Poema Morale

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The Poema Morale ("Conduct of life" [1] or "Moral Ode" [2] ) is an early Middle English moral poem outlining proper Christian conduct. The poem was popular enough to have survived in seven manuscripts, including the homiletic collections known as the Lambeth Homilies and Trinity Homilies, [3] both dating from around 1200.

Contents

Content and form

The narrator, a wise, old man, reflects on his life and his many failures; the homily ends with a description of the Last Judgment and the joys of heaven. [4] Both personal sin and collective guilt (scholars have compared the narrator's stance to that of the Peterborough Chronicler) are of concern. [5]

The poem is sometimes referred to as a sermon, [6] sometimes as a homiletic narrative. [4] It contains, in its longest version, 200 rhymed couplets. [6]

The lengths of the different versions of the poem vary greatly: the shortest is 270, the longest 400 lines; different manuscript versions also differ in wording. The Lambeth version is considered the oldest. [5] In fact, there is so much "metrical, lexical and scribal variation" that it seems there is no "correct" version: "each copy represents a reshaping within an established rhythmical and metrical structure." [2]

Though a seventeenth-century identification between the Poema and The Proverbs of Alfred by Langbaine was proven erroneous (Langbaine was led astray because he had an expectation of finding the Alfredian proverbs in the manuscript known as Bodleian Library Digby 4). There are, however, connections between the Poema and the Proverbs: a couplet of the Poema was written (in the same hand as the main text) in the margin of a manuscript containing the Proverbs (Maidstone Museum A.13). [7] On that same page are marginal notes listing and glossing Middle English characters and their names, a list also found in McClean 123, which preserves a full version of the Poema; whether this is a gloss for the scribe or the reader is not clear. [8]

At least one echo of the Poema was noted in the Ancrene Wisse . [7] The twelfth-century Ormulum has the same meter as the Poema, but, in the estimation of at least one critic, the Ormulum lacks the occasional vigor and "personal feeling" found in the Poema. [9]

Meter

Following a Latin model, the Poema employs a septenary line, [10] "a seven-foot line usually in trochaic rhythm"; according to R. D. Fulk and others this is possibly the first example of that line in English. [11] According to Joseph Malof, this Latin-derived meter in subsequent instances is transformed into the looser seven-stress line (proving the dominance in English of stress over syllable) that became the English common metre, the standard line used in ballads. [12]

Manuscripts

Seven manuscripts contain the poem, [2] [13] six of which were used in the compilation of the Middle English Dictionary. [14]

In addition, snippets are found in three other manuscripts. [2]

Editions

The first modern critical study and edition (which used six manuscripts) was Hermann Lewin's 1881 Das mittelenglische Poema morale. [15] Lewin did not yet have the version from Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean 123, a manuscript given to the museum in 1904; the version of the Poema Morale in it was not described until 1907. [16]

Related Research Articles

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Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Exeter Book</span> 10th-century book of Anglo-Saxon poetry

The Exeter Book, also known as the Codex Exoniensis or Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, is a large codex of Old English poetry, believed to have been produced in the late tenth century AD. It is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry, along with the Vercelli Book in Vercelli, Italy, the Nowell Codex in the British Library, and the Junius manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The book was donated to what is now the Exeter Cathedral library by Leofric, the first bishop of Exeter, in 1072. It is believed originally to have contained 130 or 131 leaves, of which the first 7 or 8 have been replaced with other leaves; the original first 8 leaves are lost. The Exeter Book is the largest and perhaps oldest known manuscript of Old English literature, containing about a sixth of the Old English poetry that has come down to us.

<i>Ormulum</i> 12th century English book of homilies

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The Lambeth Homilies are a collection of homilies found in a manuscript in Lambeth Palace Library, London. The collection contains seventeen sermons and is notable for being one of the latest examples of Old English, written as it was c. 1200, well into the period of Middle English.

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References

  1. ↑ Conti, Aidan (2006). "The Gem-Bearing Serpents of the Trinity Homilies: An Analogue for Gower's Confessio Amantis". Modern Philology . 106 (1): 109–16. doi:10.1086/597251. hdl: 1956/6586 . JSTOR   10.1086/597251. S2CID   161613808.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Sciacca, Claudia di (2012). "For Heaven's Sake: The Scandinavian contribution to a semantic field in Old and Middle English". In Merja Stenroos (ed.). Language Contact and Development Around the North Sea. Martti Mäkinen, Inge Srheim. John Benjamins. pp. 169–86. ISBN   9789027248398 . Retrieved 6 September 2012.
  3. ↑ Treharne, Elaine (June 2012). "Cambridge, Trinity College, B. 14. 52". The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  4. 1 2 Holtei, Rainer, ed. (2002). "Poema Morale". A Companion to ME Literature. Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  5. 1 2 Dunn, Charles W. (1990). Middle English Literature . Garland. pp.  46–48. ISBN   9780824052973 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  6. 1 2 Harsch, Ulrich. "Poema Morale, ca. 1170". Bibliotheca Augustana. Fachhochschule Augsburg. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  7. 1 2 The Proverbs of Alfred. New York: Haskell. 1931. pp. 10, 63.
  8. ↑ Brown, Carleton (1926). "The Maidstone Text of the Proverbs of Alfred". Modern Language Review . 21 (3): 249–60. doi:10.2307/3714778. JSTOR   3714778.
  9. ↑ Daiches, David (1979). A Critical History of English Literature: from the beginnings to the sixteenth century. Allied Publishers. p. 42. ISBN   9788170230465 . Retrieved 6 September 2012.
  10. ↑ Myers, Jack; Wukasch, Don C. (2003). Dictionary of Poetic Terms. U of North Texas P. p. 329. ISBN   9781574411669 . Retrieved 6 September 2012.
  11. ↑ Fulk, Robert D. (2002). "Early Middle English Evidence for Old English Meter: Resolution in Poema morale". Journal of Germanic Linguistics . 14 (4). doi:10.1017/S147054270200017X. ISSN   1470-5427. S2CID   170857828.
  12. ↑ Malof, Joseph (1964). "The Native Rhythm of English Meters". Texas Studies in Literature and Language . 5 (4): 580–94. JSTOR   40753790.
  13. ↑ Laing, Margaret (2000). "'Never the twain shall meet': Early Middle English--the East-West divide". In Irma Taavitsainen (ed.). Placing Middle English in Context. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 97–124. ISBN   9783110167801 . Retrieved 6 September 2012.
  14. ↑ "Entry for "Poema Morale" in Middle English Compendium HyperBibliography". Middle English Dictionary . University of Michigan . Retrieved 6 September 2012.
  15. ↑ Lewin, Hermann (1881). Das mittelenglische Poema morale: Im kritischen Text, nach den sechs vorhandenen Handschriften zum ersten Male hrsg. von hermann Lewin. M. Niemeyer. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  16. ↑ Paues, Anna C. (1907). "A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the Poema Morale". Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie . 1907 (30): 217–237. doi:10.1515/angl.1907.1907.30.217. ISSN   0340-5222. S2CID   161593276.
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