1 - Stanza Origins

Summary

Meaning and significance are not innate to verse form: they can only be acquired through habitual usage. There is nothing inherently funny in the metrical structure of a limerick, for example, although the built-in anticipation of its final rhyme-word happens to lend itself well to comic effect. The limerick stanza could, in theory, be used for serious material, but any previous experience of the form will lead people to expect comedy as soon as they recognise its familiar rhythm, so the likely result would be confusion. It is a rather more complex business to establish what expectations might have been invoked in medieval audiences by the use of tail-rhyme stanzas, partly because such expectations will have changed over time. Nevertheless, the eagerness of many medieval scribes to indicate the exact verse form of the texts they were copying – via lineation, brackets, and other aspects of layout – suggests the importance they attached to recognising verse form.1 In a world where texts could only be transmitted by manuscript or by mouth, verse form plays a role analogous to that of the modern book cover: it can provide its audience with a strong initial indication of what to expect from the text.

There is no known Middle English equivalent to such commentaries on vernacular poetic practice as Dante's De vulgari eloquentia. In their absence, the only way of determining what literary associations the Middle English romance poets hoped to exploit by adopting the tail-rhyme stanza is to trace the stanza's origins and its usage up to that point.