4 - Metre, Accent, and Rhythm

Summary

Complicated patterns dance through Middle English verse, rhythms so flexible they appear ‘deregulated’. The following discussion draws on music theory to explicate both characteristics of this rhythmic complexity and principles that govern it. By distinguishing categories of accent and articulating how different types of accent establish simultaneous rhythms in the text itself, we may come to appreciate and understand choices that might otherwise be dismissed as ‘scribal corruption’.

This approach, grounded in music theory, is more clearly justified when we consider the intimate connection between verse and music in the development of rhythm in medieval Europe and the integral involvement of music in the poetry that influenced Middle English verse. In this context, the thirteenth-century English song ‘Edi beo thu’ models how lines with varying number of syllables can be set to a melody in triple metre, and how initial and final unstressed syllables group with preceding or subsequent stressed syllables, establishing line structures that do not consistently align with metrical structures.

Linguistics as well as music can provide a means of recognizing and understanding the simultaneous rhythmic patterns that structure Middle English verse. Variation in one rhythmic structure provides energy without a loss of continuity when other rhythmic structures are maintained; recurrence of a disrupted pattern brings greater satisfaction than continuous reiteration of the pattern. Furthermore, we find evidence that where metre is strong, as in the tail-rhyme romances, we should expect discontinuities in the prosody.

Finally, this chapter will conclude with instances of rhythmic variation in the manuscripts of the Middle English romances.