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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1903 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024

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I'm not the only one who loathes old English poetry, right? Chaucer is great, Shakespeare is great... and then it's about two and a half centuries until you reach something enjoyable again. Awkwardly mythology references, cloying saccharine language, each stanza flowing out like a nursery rhyme and resolving itself in that lame self-satisfied way, with an aftertaste like stale bread. It is a wonder that they who read the King James Bible produced it.

Did you read the contest review for The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet’s Craft Book? It was my favorite of the entries.

You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each century, going back until you can’t easily understand the English anymore, and find in the 16th century such poems as John Skelton’s “Speke, Parott” [sic]:

My name is Parrot, a byrd of Paradyse,
By Nature devised of a wonderowus kynde,
Deyntely dyeted with dyvers dylycate spyce,
Tyl Euphrates, that flode, dryveth me into Inde;
Where men of that countrey by fortune me fynde,
And send me to greate ladyes of estate;
Then Parot must have an almon or a date.

Moving forward into the 17th century in search of poems that spell their subject matter consistently, you might come across John Donne’s “A Hymn to God the Father”:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done; I fear no more.

Moving forward with a bit more confidence, now that English has had a bit more time to settle on its modern form, you find in the 18th century Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”;

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

By now, the patterns to this ‘poetry’ thing are becoming pretty clear, but a little stale; there’s only so many one- and two-syllable rhymes available, and only so many times you can hear the word ‘yearn’ rhymed with ‘burn’ before you’re wishing for something a little more exciting…

Poetry makes it into the Western canon through some combination of novelty and technical prowess. We study things for the latter, but we read them for the former. Worse, the more technically impressive something gets, the easier it is to copy and to inform newer, more capable successors. I suspect the works you find most cloying are ones which were considered technical successes at the time.

I dislike a lot of English poetry. I find Keats the worst of the worst, with his constant poetic contractions, tangled meter (what did you need there's "o'er"s and "rous'd"s for, Johnny, if your verse doesn't flow anyway?) and, like you've written, superfluous mythology references.

Chaucer is Middle English. Old English is Beowulf. Gawain and the Green Knight isn't bad, neither is Piers Plowman.

I said old, not Old.

Out of curiosity, what do you find interesting after having slogged through those two and a half centuries?

Which time period are you talking about (I don't think you actually mean Old English)? After Shakespeare you've got Donne, Milton, Pope, Burns, and then the Romantics (who I think need no defense). I don't think there's really a time period without a great poet.

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