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Scott Moncrieff, who was also called to task for his excessive archaism, produced a stricter imitation (or meant to – his practice was not always up to it) in what he described as ‘the sort of lines that an Englishman of the Heptarchy would recognize as metrical’: From many meinies their mead-stools tore. (l. 5.) But Gavin Bone fairly characterized his metric as ‘barbarous and strange’, and ‘he will not budge a quarter of an inch to be intelligible’! The more moderate and scholarly Gummere fared little better: of his translation, using ‘a rhythmic movement which fairly represents the old verse’ – For he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve (l. 8.) – W.J. Sedgefield wrote1 that it confused main and secondary stresses, was full of ‘impossible’ metrical forms, was distorted in vocabulary because of the necessity to alliterate, and ‘it seems a pity to devote so much time and labour to what is after all a pis aller’! Nor did the more recent imitative attempt of Kennedy escape: reviewing its alliterative measure – A baleful glare from his eyes was gleaming (l. 726.) – G.N. Garmonsway declared roundly2 that ‘it is difficult to assess Kennedy’s version, when first one has to dislodge the conviction that alliterative verse is no medium to use in re-creating the poem for modern ears’. This is downright enough, and the translations criticized do not in fact give a very close equivalent of the subtlety and flexibility of the Anglo-Saxon rhythms; yet defence of imitative measures has never been lacking. Wackerbarth’s remarks written in 1849 have already been quoted. In 1898 we find a most interesting and prophetically confident statement being made by Edward Fulton in an article ‘On Translating Anglo-Saxon Poetry’:3 ‘What 1 Englische Studien, Vol. XLI (1910), p. 402 f. 2 The Year’s Work in English Studies, Vol. XXI (1940), p. 34. 3 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XIII (1898), p. 286 f. xxii

we want,’ says Fulton, ‘and there seems to be no reason why we should not get it, is an adaptation of the English, irregular, fouraccent measure sufficiently like the Anglo-Saxon line to suggest it at once and inevitably, yet not so unlike the English line as to sound strange to the modern ear.’ These hopes were certainly premature, and in the quarter-century following Fulton’s remarks any attempts at a stress metre were bound to be up against the obstinately syllabic tradition of contemporary verse writing, and in the latter part of that period against the new practice of the Imagists’ vers libre, differently but equally unsympathetic. But in the twenties and thirties this situation changed. Partly as a reaction against excessive verslibrism, partly as an attempt to combine natural speech-rhythms with a feeling of pattern, partly as an acknowledgement of the delayedaction revolt of Hopkins, and partly from a generally renewed interest in Old and Middle English non-syllabic poetry, verse whose basis was the stress rather than the syllable came increasingly to be experimented with, often involving alliteration and sometimes rhyme. These experiments have continued up to the present time and include (as I shall show) some well-known and highly successful examples of modern verse in every mood from the farcical to the tragical; now therefore constituting for the first time an argument in favour of imitative metre that must be taken seriously: the argument that readers of verse are no longer unfamiliar with the characteristic effects of accentual writing, and no longer demand at the back of their lines ‘the faint click of a metronome’.1 The trend from syllabic to accentual, already apparent in Hopkins and Bridges, was remarked on by C.S. Lewis in an interesting essay in Rehabilitations (1939) on ‘The Alliterative Metre’, where he said: ‘In the general reaction which has set in against the long reign of foreign, syllabic metres in English, it is a little remarkable that few have yet suggested a return to our own ancient system, the alliterative line. Mr Auden, however, has revived some of its stylistic features . . . Alliteration is no more the whole secret of this verse than rhyme is the whole secret of syllabic verse. It has, in addition, a metrical structure, which could stand alone, and which would then be to this system as blank verse is to the syllabic.’ Although it is true 1 P.F. Baum, ‘The Character of Anglo-Saxon Verse’, Modern Philology, Vol. XXVIII (1930), p. 143 f. xxiii

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Scott Moncrieff, who was also called to task for his excessive archaism, produced a stricter imitation (or meant to – his practice was not always up to it) in what he described as ‘the sort of lines that an Englishman of the Heptarchy would recognize as metrical’:

From many meinies their mead-stools tore. (l. 5.)

But Gavin Bone fairly characterized his metric as ‘barbarous and strange’, and ‘he will not budge a quarter of an inch to be intelligible’! The more moderate and scholarly Gummere fared little better: of his translation, using ‘a rhythmic movement which fairly represents the old verse’ –

For he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve (l. 8.)

– W.J. Sedgefield wrote1 that it confused main and secondary stresses, was full of ‘impossible’ metrical forms, was distorted in vocabulary because of the necessity to alliterate, and ‘it seems a pity to devote so much time and labour to what is after all a pis aller’! Nor did the more recent imitative attempt of Kennedy escape: reviewing its alliterative measure –

A baleful glare from his eyes was gleaming (l. 726.)

– G.N. Garmonsway declared roundly2 that ‘it is difficult to assess Kennedy’s version, when first one has to dislodge the conviction that alliterative verse is no medium to use in re-creating the poem for modern ears’. This is downright enough, and the translations criticized do not in fact give a very close equivalent of the subtlety and flexibility of the Anglo-Saxon rhythms; yet defence of imitative measures has never been lacking. Wackerbarth’s remarks written in 1849 have already been quoted. In 1898 we find a most interesting and prophetically confident statement being made by Edward Fulton in an article ‘On Translating Anglo-Saxon Poetry’:3 ‘What

1 Englische Studien, Vol. XLI (1910), p. 402 f. 2 The Year’s Work in English Studies, Vol. XXI (1940), p. 34. 3 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. XIII (1898), p. 286 f.

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