Of nýþe ant of ónde.
The fifth line has one arsis only (as appears more clearly from that in the second stanza: wiþ Lóue), thus corresponding to the above-mentioned poems (pp. 99, 100); the other lines of the cauda have two stresses.
Prof. Luick[114] looks upon the long lines of this poem and of several others (e.g. Wright’s Pol. Songs, pp. 69 and 187) as doubled native verses of the progressive or Layamon form, but rhyming only as long lines. This can hardly be, as the rhythmic structure of these verses does not differ from that of the other poems quoted above, which belong, according to Prof. Luick himself, to the class of the normal, lyric rhyming-alliterative lines.
§ 61. Narrative verse. Alliterative-rhyming verses occur in their purest form in narrative poetry, especially in a number of poems composed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in stanzas of thirteen lines, and republished recently in a collective edition by the Scottish Text Society in vol. 27 under the title Scottish Alliterative Poems (ed. by F.J. Amours, Edinburgh, 1892). The poems contained in this collection are Golagras and Gawane (also in Anglia, ii. 395), The Book of the Howlat by Holland, Rauf Coilȝear (also in E. E. T. S., Extr.-Ser. vol. xxxix), The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, The Pistill of Susan (also in Anglia, i. 93). Douglas’s Prologue to the Eighth Book of his translation of the Aeneid (although written in the beginning of the sixteenth century) likewise belongs to this group, as do also the poems of John Audelay, composed in Shropshire in the fifteenth century (Percy Soc. xiv, p. 10 ff.), and a poem Of Sayne John the Euaungelist (E. E. T. S. 26, p. 87) written in stanzas of fourteen lines in the North of England. The stanzas of all these poems—generally speaking—consist of two unequal parts, the frons written in alliterative lines, rhyming according to the formula a b a b a b a b, and the cauda which contains five or six lines, the first of which may either be a long line as in the frons, or, as in The Pistill of Susan, a short one-beat one, with four two-beat sectional verses following. Only in the last-mentioned poem does the cauda consist of six two-beat sectional verses.
The rhythm of this alliterative-rhyming metre may first be illustrated by the opening lines of Golagras and Gawane:
I.
In the týme of Árthur, | as tréw men me táld,
The king túrnit on ane týde | tówart Túskane,
Hym to séik our the séy, | that sáiklese wes sáld,