from Medieval Academy News

Other Formats, Other Media
by Mary-Jo Arn

“The Poetics of Alliteration,” by Alan Gaylord, is an interesting publication. Like the short documentary film, it seems at first to present generic problems, consisting as it does of a forty-six-page paperbound monograph/article accompanied by a compact disk in a jewel case. When I received it, I wondered what exactly it was.

Slightly perplexed, I began by listening to the disk, not having opened the libellus. What I heard was the author reading a series of passages of poetry (in Old, Middle, and modern English) clearly and deliberately, with little introduction besides the title of the work and identification of the speaker. A trained singer and an accomplished reader, Gaylord can convey with his voice a variety of styles in Old and Middle English without sounding as if he were trying to speak a foreign language (his Middle English is far easier to understand than that of many a conference speaker). Christ at the gates of Hell sounds very different from his Sir Gawain or his “lyrics lightly lilting.” The goal, however, is not dramatic reading, but reading that demonstrates the way the poetic mechanism of each poem differs from that of others.

The disk contains a substantial selection of poetry, including all or part of “Cædmon’s Hymn,” Widsith, Beowulf, Wynnere and Wastoure, Sir Gawain, Pearl, Piers Plowman, “A Bird in Bishopswood,” “The Blacksmiths,” “Alysoun,” “Spring,” and “Nou Is Tyme to Take My Leve,” and culminating in passages from the mystery plays from York and Chester. In addition to the medieval poetry, Gaylord opens with a fragment of a powerful but little-known poem by Richard Eberhart titled “Brotherhood of Men,” and includes as well Richard Wilbur’s deceptively playful “Junk.”

The readings are neither “creative anachronism” nor entertainment. The quality of the aural presentation is important because what you hear provides the basic material of the analysis and discussion you read, which (though disarmingly, charmingly eloquent) is both serious and acutely attentive. The printed text is at the same time a brief history of a poetic technique and a close look at precisely what alliteration does or can (or can’t) do, and in what ways it matters to the goal of the poetry under discussion.

The very subject of “poetics” in the sense in which Gaylord is using it is seldom addressed by scholars (and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics admits that the study of prosody is even now “in a nascent stage”). Very few people have ever written about “aural prosody,” though I suspect that many literature teachers use some semi-consciously cobbled-together form of it in the classroom. This is a modest production by a literary scholar—Gaylord suggests taking it as “a Prolegomenon to a Poetics”—but it presents a refreshingly open invitation to an intellectual discussion that has been lying fallow for some decades about how poetry (any poetry) works.

The paper half of the publication is a subsidium of Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999), the publication of the Southeastern Medieval Association, and began life as a plenary address at the 1998 SEMA conference; the disk is Chaucer Studio: Occasional Readings 26. SEMA and the Chaucer Studio are the joint publishers; both publications are available for $15 from The Chaucer Studio. Contact: Paul R. Thomas, Dept. of English, Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT 84602-6218 (paul_thomas@byu.edu).