After the prostate stuff on Wednesday I’ve been focusing on my novel-in-progress and taken a detour, for reasons that will one day be apparent, into English alliterative verse and specifically Middle English alliterative verse with its distinct scheme. This stuff is hard to write. I don’t need to write proper Middle English verse – I don’t have the vocabulary for one thing – but I do want to it to be more than a rough pastiche.
The verse is driven by the pulse of the alliteration on the stressed syllables rather than by formal meter or a rhyme scheme and that gives it a distinct flavour. I think it lends itself much more to recitation in a predominantly oral society as opposed to a form of written literature for quiet reading to oneself. I hope it becomes an exercise of getting one’s ear in after a while, but getting to that stage is work, though it also means diving into some truly great historical material to get a feel for the rhythm of it.
Anyway, the process is to work out what I want to say and then wrestle it into the proper form and part of that is being up in the shed reading it aloud to see if the syllables flow or jar. That should all keep me out of mischief over the Christmas period, or most of it: I make my mince pies on Christmas Eve and I prepare the meal on Christmas Day.
I probably won’t be online much so I’ll take this opportunity to wish a Happy Christmas to all my readers. Here are two of my favourite Christmas tunes: Dr John and the great Leon Redbone, and Steeleye Span..
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