A lot of people who have never studied any ancient language have a tendency to assume that works of ancient poetry must rhyme in the original language. It’s fairly easy to see why some people might think this, since many old poems written in English rhyme and it’s easy for people to assume that this is how all poetry—or at least all “traditional” poetry—is just supposed to be. The reality, though, is that rhyming lines of the kind that most twenty-first-century western readers would recognize are virtually absent from ancient poetry altogether.
Poems in ancient languages operate on different rules from traditional modern English poetry. In this post, I will attempt to survey some of these rules for poetry in various ancient languages. Be forewarned that I am not a poetry specialist, of the various ancient languages I will be discussing Ancient Greek and Latin are the only ones I can personally read, and this post is by no means meant to be comprehensive. Nonetheless, I hope it will serve as a rough guide to help interested members of the general public to understand at least some forms of ancient poetry.
Ancient Mesopotamian poetry
Some of the oldest surviving works of poetry are poems in the Sumerian language dating to the third millennium BCE. Rhyming couplets play virtually no role in Sumerian poetry or any later Mesopotamian poetry. Instead, these poems rely primarily on wholesale repetition for poetic effect.
For instance, Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld is a poem about the goddess Inanna in the Sumerian language that was most likely composed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE), although the oldest extant copies of it date to the Isin-Larsa Period (lasted c. 2025 – c. 1763 BCE). Here are the first thirteen lines of the poem in transliterated Sumerian, using the text from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) website:
“1an gal-ta ki gal-ce3 jectug2-ga-ni na-an-/gub\
2dijir an gal-ta ki gal-ce3 jectug2-ga-ni na-an-[gub]
3dinana an gal-[ta ki gal-ce3] jectug2-ga-ni na-an-[gub]
4nin-ju10 an mu-un-cub ki mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3
5dinana an mu-un-cub ki mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3
6nam-en mu-un-cub nam-lagar mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3
7unugki-ga e2-an-na mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3
8bad3-/tibira\ki-a e2-muc3-kalam-ma mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-[e-a]-ed3
9zabalamki-a gi-gun5ki-na mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3
10adabki-a e2-car2-ra mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3
11nibruki-a barag-dur2-jar-ra mu-un-cub [kur-ra ba-e-a-ed3]
12kicki-a hur-saj-kalam-ma mu-un-cub kur-ra ba-e-[a-ed3]
13a-ga-de3ki-a e2-ul-macki mu-un-cub kur-a ba-e-a-ed3“
Here is the ETCSL’s translation of those same thirteen lines into English:
“From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below.
From the great heaven the goddess set her mind on the great below.
From the great heaven Inana set her mind on the great below.
My mistress abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld.
Inana abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the office of en, abandoned the office of lagar, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the E-ana in Unug, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the E-muš-kalama in Bad-tibira, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the Giguna in Zabalam, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the E-šara in Adab, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the Barag-dur-jara in Nibru, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the Hursaj-kalama in Kiš, and descended to the underworld.
She abandoned the E-Ulmaš in Agade, and descended to the underworld.”
As you can tell, the poet is essentially repeating the exact same phrase or line multiple times, changing only a word or two each time, for poetic effect. There is no attempt at rhyme and there is no set meter.
Most later poetry in Akkadian and other Mesopotamian languages follows in this same general vein of relying heavily on repetition. For instance, here are the first eight lines of the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which the Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni compiled at some point between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE, relying on and incorporating material from various older Sumerian and Babylonian poems and stories, as translated by Andrew R. George:
“He who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,
who knew . . . , was wise in all matters!
[Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country’s foundation,
[who] knew . . . , was wise in all matters!”“[He] . . . everywhere . . .
and [learnt] of everything the sum of wisdom.
He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden,
he brought back a tale of before the Deluge.”
This is very different from what I think most twenty-first-century western readers of poetry are accustomed to, but that does not mean that ancient Mesopotamian poetry is bad or inferior or “primitive” in any way; it just means that it uses different poetic tools from what modern readers have been acculturated to expect.
