Rhyming before Homer?
Jorn Barger
before Homer (Egypt? China?) and all I got was this stupid parody:
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/news/index.cfm?instanceid=19091
In fact, one page claimed the opening lines of the Iliad don't rhyme,
so now I'm wondering about Homer, too...
Douglas G. Kilday
"Jorn Barger" <jo...@enteract.com> wrote in message
news:16e613ec.0303...@posting.google.com...
Of course Homer doesn't rhyme. His metrification is entirely quantitative.
When adjacent lines end with the same syllable (e.g. Od. 3:244-5, 258-9), it
is purely incidental.
Rhyming is used by Plautus for occasional special effects, never as the
metrical basis. E.g. Pseudolus 805-6:
nemo illum quaerit qui optumus et carissimust;
illum conducunt potius qui vilissimust.
The oldest poetry I know about using rhyming as the basis is Old French
poetry of the 12th century, e.g. Conon de Béthune, circa 1182:
Ke mon langaige ont blasmé li François
Et mes cançons, oiant les Champenois
Et la Contesse encoir, dont plus me poise.
La Roïne n'a pas fait ke cortoise,
Ki me reprist, ele et ses fieus, le Rois ...
Of course, there may be older examples in literatures I don't know about.
DGK
Johannes Patruus
"Douglas G. Kilday" <fuf...@chorus.net> wrote in message
news:F839a.1421$ES3.1...@kent.svc.tds.net...
[...]
> The oldest poetry I know about using rhyming as the basis is Old French
> poetry of the 12th century, e.g. Conon de Béthune, circa 1182:
[...]
> Of course, there may be older examples in literatures I don't know about.
I believe it to be the case that rhyme is an integral element of Arabic
poetry right back to pre-Islamic times. On the other hand, I read that the
Hebrew poetry of the Psalms "shows very rarely any tendency to rhyme or
vowel assonance".
Johannes
Chris Camfield
rhyming is not an inherent feature of that type of poetry (dactylic hexameter).
Chris
average conrad
invented rhyme in reaction to stodgy "Old Europe" metrics. It's true --
without Longfellow, the light of literature would have been eclipsed by the
forces of evil long ago.
atypus
lines of the Iliad "rhyme". Possibly they did in the translation which the
contributor was using.
"average conrad" <averag...@averageconrad.com.> wrote in message
news:b42rmk$ova$1...@news.acns.nwu.edu...
Bobby D. Bryant
If there's any rhyme in Homer it's purely an accident. Rhyme isn't a
universal trait of poetry. Some cultures go for it and others don't; the
ancient Greeks didn't.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Gordon
averag...@averageconrad.com. says...
So, that stodgy old Geoffrey Chaucer was imitating Longfellow, then?
--
Gordon
"I have just as much authority as the Pope.
I just don't have as many people who believe it."
Neville Lindsay
"average conrad" <averag...@averageconrad.com.> wrote in message
news:b42rmk$ova$1...@news.acns.nwu.edu...
There was a student of Oxenford also
Who unto logic long had ... ... (what can I put in there - it can't rhyme
because Longfellow hadn't invented it yet)
NL
average conrad
freely. Whether for good or evil, it's up to you to decide how best to use
it.
average conrad
> So, that stodgy old Geoffrey Chaucer was imitating Longfellow, then?
Exactly, when he wasn't out writing Shakespeare's works under the pseudonym
of Bacon or being arraigned on charges of raptus, Chaucer was forced to
speak in blank verse and Italian -- like all good Englishman up until
Longfellow, after whom they all began to rhyme in slavish imitation. And
then Madonna moved to London. These are the salient facts of British
historical importance, linguistic and otherwise.
Roger Pearse
> I do not understand how anybody could have suggested that the first two
> lines of the Iliad "rhyme". Possibly they did in the translation which the
> contributor was using.
I suppose people remember that Pope translated the Illiad into English
verse. I expect that rhymed, even if it did nothing else. I couldn't
find it online.
All the best,
Roger Pearse
Roger Pearse
For those compelled to do it,
A gift for writing verse,
Is not so much a blessing,
But more a kind of curse. (Roger Woddis)
Longfellow would never claim
To be the muse of verse.
