improvised during a waking moment at some early hour:

My love is like a candle
That someone set alight.

My love is like a boxing glove
That's useful in a fight.

My love is like a towel
That's neither wet nor dry.

My love is like an extra lens
Implanted in the eye.

Any reference to a living person? Who knows?

A rant or a raunt

Something I often find surprising is how otherwise well-informed people, when called on to read Middle English – as well-informed people so often are – will fall into a cultural cringe when faced with a word of French origin such as 'gentil' and come out with something like [jontil], or, worse still, [ʒontil] (excuse my phonetics – they're the symbols I find convenient, and pretty transparent, I would have thought).
A quick breeze through any of the Canterbury Tales would make it clear that Chaucer doesn't rhyme French e+nasal+consonant with French a+nasal+consonant: e.g. 'apparence' wouldn't rhyme with 'da(u)nce)' – but on the other hand French e+nasal+consonant does rhyme with OE-derived e+nasal+consonant: thus 'rente' with 'wente'.
The fact is, of course, that the vowels e and a before a nasal didn't merge in northern and western French as they did from about C11 in central French – and the English French vocabulary owes more in this respect to the provincial pronunciation.
Now it's true that we do have loans from central French that show the merger: e.g. 'ensaumple', but in such cases the resulting vowel is spelt a(u) in English. There's also the complicating factor that in Anglo-Norman many verbs were transferred to the -er conjugation – hence 'defendant' rather than 'defendent'. In the case of 'jaunty' from central French 'gentil' the lack of the final consonant  in the English word is enough to mark it as a late borrowing.

In mainstream English, however, French e+N+C (you understand the symbolism) gives English e+N+C (and I'd guess that for semi-learned forms like 'sentence' the current rponunciation of Latin would have played a role. French a+N+C, on the other hand, gives a+N+C, or when stressed au+N+C. Hence French 'lande' > Modern English 'lawn'.

One might reflect that French i+N+C also gives English i+N+C, e.g. 'prince'.

So, Middle English 'gentil' should for preference be sounded as [jentil] – though it's always possible that a 14th century English person wanting to show off their 'French of Paris' might introduce the foreign sound.

See, on this subject, Pope: From Latin to Modern French.

The Aeneid

I have just been rereading the Aeneid: it seems to me that it consists of two narrative series, each of the form S₂ : a : $ : S₁. The first occupies Books I-V, the second Books VI-XII. Aeneas seems to me a rather different character in the two parts – in the first the intervention of Venus is more frequent and more direct, Aeneas more frail and more human. In the second Aeneas is more the Man of Destiny.

Perhaps I am slow to catch on, but it occurs to me as a later thought that Books I-V are Vergil’s answer to the Odyssey, and VI-XII to the Iliad: the first phase a romance, the second a typological narrative (V has interesting parallels with Odyssey XXIV, the funeral games recalling the contests among the suitors, the defection of the women the fate meted out to Penelope’s serving girls).

An interesting thing about the second phase of the poem is that Aeneas only appears in the even-numbered books. These can be considered as successive stages in the narrative, in all of which Aeneas plays the role of Hero, while the odd-numbered books can be considered transitional between the stages.

In Book VI the psychopomp role is played by the Sybil, obviously, while the shade of Anchises is King.

Book VII should have at its centre a test or ordeal – war is forced on Trojans and Latins alike as a result of the intervention of Allecto.

Book VIII (a) has the transport of Aeneas away from war to a place of serenity, and intimations of future glory, both by way of the visit to the site of Rome and the prophetic scenes on Aeneas’s shield. As Ascanius (Iulus) is to Aeneas, Pallas is to Evander: the valued possession in whom his hopes for the future are invested – his value, in other words – which he entrusts to Aeneas. That is to say, Pallas is Princess, which serves to make his death at the hands of Turnus in X that much more heinous. Note that Evander collapses when Pallas leaves (much as Mezentius will when he hears of the death of Lausus).

Book IX is largely concerned with a troublesome journey – the doomed mission of Nisus and Euryalus to seek help from Aeneas, the events that provoke it and those that follow.

In Book X Jove throws the result open to Fate – thus, we are in the wilderness ($), where all things come by chance. Aeneas receives comfort from Cymodoce, leader of the Nymphs which the ships of his fleet have become – the character of the Donor is typically manifested by a comforter in a narrative of this shape – and he is revalorized by association, i.e. being reunited, with Iulus, his value, described as a beautiful object (132-8). The contrast between Aeneas and Turnus here is that Turnus is unwilling to accept the gifts of fortune, in the shape of the opportunity to kill Pallas, with humility (502). Mezentius, ironically, shows himself more pius in defeat than Turnus in victory.

In Book XI the prosecution of the Trojans’ advantage involves the neutralization of a counter-gendered character (Camilla).

Book XII reasserts social values. A compact of single combat is solemnized (though ignored by the Latins), and the Hero is finally able to do battle with the Villain.