Personally, I actually think that this heavy use of repetition gives ancient Mesopotamian poetry a real dramatic quality that is absent in many more recent styles of poetry. In the opening lines of Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld, for instance, each time the poet says that Inanna descended to underworld, there is a sense of growing anticipation and foreboding. By repeating it so many times, the poet also really hammers home that her descent to the underworld is a big deal.
ABOVE: Detail of an impression from an Akkadian cylinder seal dating to between c. 2350 and c. 2150 BCE depicting the goddess Inanna with wings, bearing an assortment of weapons on her back, holding a flail in her left hand and a leash attached to a lion, on which she is resting her foot, in her right hand (left) and photograph of a clay tablet from the Schoyen Collection dating to between c. 1900 and c. 1700 BCE bearing the text of Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld (right)
Ancient Hebrew poetry
The main corpus of surviving ancient Hebrew poems are those that have been preserved in the Hebrew Bible. All examples below come from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)’s translation of the Masoretic Book of Psalms.
As with ancient Mesopotamian poetry, rhyme plays very little role in ancient Hebrew poetry. Instead, ancient Hebrew poetry relies primarily on parallelism and vivid imagery for poetic effect. Hebrew parallelism can be seen as closely related to the ancient Mesopotamian use of the repetition I discussed in the preceding section. There are several different major kinds of parallelism that occur in Hebrew poetry.
Synonymous parallelism is when the poet makes a statement and then repeats the same idea using different, but similar, wording. For instance, Psalm 1:1 reads:
“Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked
or take the path that sinners tread
or sit in the seat of scoffers,”
In this verse, the poet repeats essentially the same idea three times using different wording: that those who are not wicked are happy.
Synthetic parallelism is when the poet makes a statement and then completes or expands on the statement. For example, Psalm 1:4–5 reads:
“The wicked are not so
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous,”
Antithetical parallelism is when the poet makes a statement and then repeats the same idea using opposite wording. For instance, Psalm 1:6 reads (with the divine name restored):
“for Yahweh watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.”
Notice how the second statement affirms the same sentiment as the first by describing the opposite scenario.
Emblematic parallelism is when the poet describes something using a simile or metaphor and also describes the literal thing itself. For instance, Psalm 82:5 describes the deities of foreign nations as follows:
“They have neither knowledge nor understanding;
they walk around in darkness;”
The first statement describes the literal reality (that the deities of other nations are ignorant) and the second statement describes a metaphor for this reality (that the other deities are all walking around in darkness).
Climactic parallelism is when the poet makes a statement and then makes another statement that partially repeats the same thought as the previous statement, but also sums up the preceding series of statements or adds a concluding thought. For instance, Psalm 29:1 reads:
“Ascribe to Yahweh, O sons of God
ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength.”
The final line here is the example of climactic parallelism because it partially repeats and concludes the first statement.
External parallelism refers to parallelism across multiple lines of poetry, which may form a chiastic structure.
Although some early scholars who studied Hebrew poetry believed that it relied on set quantitative meter like ancient Greek and Roman poetry, it is now generally agreed among Biblical scholars that this is not the case. Ancient Hebrew poetry may rely to some extent on prosody for poetic effect, but modern understanding of ancient Hebrew prosody is partly inhibited by the limited evidence for how ancient Hebrew was pronounced when spoken aloud.
ABOVE: Photograph showing a portion of the Great Psalms Scroll or 11Q5, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in Cave 11 at Qumran, dating to between c. 30 and c. 50 CE
Ancient Greek and Roman poetry
Ancient Greek and Roman poetry operate on different rules from ancient Hebrew poetry, but rhyme still plays very little role. Instead, ancient Greek and Roman poetry rely primarily on having a set meter for poetic effect. In Ancient Greek and Latin, having a set meter is what fundamentally differentiates poetry from prose. Virtually all surviving ancient poetry in the Greek and Latin languages is composed in a set meter of some kind.
Modern metrical poetry usually depends on stressed and unstressed syllables, but ancient Greek and Roman metrical poetry is different because it depends on syllable length rather than stress. In Greek and Roman poetry, a syllable can be long by nature or by position. If a syllable has a long vowel or a diphthong, then it is long by nature. If a syllable has a short vowel followed by a cluster of two or more consonants, then it is long by position.