If now we know no history,
Won't legend just be worse?
Joe Bernstein
thought I was reading a thread in soc.history.ancient, see, that's
what Google *told* me it was...) but isn't limited to the off-topic.
And anyway the off-topic stuff is at least closer than *usual* to
on-topic, since it's relevant to those interested in settings, or some
such, for Greek.
"Douglas G. Kilday" <fuf...@chorus.net> wrote in message
news:<F839a.1421$ES3.1...@kent.svc.tds.net>...
> "Jorn Barger" <jo...@enteract.com> wrote in message
> news:16e613ec.0303...@posting.google.com...
> > I spent the last hour at Google trying to find any examples of rhyme
> > before Homer (Egypt? China?) and all I got was this stupid parody:
> > http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/news/index.cfm?instanceid=19091
> >
> > In fact, one page claimed the opening lines of the Iliad don't rhyme,
> > so now I'm wondering about Homer, too...
For whatever it's worth, there are studies of the poetry of Egypt and
Mesopotamia, and probably also of China although I haven't looked at
those. I'm unaware of what we think of as rhyme as a noticeable
feature in any of these poetries, although the ones with more varied
surviving contents might have had rhyme someplace or other. (That
would be China, if any. I'd be willing to bet there's no significant
rhyming in any of the poetry of the ancient Near East, and anyway
China has handed down a lot more than the ANE cultures have. Oh hey!
There's a whole genre of Chinese, um, literature, referred to among
other names as "rhyme-prose", of Han Dynasty date. See what Google
gets you with that.)
The studies of poetry in Egypt are mostly in German, except for ones
by Jack Foster, whom I consider highly unreliable. Basically, only in
the past forty or so years has it been substantiated, at least
according to a growing number of Egyptologists, that essentially all
Egyptian belles lettres, at least before 1000 BC, were in fact in a
poetic mode. The way this was done was by figuring out a metrical
scheme, of sorts - given that we don't actually know that much about
how Egyptian sounded - and then establishing that if you read the
texts with this scheme in mind, they make more sense than if you
don't. The major area where the whole thing appears to break down is
in New Kingdom storytelling, but I don't know if it's been applied to
texts from after 1000 BC. Anyway, the main guy behind all this, whose
name is Gerhard Fecht, has written an English essay recounting the
above in more detail, and also talking about What Came After, and in
this he resumes an ongoing feud with Foster. In a nutshell, Fecht has
an organised scheme by which parallelism of various kinds is
determined by metre. Foster, as far as I can tell not only from
Fecht's essay but from what I've read *by* Foster, simplifies this
down to saying that Egyptian writing was poetry because it had
"thought couplets" or triplets or quadruplets or ..., which means
essentially that it *used* parallelism. Everyone had known that for
generations; it's not the point, and it produces a pretty bizarre
notion of what poetry is. And because of the rigidity with which
Foster works this theory out, it produces distortions in his
translations.
The basic studies of poetry in Mesopotamia are by Erica Reiner, <Your
Thwarts in Pieces, Your Mooring Rope Cut>, 1985, for Akkadian, and by
Jeremy Black, <Reading Sumerian Poetry>, 1998, for Sumerian. Black
has also put translations and transliterations of pretty much all
Sumerian poetry that I know of online; the project is <The Electronic
Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature>, its base URL is
<http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/>, and the most useful way to get to
the contents is <http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/catalogue.htm>.
From the library catalogue I looked for the titles in, I see that
there also appeared in 2001 a book by Shlomo Izre'el titled <Adapa and
the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death>. "Adapa
and the South Wind" is the name of an Akkadian story / myth, but it's
possible that this book is not simply an edition or study of same, I
dunno. I haven't done much more than look at Reiner's or Black's
books either.
There are studies of poetry in Ugaritic and Hebrew too, but these will
be so bound up with Biblical scholarship, the area that's been making
my head hurt more or less without interruption since November or so,
that I have no desire to go looking for them for you. (Hebrew poetry,
unlike Akkadian, Sumerian, apparently Egyptian, and yes, Ugaritic,
includes little narrative, and my actual research topic is narrative,
not poetry, which is also why I haven't read Reiner or Black.) But I
have looked at a book with the scary (for me) title <Verse in Ancient
Near Eastern Prose>, edited by Johannes de Moor and Wilfred Watson,
and although this is where I found Fecht's abovementioned essay (I
think), it's mostly devoted to things West Semitic.
