“You’re the first person i’ve shared this with… but… because Old English poetry is alliterative there is a high chance, when looking up words in the dictionary for a given line, that they will all be on the same page.”

I feel special. Now another twenty-something people know this about Old English poetry. I am thrilled to be a hub of the information age.

This from the same person who told me last week that the Woody Allen line in Annie Hall about not signing up for a course that requires you reading Beowulf is true.

I met with my advisor this afternoon after some time well spent (but unfruitful) in the Rare Books Room. The first section of my dissertation is due in ONE WEEK. Gulp. Ok… no gulp… I’m sick and my throat hurts.

There were two distinct verse traditions in English in the fourteenth century: a system evolving from Old English (and German in general) which depended on the number of stressed syllables in a line and linked by alliteration of initial sounds (no rhyming); a system, beginning in the twelfth century, evolving from Romantic models (Latin and French) which depended on the number of syllables in a line and linked by rhyme. The most common of the second, Romantic, system used eight syllables to a line.

I must say that i find it odd that the “Latin” system of English verse in the fourteenth century did not adopt a “stress” pattern for Latin poetry is concerned with stresses, not syllables, in the vast majority of cases i have seen (not that i claim to have seen a lot).

The Monk’s Tale is an example of a five stress, eight syllable hybrid of the system with the rhyming pattern of ababbcbc. There is usually a strong syntactically link between lines 4 and 5, where otherwise the eight-line stanza might break apart.
Ex (lines 2463-3660):
Although that Nero were as vicius
As any feend that lith ful lowe adoun,
Yet he, as telleth us Swetonius,
This wyde world hadde in subjeccioun,
Both est and west, [south], and septemtrioun.
Of rubies, saphires, and peerles white
Were alle his clothes brouded up and doun,
For he in gemmes greetly gan delite.
(An Interlinear translation is available at Harvard’s Chaucer Page)

The arrangement of the five-stress line in rhyming couplets in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women and most of the Canterbury Tales is considered by many to be his greatest contribution to English verse. As already mentioned, however, the Monk’s Tale is written in a French form ABC rather than the couplets of most of the Canterbury Tales. An influence of Italian poets on Chaucer’s verse can be argued based on the similarities between the eleven-syllable line which is similar in length, but less rigid in rhythm.

Sources
Helen Cooper, The Cantebury Tales (Oxford Guides to Chaucer) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 334-5.
Norman Davis, “Language and Versification,” Riverside Chaucer (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1986), xlii-xliii.

and yes, i edited the Wikipedia article.