The Impossible Meter
“The fascination of what's difficult1
Has dried the sap out of my veins…”
--William Butler Yeats
“In short, I was captivated, and when Lew closed his email by mentioning that no-one had ever, to his knowledge, actually used the stanza in English before, the deal was sealed.”
--Annie Finch2
English, of course, has been pilfering patterns since Chaucer. Nor has it stopped. Haiku, tanka, ghazals (not to mention the sporadic pantoum--) have been duly naturalized, with greater or lesser fidelity; from both scholars of Scandinavian lore and fascinated amateurs (many of them associated with the Society for Creative Anachronism, as a recent anthology edited by Dennis Wise documents3), a trickle and then a torrent of alliterative poems have resulted, culminating (if that is the word) in attempts at purveying the chief honorific stanza of the Vikings, dróttkvaett4.
A very quick summary of the meter might go like this: four half-lines, ending in a trochee, of six syllables each. Two of the stressed syllables of the odd half-lines alliterate with the first stressed syllable of the next half-line. In odd half-lines, there is a consonantal rhyme in stressed syllables; in even half-lines a full rhyme in the last stressed syllable and one of the two stressed syllables preceding it. There are other rules about what kinds of alliteration and what lengths of syllables can be used, but that’s the part considered transferrable to English (and often enough, not all of that). Not to mention kennings…
Early on, such people as William Morris and E R Eddison, in their saga translations, satisfied themselves with rendering the interpolated poems in rough equivalence, wisely avoiding the vexation of meeting such exacting criteria (besides the difficult sense). Then, a few poets (notably Ezra Pound5 and the Inklings6) started writing in an approximation of the Old English alliterative meter according to the latest studies (which had only just figured out the basic principles7). It would take decades and a much more formally ambitious poet to come along and go the whole hog…
Near the end of The Age of Anxiety (1946), written entirely in alliterative verse, W H Auden imitates a dróttkvaett stanza:
"Hushed is the lake of hawks
Bright with our excitement,
And all the sky of skulls
Glows with scarlet roses;
The melter of men and salt
Admires the drinker of iron:
Bold banners of meaning
Blaze o'er the host of days."
It was quite awhile before anyone wrote another12.
In the story, "The Helping Hand," from: The Stars Around Us (1970):
"Wildly the winging
War birds, flying
wake the winter-dead
wish for the sea-road.
Sweetheart, they summon me,
singing of flowers:
fair for the faring.
Farewell, I love you."
--Poul Anderson
This is representative of the many produced by SCA poets, mainly in the 70s and 80s (there are at least a dozen who tried it at least once; Fleck is said to have written a hundred) :
"Hail, thou high-built hall, thou
home of foaming ale-horns!
Ring, ye lofty rafters
rimmed with smoke-blacked timbers!
Hear me, mighty high-seat
hewn with well-honed rune-spells!
Hearken, fiery hearth and
heed my skald-brewed word-mead!..."
--Jere Fleck , from “Ravens’ Rede” (1977)8
One of my own, a love poem:
“Cthulhu Eldritch Horror Final Form
Why do I clasp whisper,
whetting hopes on soapfilm?
My remorse progs person-
proof, out of a doubtful
ensorcelment’s census
simply her words murder,
yet now, most i nest in
nearly empty eyrie
with a wing-brought brightness:
brush of her cheek, shrieking.”
-- (1987) at Alliteration.net
Over the years, my experimenting has turned out all sorts of variations, of which I may mention: a curtailed, six-line stanza, which I prefer proportion-wise (for a total of 36 syllables); dróttkvaett without the internal rhyming, only the alliteration (“invertebratekvaett”); dróttkvaett without alliteration (“blankkvaett”); and a stanza of six dróttkvaett lines that ends in two lines of ljóðaháttr (alliterating only, four-stresses and three stresses each)…
Very rarely, the meter has found a non-skeuomorphic use, as here:
“Crow’s Nest
In hard hats with hoses
and halyards to haul it
from tree-bough, with tridents
and truncheons tight-clenched in
clad fists, we are fastened
by friendship, dependent
each upon each; arching
arms, torsos and ordered
preparations (prayers
too?) now to be proven.
We pry at crow’s palace
to poke it from oak-bough.
We teeter near tree-top.
From tall ladders call down
on crow imprecations
and curses. Lodged firm, it
is fused to branch. Fashioned
fast, that nest. A lasting
tribute, a fine triumph
of technique and crowdom.
Hose, wet it with water!
Down-wash it with flash floods!
This strictly built structure
sits, settled for better
or worse. Wears forever.
No waters dislodge what
stands steady through sudden
fierce savaging havoc—
staunch galleon, gallant
through gale and great hailstorm.
Crows homing start cries of
‘Caveat!’ and Have mercy!’
‘Duck, oh my dear ducky,
lest divers survive us.’
Cry peace lest a posse
of partisans hurtles
with black wings to break us
with black beaks to crack us.
Cáw cáw caw caw cáw caw.
Caw cáw cáw caw cáw caw.”
--P K Page, from The Hidden Room (1997)10
More recently:
"Flanged arrows as flinder-
Fledges leapt from edges
Over shields, bows shrilling,
When shank-deep was dankness
Of gore. Then steel-geared they
Girded murder-hungry
Blades amid the bloody
Blend of that foe-spending."
--Rahul Gupta (part of a longer work?) at Academia.edu11
In Ian Crackett’s 2009 chapbook Skald9, perhaps the most accomplished to date:
“Now that a thin sleet-smirr
sogs the horse’s coat, force-
feeds itself through door-slats
and loose-thatched straw-patched roofs,
we’re anyone’s; wolves, skalds, elves
crossed monks, weirds, berserks, lost
gods — bastards all — enthral
us. Child, welcome to hell.”
Finally a twitter poet, posting stanzas and half-stanzas on topical subjects:
“Weekend antics wane as
wee ones drift t'ward dreaming,
flick'ring flames reflect while
flurries softly worsen.”
--@drottkvaettzine 12-11-22
1. which I have coined the word “woodjgove” for
2. “Wrought Words: On Writing the First Rionnard-Trinard” at anniefinch.com
3. Speculative Poetry and the Alliterative Revival, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024.
4. Roberta Frank, Old Norse Court Poetry: the Drottkvaett Stanza, Cornell University Press, 1978.
5. Rahul Gupta, ‘The Tale of the Tribe: The Twentieth-Century Alliterative Revival’: 2014 Thesis. https://independent.academia.edu/RahulGupta612
6. Carl Phelpstead, “Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival”. The Journal of English and Germanic Phil...Vol. 103, No. 4, Oct., 2004.
7. Henry Sweet, An Anglo Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, 1879. < https://archive.org/details/ananglosaxonrea00whitgoog/mode/2up>
8. Wise, p. 166.
9. Koo Press, rptd Arc Publications 2020.
10. Qtd in Wise, pp. 349-350.
11. Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry, Bournbrook Press, 2022.
12. A handful by J R R Tolkien were written much earlier, but did not appear in print until after his death. Roberta Frank, in a 2019 article “Dróttkvaett” in New Literary History 50:393-398 <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/740071>, quotes this one:
“Winter's winds had hunted
waves as dark as ravens,
their [leaden] ship laden,
lightless, sea-benighted.
Forth now fared they mirthless
far from mortal [portals]
in caves coldly-builded
kindled fires that dwindled.”
Michael Helsem 5-1-24