[CHAPTER XXXVI]
DEVELOPMENT OF IRISH POETRY
Some of the very earliest Irish poems—of which we have specimens in the verses attributed to Amergin, son of Milesius, and in the first satire ever uttered in Ireland, and in many more pieces of a like character[1]—appear to have been unrhymed, and to have depended for their effect partly upon rapidity of utterance, partly on a tendency towards alliteration, and in some cases on a strongly-marked leaning towards dissyllabic words.
Soon after the time of St. Patrick and the first Christian missionaries, the Irish are found for certain using rhyme—how far they had evolved it before the coming of the Latin missionaries is a moot question. The Book of Hymns has preserved genuine specimens of the Latin verses of Columcille and other early saints, which either rhyme, or have a strong tendency towards rhyme, though few of these early verses are found wholly chiming on the accented syllables.[2] It is a tremendous claim to make for the Celt that he taught Europe to rhyme; it is a claim in comparison with which, if it could be substantiated, everything else that he has done in literature pales into insignificance. Yet it has been made for him by some of the foremost European scholars. The great Zeuss himself is emphatic on the point; "the form of Celtic poetry,"[3] he writes, "to judge both from the older and the more recent examples adduced, appears to be more ornate than the poetic form of any other nation, and even more ornate in the older poems than in the modern ones; from the fact of which greater ornateness it undoubtedly came to pass that at the very time the Roman Empire was hastening to its ruin, the Celtic poems—at first entire, afterwards in part—passed over not only into the song of the Latins, but also into those of other nations and remained in them." In another place he remarks the advance towards rhyme made in the Latin poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, and unhesitatingly ascribes it to Irish influence. "We must believe," he writes, "that this form was introduced among them by the Irish, as were the arts of writing and of painting and of ornamenting manuscripts, since they themselves in common with the other Germanic nations made use in their poetry of nothing but alliteration."[4] Constantine Nigra expresses himself even more strongly in his edition of the glosses in the Codex Taurinensis. He says—
"The idea that rhyme originated amongst the Arabs must be absolutely rejected as fabulous.... Rhyme, too, could not in any possible way have evolved itself from the natural progress of the Latin language. Amongst the Latins neither the thing nor the name existed. We first meet with final assonance or rhyme at the close of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century in the Latin hymns of the Milanese Church, which are attributed to St. Ambrose and St. Augustine. The first certain examples of rhyme, then, are found on Celtic soil and amongst Celtic nations, in songs made by poets who are either of Celtic origin themselves or had long resided amongst Celtic races. It is most probable that these hymns of Middle Latin were composed according to the form of Celtic poetry which was then flourishing, and which exhibits final assonance in all the ancient remains of it hitherto discovered. It is true that the more ancient Irish and British poems which have come down to us do not appear to be of older date than the seventh or eighth century [Nigra means, in their present form], but it must not be rashly inferred that the Celtic races, who were always tenacious of the manners and customs of their ancestors, had not employed the same poetic forms already, long before, say in the earliest centuries of our era."[5]
After arguing that the Irish rule of "Slender-with-Slender and Broad-with-Broad," a rule which was peculiar to the Celts alone of all the Aryan races, contained in itself the germ of rhyme, he sums up his argument thus positively: "We must conclude, then, that this late Latin [Romanic] verse, made up of accent, and of an equal number of syllables, may have arisen in a twofold way, first by the natural evolution of the Latin language itself; or secondly, by the equally efficacious example of neighbouring Celtic peoples, but we conclude that final assonance, or rhyme, can have been derived only from the laws of Celtic phonology."[6]
Thurneysen, on the other hand, who has done such good service for the study of Irish metric by his publication of the text of the fragmentary Irish poets' books,[7] is of opinion that the Irish derived their regular metres with a given number of syllables in each line, from the Latins;[8] and Windisch agrees with him in saying that the Irish verse-forms were influenced by Latin,[9] though he thinks that Thurneysen presses his theory too far. The latter, in opposition to Zimmer,[10] will not for instance allow the genuineness of St. Fiacc's metrical life of St. Patrick because it is in a rhymed and fairly regular metre, a thing which, according to him, the Irish had not developed at that early period. It seems necessary to me, however, to take into account the peculiar prosody of the Irish, especially the tour de force called áird-rinn used in Deibhidh [d'yevvee] metre, which we find firmly established in their oldest poems,[11] and which makes the rhyming word ending the second line contain a syllable more than the rhyming word which ends the first, while if the accent fall in the first line on the ultimate syllable it mostly falls in the second line on the penultimate, if it falls on the penultimate in the first line it generally falls on the antepenultimate in the second, as—
"Though men owe respect to them,
Presage of woe—a poem.
The slender free palms of her
Than gull on sea are whiter.
A far greater than ány
Man has killed my Cómpany."[12]
This peculiarly Irish feature was not borrowed from the Latins, but is purely indigenous. The oldest books of glosses on the Continent contain verses formed on this model.[13] According to Thurneysen's theory the Irish learned how to write rhymed verse with lines of equal syllables sometime between, say, the year 500 and 700, but the Deibhidh metre with áird-rinn is found in their oldest verses, bound up with rhyme in their accurate seven-syllable lines. Why should two of these ingredients, the rhyme and the stated number of verses have come from the Romans when the Deibhidh áird-rinn (which apparently implies rhyme) did not? Besides is it credible, on the supposition that the pre-Christian Irish neither counted their syllables nor rhymed, that within less than a couple of hundred years after coming in contact with the rude Latin verse of Augustin and Ambrose, they had brought rhyming verses to such a pitch of perfection as we see, in, say, the "Voyage of Bran," which according to both Kuno Meyer and Professor Zimmer, was written in the seventh century, the very first verse of which runs—
"Cróib dind abaill a h-Emain
Dofed samaill do gnáthaib
Gésci findarggait fora
Abrait glano co m-bláthaib"?