In Ancient Greek, the vowels eta ⟨η⟩ and omega ⟨ω⟩ are always long, the vowels epsilon ⟨ε⟩ and omicron ⟨ο⟩ are always short, and the vowels alpha ⟨α⟩, iota ⟨ι⟩, and upsilon ⟨υ⟩ can be either long or short. In modern notation, a macron or straight line (–) may be written over the vowel of a syllable to indicate that it is long and a line that curves upward at both ends (◡) may be written over the vowel of a syllable to indicate that it is short.
The most basic unit of meter is a foot, which consists of a certain number of syllables, with each syllable having a set length. There are many different kinds of feet, but here are a few examples:
- A pyrrhic or dibrach consists of two short syllables, which may be indicated as follows: ◡ ◡
- A spondee consists of two long syllables: – –
- An iamb consists of one short syllable followed by one long syllable: ◡ –
- A trochee consists of one long syllable followed by one short syllable: – ◡
- A tribrach consists of three short syllables in a row: ◡ ◡ ◡
- A molossus consists of three long syllables in a row: – – –
- A dactyl consists of one long syllable followed by two short syllables: – ◡ ◡
- An anapest consists of two short syllables followed by one long syllable: ◡ ◡ –
Each line of a metrical poem consists of a certain number of feet. For instance, if a poem is composed in trimeter, that means that each line consists of three metrical feet and, if a poem is composed in hexameter, that means that each line consists of six metrical feet.
Possibly the most common meter in Ancient Greek and Latin and the meter that is virtually always used for epic poetry is known as dactylic hexameter. Each line of dactylic hexameter consists of six feet: usually five dactyls and one spondee or trochee. If we write a – to represent a long syllable, a ◡ to represent a short syllable, and a ◡ ◡ to represent a space that may be occupied by either two short syllables or one long syllable, then the scansion for one line of dactylic hexameter may be written as follows:
| – ◡ ◡ | – ◡ ◡ | – ◡ ◡ | – ◡ ◡ | – ◡ ◡ | – ◡
This is the meter that the Iliad; the Odyssey; Hesiodos’s Theogonia and Works and Days; the Homeric Hymns; Apollonios of Rhodes’s Argonautika; Theokritos’s Idylls; Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura or On the Nature of Things; Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Lucanus’s Pharsalia; Kointos of Smyrna’s Posthomerika or The Fall of Troy; and Nonnos of Panopolis’s Dionysiaka are all composed in.
The scansion for the first seven lines of Vergil’s Aeneid may be written as follows, with slashes indicating the breaks between feet and underlined portions indicating elisions or places where the end of one word runs into the beginning of the next word as a single syllable:
“Ārmă vĭ/rūmquĕ că/nō, Trō/iaē quī / prīmŭs ăb / ōrīs
Ītălĭ/ām fā/tō prŏfŭ/gūs Lā/vīnăquĕ / vēnĭt
lītŏră / mūltum īll/e ēt tēr/rīs iāc/tātŭs ĕt / āltō
vī sŭpĕ/rūm, saē/vaē mĕmŏ/rēm Iū/nōnĭs ŏb / īrăm
mūltă quŏ/que ēt bēl/lō pās/sūs, dūm / cōndĕrĕt / ūrbĕm
īnfēr/rētquĕ dĕ/ōs Lătĭ/ō gĕnŭs / ūndĕ Lă/tīnŭm
Ālbā/nīquĕ pă/trēs āt/que āltaē / moēnĭă / Rōmaē.”
As you can see, the poem does not rhyme, but the meter is very regular and this meter is what provides the primary poetic effect.
ABOVE: Illustration from folio 14 recto of the Vergilius Romanus, an illustrated parchment codex manuscript containing the works of the Roman poet Vergil dating to the fifth century CE, depicting how the illustrator imagined Vergil himself might have looked (No one knows what he really looked like.)
Despite what I’ve said above, rhymes do show up in ancient Greek and Roman poetry on some very rare occasions, but they never occur in the form of a couplet and they normally only appear in works of poetry that are intentionally trying to sound playful.
