explanation (razo):
Initial note: This is the very first poem I ever wrote for the SCA, and it was certainly my first attempt at Middle English (let alone any medieval tongue). Although I really want to try and edit this to make it better metrically, I also want to present it as an example of what you can do with little understanding of medieval languages or poetic style. So, the following are the notes I originally typed up when I first performed this piece. I rewrote much of this in September 2005 for publication in the Atlantian arts & sciences journal The Oak - you can read the new version here: Oliveres wordes to Patrick his brother.
This poem has been written in Middle English, with a style and sound much like that of Chaucer’s more personal and less courtly poems, after several of whose works this attempts to imitate. The tone and subject matter are fairly comical and trivial in overall respective importance, and purposefully so. The technical skeleton of the work is as haphazard and loose as the works from which it derives, as Chaucer’s own lack of adhering to specific meter added to the rather banal nature of the poems.
With regard to the tone of the poem, “Oleksas wordes...” means to emulate a rather short poem of satirical grief and ire written by Chaucer, entitled “Chaucers wordes unto Adam, his own scriveyn,” in which Chaucer derides his copyist for the latter’s continual inability to copy manuscripts properly and legibly (Riverside Chaucer pp. 650). As Chaucer pronounces a curse upon his copyist to receive a terrible scalp disease known as the “scalle” if he does not properly duplicate manuscripts, so does the narrator of my poem seek to pronounce all sorts of insults and woeful exclamations for the result of his brother’s inability to write correctly.
A second poem of Chaucer’s also serves to provide an influence of tone and subject matter for my own work; within “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan” Chaucer constantly proclaims his woes upon the apparent apocalypse because his friend Scogan mistreated his lady over the holidays (pp. 655). Building off of this example, the narrator in my poem continually refers to his own end, and that of his brother, due to the error which his brother made in incorrectly copying the directions to the event. However, the environment of traveling companions en route to a revel cannot be provided without some mention of The Canterbury Tales, however subtle its influence. The rather comical tragedy of my poem’s characters is just one offshoot of the disasters that could befall pilgrims in worse situations than those of Chaucer’s epic, from which I offered only tribute to the traveling situation of the characters.
The structure of this poem is derived specifically from both of the shorter poems of Chaucer - that is, “Chaucers wordes...” and “Lenvoy” - which utilize a stanza and rhyme form established by Chaucer and seen in later fourteenth and early fifteenth century works by poets such as John Lydgate, who utilizes this form in works such as “A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady” and “An Exclamacioun of the Death of Alcibades,” the latter of which is from his epic The Fall of Princes (John Lydgate: Poems, pp. 25 and pp. 14). These poems’ stanzas are constructed of seven lines apiece, which follow a strict ABABBCC rhyme pattern for Middle English; it follows pronunciation rules and in some cases, rhyming syllables prior to the ending -e, where appropriate for certain nouns of verb forms (as there are no silent vowels in Middle English). The short poem of “Oleksas wordes” faithfully follows this guideline in construction. With regards to meter, there is none. Regarding the two poems by Chaucer, they do indeed maintain a rather rough semblance of meter from one line to another, which disappears and may form a new meter later on; but as there was no strict or set meterical beat, I chose instead to do without a regular pattern that might be more reminiscent of modern or, at the least, post-Chaucerian poetry.
Works Cited
Norton-Smith, John. ed. John Lydgate: Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
Benson, Larry. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.