Word order in a poem

Poetic Style

Almost all surviving Old English poetry is
alliterative, meaning it creates rhythm using a pattern of
stressed syllables that begin with the same sound.
To adhere to the alliteration and meter, word order is often more fluid in poetry compared to prose
and poets employ a number of rhetorical
devices such as appositives:
repitition of identity using a different phrase;
and kennings: compound words which use figurative language to describe an object.
These can make sentence structures confusing if you are unfamiliar with them so we will cover them here.

Also, it is worth noting that although Old English poetry is written identically to prose in
manuscripts,
editors often break poetry into lines and half-lines to make it easier for a modern reader — who may be
unfamiliar with the meter — to understand. So while the opening to Beowulf looks like this in the
manuscript:

Modern editions of the poem often break up the text to look like this:

To understand why, we need to examine the meter of Old English verse. It is important to remember that
Old English poetry is generally agreed to be composed for oral recitation, rather than simply to be
read.

Alliteration and Stress

Alliteration is the repetition of a sound at the beginning of a syllable and stress is
the emphasis placed on a syllable. The primary stress generally falls on the first syllable of a word, unless it starts with a
prefix like ‘ge‘, as prefixes are always unstressed.
A line of poetry in Old English consists of two half-lines seperated by a natural pause known as a
caesura, and each half-line has two stressed
syllables.

The first
heavily stressed syllable in the first half-line alliterates with the first heavily stressed syllable of
the second half-line. Unaccented syllables are irrelevant to the metrical pattern. For example,
in the line: ‘Oft him anhaga are gebideð — Often the loner finds grace for himself‘, ‘oft — often‘,
‘anhaga — loner‘ and ‘are — grace‘ alliterate and there is a short pause between
‘anhaga‘ and ‘are‘.

As can be seen above, alliteration is based on sound, not letter.
Vowels and diphthongs alliterate with each other. So stressed syllables
beginning in ‘o‘, like ‘oft‘ can alliterate with stressed syllables beginning
with any other vowel, like ‘anhaga‘.
However consonant clusters alliterate only with
themselves.
For example, ‘sp-‘, ‘st-‘
or ‘sc-‘ alliterate only
with another syllable beginning with ‘sp-‘, ‘st-‘
or ‘sc-‘. They do not alliterate with each other or other words beginning with
‘s-‘.

Because alliteration and meter are integral to surviving Old English verse, it can explain some
awkward or strange sentences you run across. However, there are some other features you should be aware
of.

Kennings and Appositives

Kennings are compound words which use more figurative language in place of nouns. For
example, referring to blood as
‘heaþoswata —
battle sweat‘
or referring to the sky as ‘heofones hwealf — heaven’s vault‘. By substituting nouns with more
figurative language, poets increased the number of words that could be used to alliterate.
Also, the fact they are compound words lends itself to the rhythms of Old English meter.

Appositives are nouns or noun phrases that follow or come before a noun, and specify
who or what
something is. For example, ‘Him se yldesta andswarode,
werodes wisa, word-hord onleac — To him the senior one answered, leader of the troop,
unlocked his word-hoard‘. The phrases ‘the senior one’ and ‘leader of the troop’ both refer to
the same subject — in this case Beowulf — even though they
are separated by the verb. This kind of variation is a common feature of oral poetry but can
read awkwardly to a modern English reader. You can find an example of kennings and appositives in the
below excerpt from Beowulf: ‘Hæfde se goda Geata leoda
cempan gecorone þara þe he cenoste
findan mihte fiftyna sum
sundwudu sohte secg wisade
lagucræftig mon landgemyrcu —
The worthy one had, from the Geatish peoples, chosen champions, those who were the boldest he could
find;
fifteen together, they sought the sea-wood, he led the warriors, that sea-skilled man, to the
boundary of the shore‘.

While the other rules of word order still generally apply to poetry, word order is often more fluid
in order to conform to the stylistic features found in surviving Old English
verse, so it is important to be aware of them.

Return to Prose Style

Continue to Syntax
Overview

Poetry has licence to manipulate ‘reality’ (for example in metaphor or allegory) and also to distort language into artificial and deliberate patterns which you would be much less likely to find in everyday speech.  This is the origin of the idea of ‘poetic licence’.  One of poetry’s licences is its licence to vary the expected or conventional order of words in a sentence, without these unusual orders being considered ‘wrong’ or ‘ungrammatical’.

Gregory Roscow (in his great book, Syntax and Style in Chaucer’s Poetry, to which this post is greatly indebted, and which you should all read) quotes from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s early thirteenth-century Poetria Nova, a guide for poets writing Latin verse: ‘Juxtaposition of related words coveys the sense more readily, but their moderate separation sounds better to the ear and has greater elegance.’   It is easier to understand words when they are close together in a conventional order, but it can be more eloquent and musical to separate elements of a sentence.

Geoffrey’s advice was for poets composing in Latin, but poets also used inverted word orders in English (especially if they were seeking to write in an elevated style).  Roscow’s book shows which sorts of manipulations of word order are found in English poetry before Chaucer, and which ones may well be Chaucer’s own innovation.  These manipulations can make lines difficult to parse and understand.   In Book I of Troilus, the narrating voice describes how the God of Love does not spare Troilus from the pain of unrequited love:

In him ne deyned sparen blood royal
The fyr of love, (i.e. ‘the fire of love didn’t
deign to spare his royal blood’, when
translated in ‘normal’ word order)

The subject of the sentence (the fyr of love) is postponed until after the verb and the object.  Chaucer does this partly to meet the demands of rhyme, metre and line-length, and partly as a principle of style.  Inverted word orders such as this make Chaucer’s poetry seem noticeably different from everyday language, more complex, elaborate, poetic.  It’s a useful thing to be able to spot for commentary or close-reading.  Be careful to consider, though, whether the words have been inverted for grammatical reasons (for example questions or imperatives).

One of the types of word order Roscow discusses is front-shifting (the moving of a sentence or clause component to the front of a sentence or clause, when we would normally expect it later on).  Here’s the description of Troilus on his horse outside Criseyde’s window for the first time in Book II:

This Troilus sat on his baye stede,
Al armed, save his heed, ful richely,
And wounded was his hors, and gan to blede,

You can see that the third line reads wounded was his hors not his hors was wounded.  Chaucer probably does this here because of the demands of metre, but nonetheless this potentially produces some very useful ‘by-products’ for us to interpret.  The front-loading of wounded emphasises both that word and the switch of focus from armour to injury.  It also makes us wait for just a fraction to find out who or what is wounded.  Is it somehow a disappointment to find out that it is Troilus’s horse, rather than Troilus himself, who is wounded?

Roscow also discusses syntactical discontinuity (that is, the separating of words and phrases which would usually be found close together in sentences).  Here’s the narrating voice’s continuation of the events leading up to Troilus’s death in Book V:

The wrathe, as I began yow for to seye,
Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;
For thousandes his hondes maden deye,
(i.e. ‘as I began to tell you, the Greeks paid
dearly for the wrath of Troilus, because his
hands made thousands die’, when
translated in ‘normal’ word order)

At this significant moment at the end of his poem, Chaucer makes use of much discontinuity, even splitting the noun phrase the wrathe of Troilus, as well as front-shifting wrathe and thousandes for emphasis.  All this allows Chaucer to create his passage of high style, even though the vocabulary is relatively familiar.

Further Reading:

G H Roscow, Syntax and Style in Chaucer’s Poetry (D S Brewer, 1970)