One notices at the conclusion of the poem that the ambition to found Troy anew, voiced for example by Venus in the debate that opens Book X, has not been fulfilled: the Trojan name is to be extinguished. On the other hand, not only Aeneas’s enemies but also his allies have been destroyed. The dynasty of Evander is cut off, thus vacating the site for the future Rome, and Latinus has lost his wife to suicide, while one can’t feel too happy for Lavinia. The reader can hardly help asking whether it has all been worth it. There are resonances here of Augustus’s claims to have refounded the republic, and also, in the repeated equation of heirs with value (Aeneas, Evander, Mezentius), of Augustus’s own problems with succession. Together with the curious exit of Aeneas from the Underworld through the gates of ivory (VI 893-899), leave one with the feeling that a pervasive irony underlies this second half of the poem.

Thinking about narrative - Puss in Boots and Hamlet

In Puss in Boots we have the Lacanian Discourse of the Master, alias the metaphoric narrative: $→S1→S2→a. We begin in the Wilderness: the Miller’s son left, upon the death of his father, with nothing but a cat. However, upon his acceding to the cat’s request for a bag and a pair of boots, Puss, in the Proppian role of Donor, makes presents to the king on the young man’s behalf. At the conclusion of this phase, the Miller’s son is revalorized by the gift of fine clothes – he is now taken, on Puss’s say-so, for the Marquis of Carabas.

The transition to the next phase requires a triplet of tasks, carried out by Puss in the role of Helper: menacing mowers in a hayfield, reapers in a cornfield and unspecified further people in other places into telling whoever passes that the fields belong to the Marquis.

The second phase is the City – the ogre’s castle, where Puss, by verbal trickery, is able, again as Helper, to kill the ogre (the Villain). The transition to the next phase is marked by a journey – of the Miller’s son in the king’s carriage. They arrive then at the New Place, the castle, where Puss, in the role of King, is able to show off the riches that apparently belong to the Marquis.

We then move directly to the final phase, the Garden, and the wedding of the Miller’s son to the princess (the Princess).

Things to notice: though the Miller’s son is the Proppian Hero, he never actually does anything. What is more, he has never suffered at the hands of the Villain, nor does he set out to win the hand of the Princess – he doesn’t even know there is a princess until Puss contrives for them to meet. In short, just as the ogre is the Villain, the Miller’s son is the Hero because of our feeling for the genre: the young man’s marriage to the Princess is our desire as intended readers rather than his as Hero.

Puss, though the main character, is not the Hero. He is the point-of-view character, the prism, if you like, through which we as readers view the action.

It seems to me that the way this story works may help us in understanding Hamlet. The play is a narrative: as such I would expect it to correspond to one of Lacan’s four types – but which one? My initial difficulty arose from not knowing where in the action of the play to locate the Garden: there seemed to be no still point, no episode of pleasure that invited that identification. Yet the Garden is simply a metaphor for the object of desire, and once we have realized that, we can see that the Garden is in fact the terminal phase of the play, which fulfills the desire that Claudius and Gertrude should be punished and civic order restored.

We begin in the Wilderness – outside, in the dark, a place of unexplained manifestations. Hamlet, when he appears, is in mourning and in despair: ‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’. He is estranged from his mother and the new king; he has apparently courted Ophelia, but is cut off from this also by the counsel of her brother and father.

Enter the ghost, as Donor, in this case donor of motivating information. Hamlet is made aware of Claudius’s crime; his desire, and ours as audience, is not only for the crime to be avenged, but also for the disturbance to the civil order, which was already apparent before the disclosure of the crime, to be redressed.

The transition to the next phase requires Hamlet to convince the court of his madness; a task performed through his interaction with a counter-gendered character (Ophelia). Then in the City (the court), there is a triple encounter with the Villain: Claudius put to the test by the players’ performance, Gertrude upbraided, Polonius killed.

Hamlet’s journey to England and back is the transition between the City and the New Place, where Claudius’s plans to murder Hamlet are laid bare first by Claudius himself (the poisoned rapier) and then by Hamlet (the treacherous letters), while the truth of Hamlet’s love for Ophelia is disclosed by Hamlet himself. Claudius and Hamlet thus share the role of King between them. A difficult task (the duel between Hamlet and Laertes) leads to the deaths of Claudius and Gertrude. The crime is avenged, and the entry of Fortinbras (the Princess) foreshadows a new stability.

Who is the Hero? I can’t help feeling that the Hero is the audience – that the fourth wall lies open to incorporate us in the performance. To me, the role of Hamlet is too polymorphous for it to be possible to identify him as Hero – partly, providing voiceover by way of soliloquy, he embodies the narrator, partly, as in his banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or with Osric, he represents a character that appears elsewhere as the Hero’s wisecracking sidekick (like the cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service); mostly he is a proxy for the audience’s desire that the narrative should take its course. I am led to wonder here how applicable such an analysis might be to others among Shakespeare’s later plays – The Tempest, for instance.

