Page 18 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose

Notes considerable number of writings of generally similar style and purpose. He became thus in a way
the eponymous hero of popular political and theological discussion of the times. But that the three
versions of the poem known as Piers Plowman were the work of a school of popular alliterative
poets, writing perhaps under the direct inspiration of Langland very much as Wiclif’s poor priests
preached and taught under the leadership of their master, though not inherently impossible,
seems on the ground of the evidence less probable than that Langland himself revised and enlarged
his own work. Whether the poem be regarded as the work of one or of several authors, however,
the significant point is that the three versions exemplify a homogeneous and fully thought out
method of literary expression.
Both the similarities and the differences of Piers Plowman as compared with the writings of Chaucer
are significant. Like Chaucer, Langland accepted verse unquestioningly as the proper medium of
literary expression and for general, popular appeal. He viewed life at a different angle from the
courtly Chaucer, but he also in his degree was a literary artist, and in his art, the child of his own
generation. Both poets used the standard literary speech of their day, for Chaucer’s style was not
pedantically learned, nor was Langland’s extravagantly archaic or popular. The most striking
characteristic of Langland which distinguishes him from Chaucer, the characteristic also which
connects him directly with the study of the origins of English prose, is his use of metrical form.
Chaucer wrote in the strictly regulated meter of numbered syllables and of rime which English
borrowed from French and which the traditions of English poetry have established as the prevailing
English meter. But Langland followed a different and native style of metrical composition, moribund
but temporarily revived in his day and effectively employed by a number of different poets. This
was the alliterative long line which came by direct descent from the Old English line of Cdmon
F
and Cynewulf. It differs from the Old English line, however, in that the latter, in standard Old
English poetry, is maintained more rigorously and in accordance with the rules of a more narrowly
defined metrical system than in Langland’s long line. With the later poet, we observe clearly the
operation of that breaking down tendency which led ultimately to a complete loss of feeling for
the alliterative long line as in any way a metrical form distinguished from prose. Even in the latter
part of the Old English period, the pure tradition of Old English versification was not maintained,
and E lfric , in many respects possessed of a fine literary feeling, was guilty of a kind of prose
poetry compounded of legitimate prose and degenerate Old English verse. With the obscuring
and loss of native customs in general which attended the Danish and Norman conquests, the strict
system of Old English meter disappeared, never again to be restored in the practice of English
poetry. At no time, however, did the composition of alliterative English verse cease altogether.
Side by side with the regular meter of Romance origin, which took upon itself the character of the
standard literary meter, a corrupted form of the older alliterative long line continued to be used,
especially as the meter appropriate to popular and patriotic writing. This popular alliterative
meter was cultivated, at least in one or two regions of England, with special enthusiasm in
Langland’s own day, as evidenced not only by Langland’s preference for it, but also by the
writings of his contemporary, the unknown but highly accomplished author of Sir Gawayne and the
Green Knight and other poems.
Structurally the old alliterative long line consisted of two approximately equal half-lines, each
with its own independent scansion, which were held together as one line by the possession of a
common alliterating sound. Each half-line contained two metrically stressed syllables, sometimes
also a third secondarily stressed syllable, and a varying but on the whole rather narrowly limited
number of unstressed syllables, the two kinds of syllables being arranged according to a small
number of fixed patterns. The alliterating sounds were always the initial sounds of metrically
stressed syllables, which at the same time must also bear a logical stress, and each half-line
contained at least one, though either or both might contain two. Alliteration other than that
between metrically stressed syllables did not count in the metrical scheme, and where it occurs is

12 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY