This is a research paper I published in 2023 in the volume Crossroads in Diversity(ed. Gaal-Szabo et al.) at  Debrecen Reformed Theological University Press and it one of the sources I relied on in designing some of my LPs  for the FOSTIN project.

Musical Features in the Early English Poetry

                                                                      Pop Titus

 

In Western poetics, there have been different views on the status of sound in poetry. The traditional literary view is that poetry is sound, and the written or printed text is a representation of sound. Another point of view is that language does not have a voice in itself and that important aspects of poetry follow from the visual features of textuality. The third point of view is the one upheld by structuralists and claims that language of poetry is ambivalent. Thus, language is, as structuralists have shown, a set of signs or sounds present in either or both media: the sonic and the graphic, therefore poetry is a structure or system of sounds. While nowadays readers are accustomed first to visualizing a poem in its written form, before the invention of writing and the spread of literacy, the main condition of poetry was orality.  Croce’s theory that "real artworks exist only in their creator's mind even if the author is anonymous” may be applied in this context. (Croce, 1966:23) In this paper, I will look at the sound features (namely, the musical features) in some of the earliest anonymous poems written in English which, before being printed, have been “recorded” by the word of mouth.

 Throughout history, many scholars attempted either to separate poetry from music (from the Hellenistic period to the New Formalist theory) in terms of prosodics, its scope, message etc., or to connect the two art forms. Thus, the prosodic analysts debated the musicality of poetry, the neo-classical scholars analyzed the alliterative meter and other musical elements employed by poets such as Thomas Wyatt or G. Chaucer, Bertrand Bronson analyzed the ballad's musical features and Gates Henry Louis Jr., and K. A. Appiah looked into modern poetry and musical patterns. One may argue, however that most cultures and  languages offer many examples  that poetry that continues to be read and remembered today always has some connection with music. Thus, most accounts of ancient Greek culture insist on the centrality of music-the rhapsodes singing the epic poems written in heroic couplets, the odes played on the lyre or kithera and an acquaintance with different musical modes as an essential skill of a civilized person. From the earliest Anglo-Saxon poetry through the Middle Ages and later on, we have anonymous epic poems, lyrics and ballads which survived and permeate contemporary folk or popular music.

Of these, it is the Anglo-Saxon anonymous poetry which contains most obvious traces of musicality. We know very little about the people who composed Anglo-Saxon poetry because their work belonged to an oral tradition. They were travelling minstrels called scops[1] who performed for noblemen in the halls of kings. Their social function they exercised was very important because they knew the old stories the first settlers had brought with them in the 5th century from their European homelands.

Anglo-Saxon Poetry is highly musical as the scop often accompanied himself on a harp or a lyre. Musical elements of the language such as alliteration, assonance, rhyme and rhythm helped the scop to memorize the often very long works, and so they facilitated the passing of poems orally, from generation to generation. The poems composed by the scops were divided later by critics into two groups: Pagan and Christian. What remains of early Anglo-Saxon poetry today was written down by monks in monasteries from the end of seventh century onward.

One of the earliest poems from this period is the well- known anonymous epic saga, Beowulf, a poem which resembles in many aspects, including in its musical features, the Germanic epic poem The Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). Thus, beside its main stylistic feature, the kenning (metaphorical phrases used instead of nouns), the two frequent musical features present in Beowulf are alliteration and caesura. It is known alliteration means the repetition of the same initial consonant sound in a sequence of nearby words. In Anglo-Saxon times, before the introduction of rhyme, alliteration gave the language of poetry its musical quality and made the poems easier to remember. Here are some examples from Beowulf:: “Now many an earl/of Beowulf brandished blade ancestral”  (Heaney, 2000,  15); “So Hrothgar’s men lived happy in his hall”(16); “Then, when darkness had dropped, Grendel Went up to Herot,/ wondering what the warriors.”(30-32); “He will carry me away as he goes to ground, gorged and bloodied” (446-447).

 

 

The other musical element one may frequently find in Beowulf is caesura, a feature which regulates the rhythm of poetry. A caesura (Lat- cut) is a break or pause that occurs in the middle of a line. Here are two examples: “then came from the moor// under the mist-hills/Grendel stalking// he bore God's anger” (710-712); “There was Shield Sheafson, || scourge of many tribes, |A wrecker of mead-benches, || rampaging among foes. (9, 10).