I don't know whether Hittite has been studied in relation to poetry,
let alone whether this has resulted in books that attempt to explain
it to non-Hittites; Hittite narratives bore me enough that I haven't
seen any reason to find out.
> Of course Homer doesn't rhyme. His metrification is entirely quantitative.
Most poetries I've ever heard of don't rhyme. I'm having trouble
understanding why the original poster expected Homer to.
Heck, even Old English poetry didn't (doesn't) rhyme.
Is there a technique that the overwhelming majority of poetries *do*
use? I'm not convinced there's any candidate other than "metre", and
it seems to me that a "technique" that broadly described is cheating.
At any rate, I'm not trying to say rhyming is something freakish in
(some) Western poetries, just that it's no more universal than any
number of other things.
> Rhyming is used by Plautus for occasional special effects, never as the
> metrical basis. E.g. Pseudolus 805-6:
>
> nemo illum quaerit qui optumus et carissimust;
> illum conducunt potius qui vilissimust.
Heck, I didn't know that! I wonder why it wasn't mentioned by ...
> The oldest poetry I know about using rhyming as the basis is Old French
> poetry of the 12th century, e.g. Conon de Béthune, circa 1182:
>
> Ke mon langaige ont blasmé li François
> Et mes cançons, oiant les Champenois
> Et la Contesse encoir, dont plus me poise.
> La Ro?ne n'a pas fait ke cortoise,
> Ki me reprist, ele et ses fieus, le Rois ...
>
> Of course, there may be older examples in literatures I don't know about.
The opening pages of F. J. E. Raby's <A History of Secular Latin
Poetry in the Middle Ages> go into some detail about changes in Latin
prosody in general in late antiquity. I think his focus is on
changing from quantitative to accentual metre, but unless I'm badly
mistaken - which is possible, it's been six years or so - he also
devotes some pages to rhyme. Going further out on a limb, my memory
is telling me, with what degree of reliability I know not, that while
rhyme had been (said he, in 1934) overrated by some scholars, it was
indeed a genuine, though minor, aspect of late antique / early
mediaeval poetry in general ("minor" in the sense that some poets used
it but it wasn't by any means expected or the norm).
Someone correcting my recollections of Raby here would be a very
welcome change to the trend the thread has taken at least as shown by
Google.
Since I don't know how often Raby gets mentioned here, I may as well
add that his title is misleading. He by no means excludes religious
poetry from his discussion. He did, however, write a shorter work
(earlier, but he lived to revise it after the "secular" book) titled
<History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of
the Middle Ages>. For late antiquity, I found very little in it that
wasn't in the "secular" book - I think, maybe two or three poems?
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer <j...@sfbooks.com>
<http://these-survive.postilion.org>
hippo
"Bobby D. Bryant" wrote in message
> Jorn Barger wrote:
> > I spent the last hour at Google trying to find any examples of rhyme
> > before Homer (Egypt? China?) and all I got was this stupid parody:
> > http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/news/index.cfm?instanceid=19091
> >
> > In fact, one page claimed the opening lines of the Iliad don't rhyme,
> > so now I'm wondering about Homer, too...
>
> If there's any rhyme in Homer it's purely an accident. Rhyme isn't a
> universal trait of poetry. Some cultures go for it and others don't; the
> ancient Greeks didn't.
In Anglo-Saxon poetry rhyme is internal to the line rather than at the ends
of several. Rhyme and meter were aids to memory in a preliterate
societies. -the Troll
Frank Zeeb
> There are studies of poetry in Ugaritic and Hebrew too, but these will
> be so bound up with Biblical scholarship, the area that's been making
> my head hurt more or less without interruption since November or so,
> that I have no desire to go looking for them for you. (Hebrew poetry,
> unlike Akkadian, Sumerian, apparently Egyptian, and yes, Ugaritic,
> includes little narrative, and my actual research topic is narrative,
> not poetry, which is also why I haven't read Reiner or Black.) But I
> have looked at a book with the scary (for me) title <Verse in Ancient
> Near Eastern Prose>, edited by Johannes de Moor and Wilfred Watson,
> and although this is where I found Fecht's abovementioned essay (I
> think), it's mostly devoted to things West Semitic.
