Irish had their Gaelic poems; people of Teutonic speech had their rough verse based on alliteration and the count of the strong syllables. The Romance tongues emerging from the common Latin were as yet poetically untried. But in the proper Latin, which had become as unquantitative and accentual as any of its vulgar forms, there was a tonic poetry that was no longer unequipped with rhyme.
Three rhythmic elements made up this natural mode of Latin versification: the succession of accented and unaccented syllables; the number of syllables in a line; and that regularly recurring sameness of sound which is called rhyme. The source of the first of these seems obvious. Accent having driven quantity from speech, came to supersede it in verse, with the accented syllable taking the place of the long syllable and the unaccented the place of the short. In the Carolingian period accentual verse followed the old metrical forms, with this exception: the metrical principle that one long is equivalent to two shorts was not adopted. Consequently the number of syllables in the successive lines of an accentual strophe would remain the same, where in the metrical antecedent they might have varied. This is also sufficient to account for the second element, the observance of regularity in the number of syllables. For this regularity seems to follow upon the acceptance of the principle that in rhythmic verse an accented syllable is not equal to two unaccented ones. The query might perhaps be made why this Latin accentual verse did not take up the principle of regularity in the number of strong syllables in a line, like Old High German poetry for example, where the number of unaccented syllables, within reasonable limits, is indifferent. A ready answer is that these Latin verses were made by people of Latin speech who had been acquainted with metrical forms of poetry, in which the number of syllables might vary, but was never indifferent; for the metrical rule was rigid that one long was equivalent to two short; and to no more and no less. Hence the short syllables were as fixed in number as the long.[1]
- ↑ Wilhelm Meyer, a leading authority upon mediaeval Latin verse-structure, derives the principle of a like number of syllables in every line from eastern Semitic influence upon the early Christians. See Fragmenta Burana (Berlin,
