Bernard of Cluny by John Balnaves.
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CHAPTER 6 METRE AND RHYME



 (...continued from Chapter 6a)

The rhythmi contain stanzas of four lines, with internal rhymes in the first and third lines, and end rhymes in the second and fourth.



That metrical form was popular for hymns to Mary. It was used, for example, by Peter the Venerable in one of his Marian hymns24 and by an anonymous Cistercian monk in his Speculum Reginae Caelorum.25



The epilogue of the Mariale also contains four-line stanzas. There are internal rhymes in the first three lines. The fourth line is shorter than the first three, and does not rhyme.



Bernard's poetry could perhaps be thought of as showing a progression27 from classical, quantitative forms, through various intermediary forms, to verse forms which are fully accentual and which involve regular rhyme. Bernard himself says that the metre of the De contemptu mundi consists entirely of dactyls, except for the final trochee or spondee and that it has the resonance of the Leonine measure. He regarded the metre as particularly difficult. He clearly regarded his work in this poem as being something very special and thought that his achievement was due to divine inspiration.28 That attitude is difficult to reconcile with the qualified approval of Leonines which he expressed in the Carmina de Trinitate and the concern he expressed about the difficulty of being succinct in the Leonine metre.



One may perhaps conjecture that the order in which the poems were written may have been something like the order in which they are discussed above. If that were so, it might have implications for the dating of the poems, but see above, pp.84ff. and footnote on p.295. However that may be, Bernard's range of verse forms shows something of the wealth of metrical opportunities which were available to and exploited by twelfth-century Latin poets. It also gives some pointers to the development of accentual verse.



The emergence of rhyming, accentual verse can be traced in the development of the liturgy of the Mass. The chants which intervene between the epistle and the gospel had become, by the sixth century, "jewels of the Roman Mass."29 In the singing of one of these chants, the alleluia, it became customary to prolong the final vowel "a" in a melody called a jubilus or a sequence.30 But singing long and intricate melodies without words is difficult, and early in the ninth century texts emerged to support the melodies, and the text itself came to be called a sequence. A similar development occurred later in the form of tropes, where an existing text was expanded to accommodate an elaborate melody.



It is clear that sequences were well established by the time of Notker Balbulus, who entered the monastery of Saint Gall as a boy in 840 and died in 912.31 His Liber sequentiarum contains 38 sequences.32 Their metre is irregular and, except in the first, in which most lines end in "a," there is very little rhyme. Notker tells us how he came to write them. In his boyhood, he had found it hard to commit to memory the long melodies of the final vowel of the alleluia. In 851,33 a monk from Jumieges brought to him an antiphonary in which verses were set to the various melodies, and Notker wrote sequences in imitation. Notker does not claim that he invented sequences. He was encouraged to write them because he was given a book of them. Both Notker and his master Iso ("magistro meo Ysoni") knew all about them, and indeed Iso knew that the sequences in the book were defective, because they did not obey the rule that each syllable ought to correspond to a single note in the melody ("Singulae motus cantilenae singulas syllabas debent habere.")34



Sequences were sung antiphonally, the second choir repeating the melody of the first, so the verse form of the sequence developed in pairs of passages which had an equal number of syllables. By the beginning of the eleventh century, sequences were founded on rhythmical principles, composed of even verses and strophes, and they also made use of rhymes.35 An enormous number of sequences was produced. G.M. Dreves gives the texts of some 5000.36 But the reform of the liturgy under Pope Pius V reduced the number to the handful that survived in the liturgy until modern times.



Both the early and the intermediate forms of the sequence can be illustrated by the Easter sequence Victimae paschale laudes. It is ascribed to Wipo, who died at some time after 1048. Part of it has no rhymes but only assonance, and was probably in existence before Wipo. That part is typical of earlier sequences.37 In its modern version, it seems clumsy. Joseph Jungmann prints it in its original form, restoring some lines omitted in the reform under Pope Pius V and showing the regularity of the poem's structure.38 The Pentecost sequence, which is the work of Stephen Langton, who died in 1228, is completely regular, both in metre and rhyme.



The sequence Dies irae, which is sometimes ascribed to Thomas of Celano, belongs, in fact, on the basis of manuscript evidence, firmly in the twelfth century.40 Both of the other sequences which survived in the modern liturgy belong to the thirteenth century, the Lauda Sion being the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Stabat mater probably of Saint Bonaventure.41 Both of them are similar in metre and in rhyme to the Veni sancte Spiritus.



But Latin verse using stress rather than quantity did not make its first appearance with sequences in the liturgy. From the earliest times, Christians recited or sang the Psalms which they inherited from Judaism and when the Psalms were incorporated into the Roman liturgy they were in the Latin of the Vulgate. They lack any regular metrical stress, but they are certainly in no way quantitative. Yet the structure and antiphonal manner of reciting or singing the Psalms seems to have suggested to Saint Augustine of Hippo the rhythm of his Psalmus contra partem Donati. The poem commences with an antiphon, "Omnes qui gaudetis de pace, modo verum judicate." It consists of twenty strophes, each of twelve lines, and each followed by the antiphon. Each of the strophes begins with a letter of the alphabet (A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,V) which is a feature of some of the Hebrew Psalms.42 The poem concludes with a thirty-line epilogue. Throughout, all lines end with the vowel "e" or "ae."



What is important for our present purposes is that each line of the poem (making allowance for obvious elisions) consists of sixteen syllables, with a caesura in the middle of the line. This seems to be the first example of post-classical Latin verse which not only breaks completely away from quantitative metre but also adopts systematically and consistently a metre based on number of syllables. But it is noticeable that the metric stress bears little relation to the natural stress of the spoken words.



Bernard's accentual metrical forms had their origins in part in patristic and liturgical Latin verse forms. But not entirely so. The earliest, pre-classical Latin verse was not quantitative but accentual. It is interesting to compare Saint Augustine's Psalmus contra partem Donati with the Saturnian metre, of which it is somewhat reminiscent. The Saturnian metre was also in origin hieratic and designed to be recited or sung on religious occasions. There has been a great deal of controversy about the exact nature of the Saturnian metre, but it is seems clear that it was accentual, not quantitative; that it was based on number of syllables; and that each line consisted of two parts, which may indeed have been sung antiphonally, or which perhaps corresponded to "the forward swing and recoil of the dance."44 Exactly how it should be scanned is a matter of controversy, made more difficult by the fact that we do not know if the rule of the penultimate syllable for Latin accent applied in the early days of the language. H. W. Garrod argues that in the very earliest times, all Latin words were accented on the first syllable, and that this persisted in the Saturnian metre.45 But if, for the sake of comparison with Saint Augustine's Psalmus contra partem Donati, we set out a basic metrical stress, ignoring the stress of natural language (whatever it may have been), we get something like the following:





Read in that unorthodox manner, the Saturnian metre has an extraordinarily familiar rhythm.



The syllable count in nursery rhymes is not as exact as in Saint Augustine's Psalmus or in the later sequences. It is perhaps as exact as in the remnants of Saturnian metre that we have. "Taurasia, Cisauna, Samno cepit," for example, does not fit the pattern.47 Scholars who accommodate the Saturnian metre to the rhythm of "The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey," attempt to apply it thus:



But the rhythm of the nursery rhyme is not quite like that.



The corresponding Saturnian line would be:



It may seem that we have wandered a long way from the Latin verse of the twelfth century. But the rhythm of the Saturnian metre and the rhythm of English nursery rhymes are in fact very similar to one of the most popular verse forms of the twelfth century, the Goliardic stanza.



(...continues on Chapter 6c)