West Semitic and Akkadian poetry generally do not rhime, neither in
narrative nor in "abstract" passages, though rhime may in some cases be
a rhetorical device.
> I don't know whether Hittite has been studied in relation to poetry,
> let alone whether this has resulted in books that attempt to explain
> it to non-Hittites; Hittite narratives bore me enough that I haven't
> seen any reason to find out.
Not as far as I know, there is a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual text, called
epic of freedom, which does not rhime.
Greetings
Frank
Robert Stonehouse
wrote:
Resolved alike, divine Sarpedon glows
With gen'rous rage that drives him on the foes.
He views the towers,and meditates their fall,
To sure destruction dooms th'aspiring wall;
Then casting on his friend an ardent look,
Fired with the thirst of glory, thus he spoke.
"Why boast we, Glaucus, our extended reign,
Where Xanthus' streams enrich the Lycian plain,
Our num'rous herds that range the fruitful field,
And hills where vines their fruitful harvest yield,
Our foaming bowls with purer nectar crowned,
Our feasts enhanced with music's sprightly sound?
Why on these shores are we with joy survey'd,
Admired as heroes, and as gods obey'd,
Unless great acts superior merit prove
And vindicate the bounteous pow'rs above?
'Tis ours, the dignity they give, to grace,
The first in valour, as the first in place;
That when with wond'ring eyes our martial bands
Behold our deeds transcending our commands,
Such, they may cry, deserve the sov'reign state
Whom those that envy dare not imitate!
Could all our care elude the gloomy grave,
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave,
For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war.
But since, alas! ignoble age must come,
Disease, and death's inexorable doom,
The life, which others pay, let us bestow,
And give to fame what we to nature owe.
Brave though we fall, and honour'd if we live,
Or let us glory gain, or glory give!"
Bill Rogers
Chinese poetry rhymed, at least as early as T'ang Dynasty (around 700
AD). All my books are in storage, but here is one example
Chwun myan bu jywe syau
Chu chu wen ti nyau
Ye lai feng yu sheng
Hwa lwo jr dwo shau
Sleeping in spring didn't feel the dawn
Everywhere hear birds singing
Last night the sound of rain and wind
Flowers fell, I wonder how many
There were also strict rules about the order of tones in each line, in
addition to the rhyme schemes. I am not sure about earlier forms. I
remember a marginal note in an old edition of Tang Shr San Bai Shou
which cited a very old poem which I think rhymed, but I cannot
remember the poem.
Bill Rogers
Roger Pearse
Thank you -- very interesting to see.
Neville Lindsay
"Robert Stonehouse" <ew...@bcs.org.uk> wrote in message
news:3e66fa8c...@news.cityscape.co.uk...
> On 5 Mar 2003 12:54:53 -0800, roger_...@yahoo.co.uk (Roger Pearse)
> wrote:
> >"atypus" <pet...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
news:<3e650e4d$1...@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com>...
> >> I do not understand how anybody could have suggested that the first two
> >> lines of the Iliad "rhyme". Possibly they did in the translation which
the
> >> contributor was using.
> >
> >I suppose people remember that Pope translated the Illiad into English
> >verse. I expect that rhymed, even if it did nothing else. I couldn't
> >find it online.
> From book 12:
>
> Resolved alike, divine Sarpedon glows
> With gen'rous rage that drives him on the foes.
[----]
Epic poetry didn't rhyme. Each line consisted of two scannable phrases,
which the rhapsode had a great stock of, and he slapped two stock phrases
together from his memory as he sang, meanwhile twanging his instrument for
dramatic effect. Translators in modern times liked to finesse their
translations by getting them to rhyme because rhyming poetry was de rigueur
at the time. Now we imagine mature poetry as generally blank verse (except
for special-effect stuff) and concentrate in translations on accurate
expression of the original rather than trying to make it conform to a poetic
model which we today tend to associate more with doggerel or limericks
rather than higher literature.
NL