Notably, the ancient Greek comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) occasionally uses rhymes in his comedies for comedic or playful effect. For instance, in his comedy The Frogs, which was originally performed in Athens in 405 BCE at the Lenaia festival, the enslaved character Xanthias says the following in lines 739–740:
“πῶς γὰρ οὐχὶ γεννάδας,
ὅστις γε πίνειν οἶδε καὶ βινεῖν μόνον;”
This means:
“For how is he not noble,
the sort of man who only knows how to drink and fuck?”
Notice that there is a rhyme here of the infinitive verbs πίνειν (pínein), meaning “to drink,” and βινεῖν (bineîn), meaning “to fuck.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Campanian red-figure oinochoë by the Seated Nike Painter dating to between c. 350 and c. 340 BCE depicting an actor dressed as the character Xanthias in a performance of Aristophanes’s Frogs, now held in the British Museum in London
Ancient and early medieval Germanic poetry
Ancient and early medieval poets composing in Germanic languages did not rely as heavily on set meter as ancient Greek and Roman poets did. Instead, they composed in what is known as alliterative verse, which receives its name from the fact that it uses alliteration, rather than rhyme, as its primary poetic device. Alliteration is when a series of words have the same sound at the beginning. Examples of alliteration includes phrases such as “angry alligator,” “bumble bee,” “big bad,” “cabbages cannibalizing cows,” and so on.
Generally speaking, in Germanic alliterative verse, each line is divided into two half lines known as verses, hemistichs, or distichs, which are separated by a heavy pause known as a caesura. The first hemistich in a line is sometimes known as the “a-verse” and the second is sometimes known as the “b-verse.” Each hemistich usually contains two highly stressed syllables, which are known as “beats” or “lifts.”
The first lift of the a-verse nearly always alliterates with the first lift of the b-verse. The second lift of the a-verse often either alliterates with the first lifts of both verses or with the second lift of the b-verse. The second lift of the b-verse usually does not alliterate with the first lift of either verse.
For example, the following are the first eleven lines of Beowulf, an epic poem mostly composed in the West Saxon dialect of Old English at some point between c. 700 and c. 1000 CE that is probably the most famous work of alliterative verse today, with the alliterating words in each line underlined and the caesuras marked with two vertical lines (||):
“Hwæt wē Gār–Dena || in geār–dagum,
þēod-cyninga || þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas || ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing || sceaþena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgþum, || meodo-setla oftēah;
egsode Eorle, || syððan ǣrest wearð
fēasceaft funden; || hē þæs frōfre gebād:
wēox under wolcnum, || weorð-myndum þāh,
oðþæt him ǣghwylc || þāra ymb-sittendra
ofer hron-rade || hȳran scolde,
gomban gyldan: || þæt wæs gōd cyning!”
As you can see, there’s no rhyme here, but there is quite a lot of alliteration!
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the first folio of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, perhaps the most famous Germanic poem in alliterative verse, in Cotton MS Vitellius A XV f. 132r
The vast majority of ancient and early medieval poetry in Germanic languages is in alliterative verse, rather than rhyming verse. There is, however, one surviving early medieval poem in Old English that is entirely composed in rhyming couplets. This feature of the poem is so unusual and so extraordinary that the poem itself is known today as “The Rhyming Poem.”
The poem is eighty-seven lines long and is found in the Exeter Book, a collection of poems in Old English that was compiled in the late tenth century CE, on folios 94r-95v. Based on the date of the manuscript, the poem itself must date no later than the tenth century CE.
Like the much more common alliterative poems in Old English, each line of “The Rhyming Poem” is divided into two hemistichs with a heavy pause or caesura between them. Remarkably, the end of each hemistich rhymes with the other hemistich in the line as well as the end of each hemistich in the previous or following line. Here are the first ten lines of “The Rhyming Poem” with the rhyming portions underlined to illustrate:
“Me līfes onlāh || se þis lēoht onwrāh,
ond þæt torhte getēoh, || tillīce onwrāh.
Glæd wæs ic glīwum, || glenged hīwum,
blissa blēoum, || blōstma hīwum.
