However much a maker of excerpts may stretch his commission to give variety, it is in vain if the reader will not do his part; for it lies with him to find interest. Really no effective attack can be made on a crust of such diversified hardness until the reader looks at his text as a means of winning back something of the life of the past, and feels a pleasure in the battle against vagueness.
The first step is to find out the verbal meaning. Strange words, that force themselves on the attention and are easily found in dictionaries and glossaries, try a careful reader less than groups of common words—such lines as
Þe fairest leuedi, for þe nones,
Þat miȝt gon on bodi and bones II 53-4
which, if literally transposed into modern English, are nonsense. Those who think it is beneath the dignity of an intelligent reader to weigh such gossamer should turn to Zupitza's commentary on the Fifteenth Century Version of Guy of Warwick,[27] and see how a master among editors of Middle English relishes every phrase, missing nothing, and yet avoiding the opposite fault of pressing anything too hard. For these tags, more or less emptied of meaning through common use, and ridiculous by modern standards, have their importance in the economy of spoken verse, where a good voice carried them off. They helped out the composer in need of a rime; the reciter on his feet, compelled to improvise; and the audience who, lacking the reader's privilege to linger over close-packed lines, welcomed familiar turns that by diluting the sense made it easier to receive.
[27] Early English Text Society, extra series, 1875-6.
Repeated reading will bring out clearly the formal elements of style—the management of rime and alliteration in verse, the grouping and linking of clauses in prose, the cadences in both verse and prose: and before the value of a word or phrase can be settled it is often necessary to inquire how far its use was dictated by technical conditions, compliance with which is sometimes ingenuous to the point of crudity. Where a prose writer would be content with Mathew sayth, an alliterative poet elaborates (VIII a 234) into:
Mathew with mannes face mouthed þise wordis
and in such a context mouthed cannot be pressed. The frequent oaths in the speeches in Piers Plowman are no more than counters in the alliteration: being meaningless they are selected to prop up the verse, just as the barrenest phrases in the poem On the Death of Edward III owe their inclusion to the requirements of rime. Again, it will be easier to acquiesce in a forced sense of bende in
On bent much baret bende V 47