The current volume I’m reading in the Harvard Classics series is English Poetry 1. I believe they’ve tried as much as possible to go in chronological order starting at Chaucer. Having started with this late middle English piece, it then went to ‘traditional ballads’ which, were nearly all Scottish. Those finished up with A Gest of Robyn Hode, which would have been English. But finally, after 190 pages of English that is familiar, but still takes more work than I’d like… I’ve arrived at poetry that is in the early modern period- from the 1500s on.  

The Scots ballads are … well…. a bummer. They were hard to read and quite frankly, kind of morose. There was an earlier volume of Robert Burns which I had to eventually just skip over most of it. I think I looked up what his most famous poems were, and made sure I read them, but then for most of the book, I’d pick every 5th or 8th poem and try it. Most of it was written in Scots and I just couldn’t really make out what it was he was saying. He did write in English too, but he thought his best thoughts came through in Scots, not English. Reading the ballads sort of kicked me back to that. Though by now, it seemed like the language was more or less English, it was just written in a phonetic way that made it much slower to plow through. I should mention however that I did enjoy Burns, and found a lot more upbeat stuff than what I read in the ballads.

At any rate, I’m happy to be past the middle English stuff and on to language that is understood innately. That said, it’s still poetry, so less interesting to me. With that in mind, I find myself having to slow down still and read with a real intention to get what is being said.

One of the things that Victor Hugo had attacked in the last volume was “Poetic Diction”- by which I believe he meant the tendency to rearrange word order with the aim of placing rhyme words where they needed to go. For example:

Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes intendeth
Which now my breast o’ercharged to music lendeth

From there, doing so became the expected order, and came to be considered an integral part of poetry. Hugo had insisted on writing as people spoke, which meant doing away with this artificial diction. The reaction was that this wasn’t real poetry.

This made me think of a songwriting class I took years ago. At times we would try to fudge words around to get the rhyme… because we’ve all seen this type of license taken in lyrics and poetry, and our teacher would say, no… don’t do that. The language needs to be natural. Apparently Hugo’s direction became the accepted way.

I’ll leave with these lines from The Unfaithful Shepherdess, a poem of a young shepherdess who apparently falls in love easily.

Another Shepherd you did see
To who your heart was soon enchained
Full soon your love was leapt from me
Full soon my place he had obtained
Soon came a third your love to win
And we were out and he was in

There is some poetic diction happening in this piece, but I had to laugh at the last two lines- especially the last- because it sounds like something that would be said today.