Secgas mec sēgon, || symbel ne alēgon,
feorhgiefe gefēgon; || frætwed wǣgon
wicg ofer wongum || wennan gongum,
lisse mid longum || lēoma gehongum.
Þā wæs wæstmum aweaht, || world onspreht,
under roderum areaht, || rǣdmægne oferþeaht.”
This virtually unique example of early medieval Old English rhyming verse prefigures the later much more extensive use of rhyme that would take over during the Middle English period.
ABOVE: Photograph from this article in The Guardian showing the Exeter Book, which contains “The Rhyming Poem,” a unique poem in Old English that is composed entirely in rhyming couplets
Excellent article, as usual! As a big fan of premodern poetry, as well as someone who has dabbled in metrical poetry myself, this article was really interesting! I knew most of the things within the article (except about Sumerian/Akkadian poetry), but reading them in your accessible and interesting style is always a treat.
I’d just like to post a small correction about the Germanic allitterative verse. You didn’t mark properly the allitterations in this verse:
> egsode eorle, siþþan ǣrest wearþ
Thing is, if a word starts with a vowel, then, in order for it to allitterate, there just needs to be another vowel in its place. So ‘ǣrest’ is allitterating too. I think that later (mostly Norse) poems sometimes stive to always allitterate with the same vowel, but it’s a later development (kinda like how Nonnos always makes long feet and stress coincide in his poems). But in ‘classical’ Germanic poetry, a word starting with a vowel is thought of starting with a ‘null consonant’, so it allitterates with other such null consonants.
As a curiosity, you could also point out that Icelandic literature still uses the allitterative verse, which has been displaced in all other Germanic poetic traditions. This is probably due to the insularity of Iceland.
My compliments for knowing about the Rhyming Poem, that’s pretty obscure ^W^
Thank you so much for the correction and I apologize for my error! I have now emended my underlining to show that ǣrest is also alliterating.
I did not know that Icelandic literature still uses alliterating verse, although I am not surprised, since I know that the Icelandic language and Icelandic literary culture are both very conservative and that the language has preserved many features of Old Norse that other languages have not.
For example, unlike most if not all living Germanic languages (which are all descended from Proto-Germanic), Icelandic still has case endings on all the nouns.
You defiantly made me realize the rhyming in English poetry was only something to become only more popular in the Middle Ages. I personally like to listen to Middle English poetry sometimes myself, mostly because unlike Old English I can still somewhat understand it and I find pre-Great Vowel Shift pronunciation fascinating.
Fun fact: There exists a Germanic language called Scots that evolved directly from Middle English and still retains many of its features and pronunciation of words that has since became lost or changed in Modern English. If you want an idea of what Scots sounds like, here’s a translation of it of a children’s book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2qmm9o77NU
It is surprising that many Anglophones would believe that ancient poetry must rhyme, considering the importance of Shakespeare in English literature. Learning about ancient poetry is always interesting, but I wonder if there is any translator who has tried to recreate the original metre of the Iliad and Odyssey in English? From what I have heard Pope rhymed, and the Wilson translation is in pentameter. As for alliterative verse, I (and I would think many others) learned of that from Tolkien: “We heard of the horns in the hills ringing/ the swords shining in the South-kingdom”
Alexander Pope rendered the Homeric epics in so-called “heroic couplets” (i.e., rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter). Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and her forthcoming translation of the Iliad are both in blank verse (i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter).
I’m not aware of any translator who has ever tried to exactly replicate the original dactylic hexameter of the Homeric epics in English. This is mostly due to the fact that it is really difficult to make dactylic hexameter work in English. Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of the Iliad and his 1967 translation of the Odyssey probably come the closest to replicating the original Homeric meter in English, but even Lattimore does not try to compose in actual dactylic hexameter, opting instead for what the classicist Peter Green has called a “loose quasi-hexametrical line.”
As someone who, as I said above, loves writing in metrical verses, in both English and Italian, I was surprised by the different connotation that the iambic/trochaic meter (that is, one stressed syllable every two), and the anapestic/dactylic meter (one stress every three syllables) have in Italian and English.
