Summarising this study’s findings, this concluding chapter explores a little-discussed and much-maligned text in their light: the relatively late, formally innovative, and greatly enigmatic Rhyming Poem of the Exeter Book. This poem is known for its apparently disorganised structure and ambiguous subject matter, moving rapidly between human and nonhuman referents, and operating on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. Yet The Rhyming Poem gains a great deal of clarity when approached as an articulation of a human life course, blurring with that of the world itself. Drawing on arguments built throughout the book, this final chapter sets out a new account of the poem, finding more coherence to its structure than scholars have previously detected, and pointing particularly to key connections between form and content in the poet’s bold use of rhyme to accentuate the sudden shifts and transformations of the life course.

In this chapter, we move from discussing English segmentals – individual consonant and vowel sounds – to suprasegmentals, the units of sound above the level of the segment. This includes stress, pitch, and tone, and extends above individual vowel and consonants to syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. At the core of our discussion of suprasegmentals is the syllable, which can be defined as a unit of organization for sound sequences. Every word is made up of minimally one syllable; in some languages, including English, words often contain multiple syllables.

We begin the chapter by examining what we mean by 'syllable', and the components of a syllable, including the onset, nucleus, and coda. We then examine syllable inventories cross-linguistically, with a special focus on the languages that influence varieties of English. An overview of English syllable structure is then provided, with a focus on how syllable structure varies across varieties. In the final section of the chapter, you will be guided through exercises designed to check your understanding of the content of the chapter and to analyse your own English syllable inventory.

England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

It did not take long for Molière’s plays to travel across the Channel, but the forms in which they appeared on the early modern English stage and page were varied. The first translations of the 1660s were marked by a hybridising tendency in which one or more Molière plots were absorbed into composite plays, thereby satisfying the English taste for dramatic variety. Although this trend dwindled in favour of single-play translations, the hybridising approach was not abandoned altogether – comedy-ballets, as compound forms, were still blended. Even where single plays were translated, it was common for extra characters and small subplots to be added. But what one hand giveth the other taketh away: rhyme was, at this time, described as ‘an effeminate practice’ and, except for Dryden’s Amphitryon, was largely eschewed for its unnaturalness. Early translations of Molière were occasionally undertaken by women; Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre took up the medical satires and their work reveals that translation could be used to explore gender-based power imbalances. In the early eighteenth century, there was a notable drive towards preserving Molière’s plays in monumental collected editions, but these were seen as a complement to continued translation experimentation.

This part of the book demonstrates the many ways in which we can come to understand and enjoy a poem. It takes the reader through a series of shorter sections, each of them showing how by asking a particular question of a poem – about its verbal effects, about its form, about its emotional impact, about its subject matter – we can start to develop an understanding of it. The sections offer accessible introductions to technical matters such as rhyme and metre, but they also show how questions of technique in poetry are inseparable from the questions of what a poem has to say and to show us. Examples from a broad range of poetry written in English are used to illustrate the different approaches.

This chapter begins from the premise that poetry affords specific modes of attention and linguistic play, and that both are central to poetry’s value. It is a truism that poems tend to require a slower, more deliberate pace of reading in order for their intricacies and meanings to become fully apparent. Our contemporary culture is deeply inattentive, with distraction, multitasking, and disengagement all symptoms of social and cultural life. Many contemporary poems push against these conditions, whether implicitly or explicitly, by offering a space for noncoercive attention. The compaction or density of poetry isn’t simply a sign of its difficulty or unapproachability, it is more centrally an index of readerly possibilities. Poems condense, arrange, and splay language. On top of language’s system of syntax and grammar, poetry places a rhythmic and sonic grid – whether based on a conventional metrical scheme or not. In part, this chapter exfoliates Roman Jakobson’s “poetic function” in order to suggest the various ways that contemporary poetry mobilizes an assortment of grids, patterns, and schemes as part of its compositional unfolding. It includes readings of poems by Paul Muldoon, Maggie O’Sullivan, Seamus Heaney, Jen Hadfield, and Harryette Mullen.

We live in a post-translation world in which we are learning to extend our perception of what constitutes translational activity and its consequences. This chapter explores two aspects of the translational practice of poets of the 1890s: its suffusive nature and its prosodic experimentalism. By suffusive translation is meant a translation sourced in a roundabout way, relying on different kinds of formal and multi-sensory bricolage and filtering, such that the poems translated are re-metabolized, infused with new expressive colourings, as much as they are simply assimilated. At the same time, these translations explore a new prosodic range in their sensitivity to phrasal rhythms or cadence, to tonal shaping and to vocal inhabitation. Verlaine is the principal but by no means only French presence in this loosening and developing range of expression, and the examples discussed are drawn from the work of, among others, Lord Alfred Douglas, Arthur Symons, John Gray and Theodore Wratislaw. The chapter argues that the translations these poets undertook made a significant difference to the ways in which verse might be envisaged by the following generation of English-speaking poets.

Old Chinese refers to the Chinese language before the Qin dynasty (Mandarin: xiānqín 先秦). Unlike later periods, there is no systematic record of an entire phonology. The phonology of Old Chinese must be completely reconstructed, based on various pieces of unrelated source materials. The reconstruction of Old Chinese represents the most difficult work in the study of the Chinese historical phonology. It also should be noted that the source materials often have unclear information regarding the time and geographical locations about the language. The source materials mainly include the rhyming words of ancient poetry, the Chinese characters that share phonetic components, and reconstructions based on both the phonology of Middle Chinese, which is itself based on rhyme dictionaries with complete phonological information, and the pronunciation of modern Chinese dialects. Although Old Chinese phonology must appear first according to chronology, it would be very helpful to read Part III (Middle Chinese) first before coming back to read this part, as linguists studying Old Chinese use Middle Chinese phonology as their main reference point in the reconstruction of phonology. A good understanding of Middle Chinese phonology, and especially the terminologies involved, will benefit the reading of this part.

This chapter deals with the formal aspects of Chaucer’s verse craft. It discusses Chaucer’s mastery of rhyme and rhythm, and illustrates some of the stanza forms (rhyme royal, ballade, rondeau) that Chaucer deployed. It describes the metrical system behind both his octosyllabic lines and his pentameter lines, including the treatment of final e. Deviations from metrical norms, such as headless lines and enjambment, are discussed, but I argue that even perfectly regular iambic tetrameter and pentameter lines show variation, based on the degree to which linguistic stress approximates or modulates away from the metrical template. Particular attention is paid to Chaucer’s own comments about rhyme and the syllable count.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.