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realistic speech with just sufficient form to make non-prose effects possible when the playwright may want them. This success, and the acceptability of the play on the stage, argue strongly for the investigation and development of the accentual metres. The playgoer will also find that the tangential and apparently ungirdable ebullience of Christopher Fry is often, and often at his best moments, formal enough in a stress category though seldom in a syllabic. The author’s rather disarming statement in his Foreword to The Lady’s Not For Burning (1949), that ‘every man is free to think of the writing as verse, or sliced prose, or as a bastard offspring of the two’, has to be placed, for truth’s sake, against poetically charged passages in the play which use a very respectable 4-stress line – The night-wind passed me, like a sail across A blind man’s eye. There it is, The interminable tumbling of the great grey Main of moonlight, washing over The little oyster-shell of this month of April: Among the raven-quills of the shadows And on the white pillows of men asleep: The night’s a pale pastureland of peace, And something condones the world, incorrigibly . . . – or against the satisfying accentual swing of lines like Hammering the door and yelling like a slaughter-house and: I’d as soon kiss the bottom of a Barbary ape. In poetry itself; since the second world war, we have two outstanding experiments in stress and alliterative metre, both of which are for different reasons highly relevant to any modern poet’s task of translating from Old English. W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, a ‘baroque eclogue’ (of about the length of Beowulf ) on the state of man in a twentieth-century society at war, is written for the most part in an Anglo-Saxon metre with careful alliteration; it uses a very wide vocabulary, and the technical skill involved is virtuosic. xxvi
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Richard Eberhart’s Brotherhood of Men also deals with anxiety and the twentieth century, but is a narrative poem of Corregidor and Bataan and the American war in the Pacific, of some 300 lines, in Anglo-Saxon metre but with sporadic and irregular alliteration. There are instructive differences between the two poems. Technically, The Age of Anxiety gives the impression of being streamlined; its lines are shorter, less rough, less willing to risk the overloading of secondary stresses. Its regular alliteration is a part of that streamlining, but it is less functional than that of the Eberhart poem, since its use is automatic and since the alliterative letter is often concealed in the interior of a word (skipping the prefix: as when ‘foresees’ alliterates with ‘slaves’, ‘pinch’ with ‘deprived’). The employment of continuous alliteration, in fact, proves as distracting to both poet and reader as that of occasional alliteration is stimulating. The technical strain imposed on the poet is not outrageous in itself, but the effort, in the absence of such a tradition of writing, is an unfamiliar and (one feels) unnecessary handicap which results in a tour de force; the position is paralleled by the strain shown in Old English poets when they try to use regular rhyme, technically feasible in Anglo-Saxon but alien to their tradition. It is fair, I think, to say that Auden’s technical preoccupations in this poem, brilliant though the result is, have prevented it from achieving the proper fullness of emotional effect. But it must also be pointed out that Eberhart’s task was easier and more straightforward, in a relatively short and narrative poem dealing with a physical situation. Brother hood of Men is precisely right in its adaptation of the old alliterative metre to the uses of a modern heroic lay. The line is longer than the Old English line, which is as it should be, in accordance with the changes in the language; alliteration is used side by side with assonances and rhymes and echoes of various kinds, and also with plain lines whose sometimes strongly moving effect comes only from the ‘meaning’ and the rhythm and from contrast with the alliterative passages (as for example the poem’s last line, quoted below); and the appearance of ‘heavy’ or harshly stressed lines like ‘Played opossum to the enemy’s piercing examinations (lines impossible in Auden’s scheme) is contextually justified – justified because the present-day reader who knows that he is not here reading syllabic verse is willing and able to make whatever accommodation his personal love of regularity requires and still find the driving 4-beat measure. xxvii

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realistic speech with just sufficient form to make non-prose effects possible when the playwright may want them. This success, and the acceptability of the play on the stage, argue strongly for the investigation and development of the accentual metres.

The playgoer will also find that the tangential and apparently ungirdable ebullience of Christopher Fry is often, and often at his best moments, formal enough in a stress category though seldom in a syllabic. The author’s rather disarming statement in his Foreword to The Lady’s Not For Burning (1949), that ‘every man is free to think of the writing as verse, or sliced prose, or as a bastard offspring of the two’, has to be placed, for truth’s sake, against poetically charged passages in the play which use a very respectable 4-stress line –

The night-wind passed me, like a sail across A blind man’s eye. There it is, The interminable tumbling of the great grey Main of moonlight, washing over The little oyster-shell of this month of April: Among the raven-quills of the shadows And on the white pillows of men asleep: The night’s a pale pastureland of peace, And something condones the world, incorrigibly . . .

– or against the satisfying accentual swing of lines like

Hammering the door and yelling like a slaughter-house and:

I’d as soon kiss the bottom of a Barbary ape.

In poetry itself; since the second world war, we have two outstanding experiments in stress and alliterative metre, both of which are for different reasons highly relevant to any modern poet’s task of translating from Old English. W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, a ‘baroque eclogue’ (of about the length of Beowulf ) on the state of man in a twentieth-century society at war, is written for the most part in an Anglo-Saxon metre with careful alliteration; it uses a very wide vocabulary, and the technical skill involved is virtuosic.

xxvi

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