In English, as you said, having one stressed syllable every three is very difficult to pull off, and thus this meter, excluding experiments such as ‘Evangeline’, is mostly used for ‘silly’ poems such as limericks. Dr Seuss used them quite a lot. In general, this cadence has a very playful connotation in English. In Italian, however, it’s much easier to pull off (Italian words tend to be longer than English ones by about a syllable), and thus it’s used a lot in war epics and the likes (such as in ‘s’ode a DEStra uno SQUILlo di TROMba’, a very famous verse).
In Italian, verses using one stress every two are usually used in nursery rhymes and the like (example: ‘SOTto il PONte DI baRACca’), and only in the past in anything serious, and rarely. At most, they are now used in rap music. On the other hand, they are THE ‘noble’ verse in English, probably because it’s very easy to end up with such a stress pattern.
Hopefully this comment isn’t too out-of-topic or boring, I just thought it would be interesting to share the point of view of someone who still uses some old-fashioned meters.
(Due to my limited knowledge of Latin, I only was able to compose a couple lines in that language, with mixed results, as I showed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/ue0g39/i_did_a_silly_drawing_depicting_a_friend_of_mine/ )
I don’t think your comment is off-topic or boring at all! You’ve actually just made a really interesting point.
Much of what you say about Italian is also applicable to Ancient Greek and Latin. In Ancient Greek and Latin, the iambic meter is most commonly associated with the poetic genre known as iambos, which is primarily defined by its informality, scurrilousness, and its extensive use of flagrant obscenity and insults. Two of the best-known iambic poets who composed in Ancient Greek are Archilochos of Paros and Hipponax of Ephesos. As I previously discussed in my post last year about ancient Greek swear words, Hipponax is perhaps best known for his rigorously obscene and scatological insults, such as “κατωμόχανος” in Fragment 28 (which means “a man who has been fucked in the ass so many times that his asshole gapes all the way to his shoulders”), “μητροκοίτης” in Fragment 12 (which means “mother-bedder” or “mother-fucker”), “βολβίτου κασιγνήτην” in Fragment 144 (which means “sister of cowshit”). Meanwhile, as I have mentioned above, in Ancient Greek and Latin, the dactylic hexameter is generally the most serious of all meters and it is the standard meter for all epic poetry and poetry about mythic heroes more generally.
In Modern English, as you have pointed out, things are generally the opposite. Iambic pentameter is generally best known as the meter that is used for works of great literature, such as William Shakespeare’s tragic monologues and soliloquys and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Meanwhile, the dactylic meter is rarely used and the anapestic meter is mostly used for limericks and other silly or scurrilous poems.
Now, I do wonder… Do hexameters employing mostly spondees sound more vulgar and unrefined in the Greco-Roman poetic tradition?
Thank you, that is interesting! As you say, it is very difficult to make it work in English. In my language, Swedish, most translations of Homer have been in a sort of hexameter with six feet which can be either dactyls or trochees (based on stress rather than length). That is of course due to the difference between languages, for instance iambic pentameter which is so common in English is rather difficult for Swedish translators
This seems to be something of a running theme.
What seems to be a running theme?
I knew about alliterative verse because of Tolkien, too, but it took me some time to understand the concept, because I was reading about it in Spanish, a very inadequate language to compose alliterative poems (I don’t know any examples). Tolkien also attempted to write large-scale epic poems in Modern English using it, The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Arthur, but he could never finish them.
Maybe I won’t bore you to death if I tell you about some Spanish versions of classical and medieval poetry. The best translation of Beowulf into Spanish is probably the one by Jesús Lerate and Luis Lerate, which carefully imitates the original rhythm, but without preserving the alliterations (Luis Lerate has also translated the Elder Edda using the same scheme, as well as other old Germanic poems). Regarding Greek epics, Homeric poems have many different Spanish versions, usually in prose, in hendecasyllables (which has a status in Spanish poetry comparable to that of the hexameter for the Greeks and Romans), or combining hendecasyllables with heptasyllables (a very common choice in Spanish classical poetry). J. M. Pabón (1892-1978) made a good job with his translation of the Odyssey, published after his death. He attempted to get closer to Homer than his predecessors, and adapted his hexameter into a pentameter, consisting of four dactyls and one spondee (defined on stress rather than length), and adding one or two optional anacrusic syllables. Here are the first three lines (each using both anacrusic syllables):
Musa, dime del hábil varón que en su largo extravío,
tras haber arrasado el alcázar sagrado de Troya,
conoció las ciudades y el genio de innúmeras gentes.