Later on, during the Middle Ages, there was another type of musical poetry that circulated in England- the lyric. According to Drabble and Stringer:

The lyrics were short songs that did not tell a story but expressed the thoughts or feelings of a speaker and they flourished in the Middle English period…this lyric was enriched by the direct imitation of ancient models and reached perfection in the song books and plays of the Elizabethan age. (Drabble and Stringer 1987, 340),

 The most frequent subject matter in the Middle English secular lyrics are romantic love (courtly love lyrics) and springtime. Many of them rework such themes tediously, but some, such as “Foweles in the Frith” (13th century) and “Ich am of Irlaunde” (14th century), convey strong emotions in a few lines. Two lyrics of the early 13th century, “Mirie it is while sumer ilast” and “The cuckoo song(Sumer is icumen in)” are preserved with musical settings, and were meant to be sung. Here are some lines from “Foweles in the Frith” with explanations and translation into modern English provided by a medieval poetry scholar, Aniina Jokinen:

 Mirie it is while sumer y-last

 With fugheles son

 Oc nu neheth windes blast/

And weder strong.

(Mirie – merry y-last - lasts

fugheles – birds son - sound, song

Oc – but nu – now) ( Jokinen, 2006)

Religious lyrics were also frequent at this time. The poets generally expressed their sorrow for the crucifixion of Christ and for Mary therefore the dominant mood of the religious lyrics is passion: the poets sorrow for Christ on the cross and for the Virgin Mary, celebrate the “five joys” of Mary, and to express religious devotion they borrow  register from love poetry. Early examples are “Nou goth sonne under wod” and “Stond wel, moder, ounder rode.” The musical feature which made them easy to perform is the simple aabb rhyme. One of these is the poem “Nou Goth Sonne under Wode”with its modern English translation by Thomas Duncan:

Nou goth sonne under wode.                        Now the sun sets behind the forest

Me reweth, Marie,                                          Mary, I pity your lovely face

thi faire rode      .(Duncan, 1995, 6)

There are hundreds of such lyrics collected by scholars such as John Hirsch (Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols-2004), R.T. Davies (Medieval English Lyrics: a Critical Anthology-1991) or T. Duncan (Medieval Lyrics and Carols-1995) and most of them focus on religion and romantic love.

Throughout the Middle Ages, there circulated another poetic genre which was closely connected to music- the ballad. Ballads were anonymous short folk songs that told a story and were originally composed to be sung and danced upon. In Delaney et al. (2002) one may overview the main features of the ballad genre as follows:

·         They rarely tell a story from beginning to end.

·         description is brief and conventional and very little information is given about the characters;

·         words, expressions and phrases and entire verses are repeated;

·         contain a line or group of lines which is repeated throughout the ballad - a refrain;

·         many ballads contain stock descriptive phrases such as 'milk-white steed', 'blood-red wine‘;

·         Composed in simple two or four line stanzas. The stanza usually consists of alternate four and three stress lines rhyming on the second and fourth line. (Delaney et al, 2002, 19)

Since ballads thrived among illiterate people and were freshly created from memory at each separate performance, they were often subject to constant variation in both text and tune. These variations maintained the ballad alive by gradually adapting it to the style of life, beliefs, and emotional needs of the folk audience. The way ballads are composed and maintained in tradition has been the subject of many debates among scholars. The so- called communal school, led by two American scholars F.B. Gummere (1855–1919) and G.L. Kittredge (1860–1941), argued at first that “ballads were composed collectively during  performances and the excitement of dance and song festivals.”(Gummere cited in Friedman, 1956:22) The opposing view group were the individualists led by W.J. Courthope (1842–1917) , Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and  Louise Pound (1872–1958).  These claimed that “each ballad was the work of an individual composer”, who was not necessarily a folk singer.(Pound cited in Friedman, 1956, 23) For them,  tradition served simply as the means to carry on  the creation by means of word of mouth.. However, in my view, the singer is not always expressing himself individually, but many times they are serving as a deputy of the public voice. A ballad only becomes a ballad once it has been accepted by the community and been adapted and readapted by countless variations of tradition into a local product.

