C

Is print and pressure of his proud signet B:C

On the wax of the world. He is the worshipp'd male, B:B

The earth's husband, all-beholding, C:A

Arch-chemic eye. But other country E2:C

Dark with discord dins beyond him, A:A

With noise of nakers, neighing of horses, B:A

Hammering of harness. A haughty god A:B

MARS mercenary, *** makes there his camp D2:E

And flies his flag; flaunts laughingly B:D

The graceless beauty, grey-eyed and keen, A2:E

- Blond insolence - of his blithe visage D2:C2

Which is hard and happy. He hews the act, B:B

The indifferent deed with dint of his mallet B:B

And his chisel of choice; achievement comes not B:A2

Unhelped by him; - hired gladiator B:D

Of evil and good. All's one to Mars, B:E

The wrong righted, rescued meekness, C:A

Or trouble in trenches, with trees splintered A:C

And birds banished, banks fill'd with gold C2:E

And the liar made lord. Like handiwork B:D2

He offers to all - earns his wages B:A

And whistles the while. White-featured dread B:E

Mars has mastered. His metal's iron A:C

That was hammered through hands into holy cross, B:B

Cruel carpentry. He is cold and strong, D5:B

Necessity's son. **** Soft breathes the air B:E

Mild, and meadowy, as we mount further A:C

Where rippled radiance rolls about us C:A

Moved with music - measureless the waves A:E

Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE's orbit, D5:C

Filled and festal, faster turning A:A

With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin C:B

Tyrian traders, in trouble steering A:C

Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure A:B

That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended C:C

And woes mended, of winter passed C:B

And guilt forgiven, and good fortune B:C

Jove is master; and of jocund revel, A:C2

Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted, A:A2

The myriad-minded, men like the gods, A2:E

Helps and heroes, helms of nations A:A

Just and gentle, are Jove's children, A:C

Work his wonders. On his wide forehead ***** A:C2

Calm and kingly, no care darkens A:C

Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power C:B

And leisure and largess their loose splendours A2:C

Have wrapped around him - a rich mantle A2:C

Of ease and empire. Up far beyond A2:E

Goes SATURN silent in the seventh region, C:C

The skirts of the sky. Scant grows the light, B:E

Sickly, uncertain (the Sun's finger A:C

Daunted with darkness). Distance hurts us, A:A

And the vault severe of vast silence; B:C

Where fancy fails us, and fair language, A2:C

And love leaves us, and light fails us C:C

And Mars fails us, and the mirth of Jove C:B

Is as tin tinkling. In tattered garment, C:C

Weak with winters, he walks forever A:B

A weary way, wide round the heav'n, B:E

Stoop'd and stumbling, with staff groping, A:C

The lord of lead. He is the last planet B:C2

Old and ugly. His eye fathers A:C

Pale pestilence, pain of envy, D2:A

Remorse and murder. Melancholy drink A:E2

(For bane or blessing) of bitter wisdom B:C

He pours for his people, a perilous draught A2:B

That the lip loves not. We leave all things C:C

To reach the rim of the round welkin, B:C

Heaven's hermitage, high and lonely. D2:A

Notes:

Alliteration on second lift of the first half. The orthographic w in wreathèd has, of course, no metrical function.

* Cf, Malory, v, ch. 8.

*** -ary being the compensating element in the Dip.

**** The C in necessity, being an s in pronunciation, carries the first alliteration.

***** This is C 2 in my pronunciation because I pronounce forehead so as to rhyme with horrid. In the alternative pronunciation (which is now heard even among educated speakers) it would be C1.

↑ Back to top