This idea was picked up by Manuel Fernández-Galiano to adapt the hexameter in an elegiac couplet when translating Hellenistic epigrams. I give one of them as an example (Anth. Pal. 7.80, by Kallimachos):
Alguien contome tu muerte, Heraclito, y mi llanto
provocó; recordé cuántas veces ponerse
el sol vimos charlando. Y ahora, ya no eres, amigo
de Halicarnaso, sino vieja ceniza, pero
vivirá el ruiseñor de tus cantos y nunca su mano
pondrá en ellos Hades, que todo lo arrebata.
You can observe as well the caesura in the even lines (recordé || cuántas; sino || vieja; Hades, || que), adapting the pentameters. He used similar methods when translating Horace’s Odes and Epodes. I know that some other translators dislike this approach, deeming it too artificial and strange to Spanish (in the broader sense) readers, but I couldn’t resist to try it myself with some Martial epigrams. M. Fernández-Galiano made a more traditional choice with his translation of Lycophron’s Alexandra in well-suited alexandrines. Fortunately he provided a prose paraphrase of that famously obscure poem as well.
I am the furthest thing from an expert on poetry, but it seems to me that the phonology and morphology of English specifically make rhymes work well in that language. The fact that English is stress-timed produces a pleasant effect when the final stressed syllables of lines rhyme. This effect doesn’t work in Japanese, a mora-timed language. And rhyme would be pretty boring in a language with highly regular word endings.
I think you are right! It’s also worth pointing out that Ancient Greek and Latin were both mora-timed languages, at least insofar as their poetry is concerned, and the kind of strict meter system based on syllable length rather than stress that ancient Greek and Roman poets used regularly doesn’t really work in a stress-timed language like English.
The only example of ancient poetry rhythming is this excerpt from the Classic of Poetry, a collection of ancient Chinese poems composed in the Zhou dynasty. You can check out what I’m talking about here (time stamp 2:30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyaFKnUumAM
Keep in mind though that the following is a reconstruction of what Old Chinese probably sounded like based off the work of ancient linguists who study these texts, like most ancient languages which were spoken long before the invention of devices which recorded sound, we’re not completely sure what they sounded like. Be it as it may, while I’m a native English speaker who doesn’t understand Old Chinese (let alone Modern varieties like Mandarin), I don’t exactly need to in order to know the words at the end of the lines have rhyming meter to it.
That’s really interesting! I actually was not aware of the rhyming poem in ancient Chinese that you’ve mentioned here. Sadly, I don’t know much about the standards and conventions of ancient Chinese poetry or ancient East Asian poetry more generally, which is the reason why I have not discussed those poetries in this post.
Thanks for the cool article! I would add that rhyming couplets were common in high medieval *French* poetry(see Marie de France or Chretien de Troyes, for example), and I assume that’s where Middle English picked it up from, though I’m not sure if that’s the expert consensus.
Thank you for your post! Sumerian poetry sounds really strange for modern readers. The only text of our time I can think of that bears a resemblance to it is this one:
“And the Lord spake, saying, ‘First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.’”
And now for something completely serious. How many of those ancient literatures wrote their poetry breaking lines apart in the same way as we do today?
Generally speaking, in the ancient Mediterranean world, people did not separate the lines when they wrote poetry, but instead wrote everything continuously, only moving to a new line of text once they ran out of space, the same way we write prose. They didn’t have lower-cased letters either and most of the time they didn’t have any kind of punctuation or even spaces between words. People generally wrote scripta continua.
At least in ancient Greece and Rome, though, people did distinguish lines of poetry, even though they generally did not separate the lines out when they wrote them.
Very good points. It’s a trap I’ve seen sometimes, too often.
I remember a teacher repeatedly reminding English Literature students that poetry does not have to rhyme. Unfortunately, it never sunk in.