Oy.
Alliteration is universal, though some poets use it more than others.
So are caesuras.
The question is the regularity of the two. If regular to the point of
formula, either coincidence or influence are at play. If not,
probably also not.
Alliterative verse was still being written in England into the late
14th century, but in the much more available and readable middle
english. The lyric you quote may in fact have been influenced by what
was a contemporary practice descended (ina well-documented descent),
in modified form, from the anglosaxon, but very unlikely by
anglosaxon verse conventions proper. Anglosaxon manuscripts were rare
and rarely if ever copied (were they still being copied at all?), and
I don't think there is any evidence of an anglosaxon oral tradition
surviving that late.
There was increasing continental influence on British poetry after
the conquest. Chaucer, by far the best-known and most-read middle
english writer in Shakespeare's time, represents that influence. In
one of the Tales he has the storyteller mark the difference (I don't
remember which one--Robin?), saying that he can't write alliterative verse.
Shakespeare wrote ten very disruptive generations after the lyric you
quote and Chaucer. Pockets of isolation from the developments in the
mainstream of the culture, where oral tradition might have retained
more of earlier verse forms, were increasingly rare and increasingly
far from both London and Stratford. What we know of that oral
tradition is the ballads, which are not singularly indebted to the
alliterative tradition.
A much easier explanation for Shakespeare's nonformulaic use of
alliteration is that, like us, he used it for the music when he
wanted to, independent of a dead tradition with which there was
little surviving connection. Since we can't ask him, Occam's Razor
would seem to be the best available guide.
Mark
At 12:05 PM 10/15/2007, you wrote:
>It's of course very doubtful that Shakespeare could have known any
>Anglo-Saxon poetry. But that doesn't mean he wasn't working in a
>tradition still influenced by Anglo-Saxon poetics. The similarities
>of poetic technique in his sonnets to Anglo-Saxon verse technique are
>too clear to be dismissed: they are simply there, and if something's
>there, it's silly to say it's not there because it can't be. We have
>to assume either that these similarities are coincidental or that they
>represent genuine cultural continuity. The former assumption seems to
>me to strain credulity more than does the latter.
>
>Exactly how this poetic influence could have survived is hard to
>imagine. But cultural traditions are transmitted in all sorts of ways
>that don't depend on black marks on white paper. The prime example of
>this is language itself: when Elvis Presley sang "You ain't nothin'
>but a hound dog," he was uttering a sentence composed entirely of
>recognizably Anglo-Saxon words, but Elvis was as unlikely to have read
>Beowulf as was Shakespeare.
>
>Consider the following anonymous lyric:
>
>LENTEN ys come with love to toune,
>With blosmen ant with briddes roune,
> That al this blisse bryngeth;
>Dayes-eyes in this dales,
>Notes suete of nyhtegales,
> Vch foul song singeth;
>The threstlecoc him threteth oo,
>Away is huere wynter wo,
> When woderove springeth;
>This foules singeth ferly fele,
>Ant wlyteth on huere winter wele,
> That al the wode ryngeth
>
>Eight of these twelve lines consist of four stresses separated by a
>strong pause dividing the line into two two-stress halves which are
>roughly equal though sometimes syllabically asymmetrical, these two
>parts being joined across the pause by emphatic alliteration; and the
>remaining four lines are clearly influenced by this pattern. Yet
>scholars date the composition of this poem to more than two centuries
>after the Norman Conquest, and a century and a half after the date
>when Old English is considered to have been replaced by Middle
>English. Go figure.
>
>--
>===================================
>
> Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
>
>===================================
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