How to Read Middle English Poetry

How do we teach new generations of students the nuts and bolts of Middle English poetic craft? At the advanced level there are plenty of books on the topic, but they are not suitable for beginners. There is thus an urgent need for an accessible guide to the meters and verse forms of Middle English verse. Sawyer's book, issued in an affordable paperback edition, meets this need brilliantly and does something else that is equally important: it illustrates, through analyses of well-chosen examples, that an appreciation of poets’ formal choices improves our understanding of the poet's meaning.The book is intelligently structured, moving the reader logically from smaller units of poetic composition to larger ones. In the first two chapter, on words and phrases, Sawyer discusses register (and its relation to etymology), syntax, and enjambement. Next come two chapters on meter: the first on alternating meters, including Chaucer's iambic meter, and the second on alliterative meter. Scanning poetry is a real challenge for students of English literature, and when that poetry is in a much older form of the language, the challenge only gets harder. Sawyer tactfully concentrates on the basics. Matters on which specialists disagree, such as the number of beats in the alliterative a-verse, are acknowledged, but wisely Sawyer is not drawn into controversies. The next three chapters deal with rhyme (masculine, feminine, perfect, imperfect, etc.), with stanza forms, and with overarching structures such as numerological designs and acrostics. Sawyer ends with chapters on wider issues that are relevant to verse design: the practices of scribes, the mise-en-page of verse in medieval manuscripts, the impact of other languages of medieval Britain in poems from the period and in macaronic verse in particular, and finally questions of performance, orality, and aurality. A glossary of technical terms and an index complete the book.A book designed for beginners needs to strike a delicate balance. There are essential terms and skills that students need to acquire, but going into too much technical detail will alienate and confuse them. Sawyer's book is a model textbook in this regard. The blurb at the back claims that the book is “at once thorough, wide-ranging, and practical.” I have found it so, and I would add that the writing is lucid and engaging.There are, however, some errors that should not have been allowed to pass. Comparing “Me thought I was in a wood / willed mine one, That I ne wiste no way / whider that I scholde” (Alliterative Morte Arthure, 3230–31) with Simon Armitage's translation (“I believed I was in a wood, wandering alone, Wholly unaware of which way I should walk”), Sawyer regrets the loss of “willed’” because it “contains the element ‘wil’” and so “points to something very much at issue in the poem: Arthur's will – to power, to conquest, and its coming subordination to reversals of fortune” (p. 10). But “willed” here has nothing to do with modern English “will”: it is from Old Norse villa, meaning “go astray.” Sawyer's larger point that much is lost in Armitage's translations remains true, but a better way of making that point would have been to note that Armitage's attempt to recreate the soundscape of alliterative poets distorts their practice: the aa/aa alliteration so beloved by Armitage (cf. “Lions lurked there, licking their lips” in Sawyer's next citation from Armitage) and masculine line endings are avoided in the original. In his discussion of the fifteenth-century love epistle “Myn hertes joy, and all myn hole plesaunce,” Sawyer perceptively notes that the second stanza is in plainer English, but this is not because this stanza “contains not one word originating in French or Latin” (p. 26). There are two: ese and payn. The point that borrowings from French could be used to elevate register is worth making, but it needs to be nuanced with the observation that, in general, early French loans did not have the aureate resonance that later ones did. In Sawyer's sample scansions of iambic lines from Chaucer (and Gower) the brackets around the last unstressed syllable are misleading. It is of course true that a final unstressed syllable was optional rather than mandatory in their metrical system, but this does not mean that we can either pronounce or not pronounce the final -e in, for instance, “And specially from every shires ende,” which Sawyer scans as x/x/x/x/x/(x) (p. 51). Except, notably in of Sir Thopas, Chaucer always pronounced historically justified -e in words at line ending. If we do not make this clear to our students they will never be able to appreciate the care that Chaucer took to match such rhyme words with companions that also had organic or grammatical final -e.Since the book is otherwise so well-conceived and meets such an urgent need in the student curriculum, I thoroughly recommend it, even as I hope that there will soon be a corrected edition.