But although songs and texts are many times interdependent, it is common to find the same version of a ballad being sung to a variety of tunes of suitable rhythm and metre or to find the same song being used for several different ballads .According to Albert Friedman, ballads are based on modes rather than on diatonic and chromatic scales. He notes:

Most tunes consist of 16 bars with double rhythm, or two beats per measure, prevailing slightly over triple rhythm. The tune, commensurate with the ballad stanza, is repeated as many times as there are stanzas. Unlike the “through-composed” art song, where the music is given nuances to correspond to the varying emotional colour of the content, the folk song affords little opportunity to inflect the contours of the melody. (Friedman, 1956, 13))

One of the best known traditional ballads is the anonymous The Unquiet Grave, a song which has been sung in different versions until now. It is an unusually compact and harmonious narrative, built around a dialogue between a young man and the ghost of his lover, and with very little detail or expository material. In fact, the intensity is almost that of a lyric poem rather than a story-telling ballad. The Harvard scholar, Francis James Child collected a number of different variants of this ballad. The oldest one dates from the Middle Ages, the 14th century. The first two stanzas render the words uttered by the young man.  At first, it seems he directly addresses the dead woman, although it is possible his addressee is a new, living lover: "The wind doth blow today, my love, / And a few small drops of rain." (Child, 1965, 235). However, according to Child, the reference to the "small drops of rain" faintly “ reminds of  a quatrain from the early 15th century- "Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow/ The small raine down can raine?/ Cryst, if my louve were in my armes/ And I in my bedde again!“ “ (237).The repetitions from verse to verse, a common musical pattern, has the effect of bringing the lovers touchingly close, as if one echoed the other. "I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips" is reinforced almost tenderly by the response, "You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips", while the alliteration conveys a contrasting impression of mortality. (236) Its harmonies leave the reader/listener in no doubt of the depth of the lovers' empathy. The images are simple, almost archetypal and from a sonic point of view, there are many liquid sounds which give the song a sort of free flowing harmony. The flowing, predominantly iambic rhythm suggests at times a lullaby, the epitome of   emotional singing:

The stalk is withered dry, my love,

 So will our hearts decay;

So make yourself content, my love,

  Till God calls you away.(235)

The ballad analyzed above is one of many (which will be the object of my further research) which prove the interconnectedness between text and music in the early and medieval anonymous poetry.

In conclusion, the early English poetry contains obvious sound features or traces of musicality. Orality played an important part in the transmission of anonymous poetry from generation to generation. The musical elements of the language such as alliteration, assonance and rhythm, were highly important because they helped the minstrels to handle down poems orally and thus keep tradition alive. The early (especially anonymous) English poetry such as the  epic poems(Beowulf), and the Medieval forms such as the lyric and the ballad were genres of poetry whose musical features were central as regards their social and communal function.

 

 

 

                                                                 Works Cited

 

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopedia.”scop” Encyclopedia Britannica, September 17, 1999. https://www.britannica.com/art/scop.   Accessed  August 1 2021

Croce. B.1966. Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays, translated by Cecil Sprigge, London: Oxford University Press.

Delaney,D., Ward, C., Fiorina, C.R. 2002. Fields of Vision. Harlow:Longman.

Duncan, G.T. 1995(ed)., Medieval English Lyrics and Carols 1200-1400, Penguin. http://www.maldura.unipd.it/dllags/brunetti/Medievale/lyrics_09.pdf Accessed August 23 2001.

Friedman, A.1956. The Viking Book of Folk Ballads in the English-Speaking World. New York: Viking Press.

Heaney, Seamus. 2000. Beowulf. A New Verse Translation .London, England: Faber & Faber. https://www.dvusd.org/cms/lib/AZ01901092/Centricity/Domain/2897/beowulf_heaney.pdf. Accessed July 20 2021.

Jokinen,A.2006.  “Middle English Lyrics:Merry It Is While Summer Lasts” Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/merryitis.php Accessed on August 20 2021.

 

Child,F.G. 1865. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v 2.. New York : Dover Publications .