The sun has crossed the celestial equator from north to south; in 9th century England and in the land of the Geats it begins to grow dark. At line 2200, the last act of Beowulf's story begins:
Eft þæt geiode ufaran dogrum / hilde hlæmmum, syððan Hygelac læg, / ond Heardrede hildemeceas / under bordhreoðan to bonan wurdon...

Though the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not hard to read aloud, problems are likely to multiply as soon as one begins to think about its metre. This is because its construction is, as it were, inside out compared to the verse one is more likely to be familiar with. That verse is likely to have a fixed number of syllables to the line - or a number that at any rate can be regarded as fixed - while the number of accented points may vary. To take Paradise Lost as an example, while every line has a notional 10 syllables, the number of accents per line varies from as few as 2 to as many as 6, with 4 the most common number:

Of Mán's Fírst Disobédience, and the Frúit - etc.

In GGK, by contrast, the number of accents in each line is fixed, while the number of syllables varies.

It might seem that this kind of verse would be particularly suited to English, if, as Kenneth L. Pike famously claimed, it is a stress-timed language: one in which accents fall at more or less regular intervals however many unaccented syllables there may be between them. To the extent that this is true, however, the very fact gives a line with a fixed number of syllables and a varying number of accents a great rhythmic flexibility, since accented syllables take substantially more time than unaccented ones. This is perhaps one reason accentual verse fell out of fashion.

Rhythmic flexibility in GGK comes from variation in the position of the accent, and from variation in the number of unaccented syllables, though that latter quantity does not vary much. Each of the long lines in GGK comprises two halflines. The first halfline has two accents, which may be written with the symbol / and two unaccented strings, which may be written with the symbol x. These occur in every possible arrangement: //xx, /x/x, /xx/, x//x, x/x/ and xx//. The second halfline has two accents but only one unaccented string, and two arrangements of these occur: /x/ and x//.

Typically both accented syllables in the first halfline alliterate with the first, but not the second, accented syllable in the second halfline, though sometimes the alliteration is carried by a first, unaccented, syllable of the word containing the accent. It is not uncommon also for the first halfline to contain additional, unaccented, alliterating words.

Each unaccented string consists of a pair of unstressed syllables. Unpaired unaccented syllables do not count for metrical purposes, except when a metrically defective halfline can be made regular by understanding a notional extra syllable. This most often happens at the end of the first halfline, where the pause, as it were, stands in for a syllable. Most second halflines end with a single unstressed syllable, which is not counted metrically, any more than the eleventh syllable that ends about two thirds of Chaucer's 'pentameters'.

The examples of scansion that follow should make the principles clear:

	Siþen þe sege & þe assaut watʒ sesed at Troye,	x/x/	/x/
	Þe borʒ brittened & brent to brondeʒ & askeʒ,	x/x/	/x/
	Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroʒt,	/x/x(1)	/x/
	Watʒ tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe;	/x/x	/x/
5	Hit watʒ Ennias þe athel, & his highe kynde,	x/x/	x//
	Þat siþen depreced prouinces, & patrounes bicome	x//x(2)	/x/
	Welneʒe of al þe wele in þe west iles,	/xx/	x//
	Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swyþe,	x/x/	/x/
	With gret bobbaunce þat burʒe he biges vpon fyrst,	x/x/	/x/
10	& neuenes hit his aune nome, as hit now hat;	/xx/(2)	x//
	Ticius to Tuskan & teldes bigynnes;	/x/x(1)	/x/
	Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes vp homes;	/x/x	/x/
	& fer ouer þe French flod Felix Brutus	/xx/(3)	/x/(4)
	On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he setteʒ	x/x/	/x/
	1. a single syllable before the caesura counts as 2. 2. a syllabic resonant is discounted. 3. there is more than one way to scan this a-line; of the two ways that don’t involve supplying an extra syllable, this is the commoner form. 4. a notional syllable must be supplied after ‘Felix’.

The fact that we have collarbones and horses don't means that, unlike horses, we don't have to breathe in synchrony with the motions of our forelimbs. But just because we don't have to doesn't mean we don't, and observation suggests it may be more natural when we do. Looking at the (mostly women) tennis players who strike the ball with a grunt or squeal suggests that there is something irresistible about emphatic vocalization when an emphatic gesture is being made.
It's the same impulse with marching songs - probably popular in all cultures that are fond of marching; is it a coincidence that narrative verse tends to adopt the same rhythm? Reciting Virgil, for example, one gets through about 10 lines in a minute – 60 feet, that is to say, each of which consists of two parts: what the Greeks originally called the thesis (setting down of the foot) and the arsis (lifting of the foot – during which process, of course, the other foot was being set down). That means 60 double paces a minute, in 2/4 time. That is the rate of march Napoleon prescribed for his armies.
The Old English line reads at about 14 lines a minute – four accents in each line, 56 double paces, in other words, compared with the 55 which was the standard of the British army (maybe French soldiers had shorter legs). Middle English accentual verse is the same – and like Old English verse is readily analysed as following a basic 4/4 time in which most marches are composed.
Chaucer, Milton, though writing in a different convention, also give us verse that reads at about 15 lines a minute and often provides a 4-accented line.