The Prosody of the Middle Scots Alliterative Poems

The importance of the alliterative line as a staple of Middle Scots poetry has long been recognized, and the essential characteristics of the thirteen-line stanza form favoured by Scottish poets have often been described. In her 1975 landmark study “The Alliterative Tradition in Middle Scots Verse,” a doctoral dissertation which is still by far the most comprehensive account of the structural features of the verse form, Margaret Mackay lists the poems which utilize this stanza: besides three substantial poems of major literary and historical importance, The Buke of the Howlat, Rauf Coilyear, and Golagros and Gawane, the list includes Sum Practysis of Medecyne by Henryson and the Prologue to the Eighth Book of Douglas’s Eneados, the anonymous Gyre-Carling, Montgomerie’s Ane anser to ane heland manis Invectiue and contributions by both antagonists to the Invectiues Capitane Allexander Montgomeree and Pollvart (The Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart), and a short meditation by John Stewart of Baldynneis. She also cites two instances of a verse form identical except that the ninth line is short instead of long — The Ballat of Kynd Kittok and Lyndsay's unique use of the stanza for Diligence’s opening speech in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis — and a few other poems which also utilize the alliterative long line though in different stanzaic arrangements. In his seminal work on the history of alliterative poetry in English, Thorlac Turville-Petre notes that “from the end of the fifteenth century the thirteen-line alliterative stanza was only used for ribaldry and satire” (though the Lyndsay and Stewart instances are exceptions to this), and James VI in his Reulis and Cautelis prescribes it specifically for “flyting or Inuectiues.” Yet the remarkable fact is surely not that the form had by then come to be restricted in its use but that it had survived at all: even at the highly sophisticated court of James VI, whose poets prided themselves on being at the cutting edge of European literary movements, this old warhorse retained its popularity. Contrasting with the enduring importance, in Scotland, of alliterative stanzaic verse is the scarcity of poems in continuous unrhymed alliterative verse, a form which flourished in England: Scotland has, of course, only one major example of the latter, which can be seen as bringing the history of that ancient poetic form to a spectacular conclusion, namely, Dunbar’s Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo.

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