Rhyming Poem, The

(10th century)

   The Rhyming Poem is an OLD ENGLISH poem of 87 lines included in the 10th-century manuscript known as the EXETER BOOK. Like many of the other poems in the Exeter Book (including such wellknown texts as The WANDERER, The SEAFARER, The RUIN, and The WIFE’S LAMENT), The Rhyming Poem is ELEGAIC—that is, a poem with a somber and meditative mood, usually occasioned by the speaker’s misfortune, exile, and loneliness. In The Rhyming Poem, the speaker, apparently a former king who has lost his power, yearns for his past glory as he laments his fallen condition and the changeableness of earthly fortune. The first part of the poem (lines 1–42) describes the speaker’s happy past, while the second half speaks of his gloomy present condition. The speaker’s own decline parallels that of the world in general, as the speaker realizes the transient nature of physical creation, and the poem ends with a gruesome description of mortal decay and the hope that the saved will dwell eternally in a blissful Christian heaven.

   The poem’s use of rhyme has been attributed to a familiarity with rhyming Latin hymns, and hence with a learned, clerical environment. It is therefore possible that the author was familiar with BOETHIUS’s famous CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY—certainly the theme of the poem is consistent with that text. Some scholars have even suggested The Rhyming Poem is intended as a loose paraphrase of the 29th and 30th chapters of the Old Testament Book of Job. What is remarkable about The Rhyming Poem is not its elegiac mood, which is fairly commonplace, but its remarkable display of technical virtuosity. Most unusual is the use of rhyme: While some later poems in Old English employ rhyme along with the conventional form of ALLITERATIVE VERSE, this poem displays the earliest and most consistent exploitation of rhyme. Here, each halfline of the alliterative verse rhymes with the second half line. In some cases, two lines have the same rhyme scheme. There are even two occasions (lines 13–16 and 51–54) where four consecutive lines utilize the same rhyme. The metrical pattern becomes even more intense in lines 29–37, where the poet uses essentially the same sound (-ade) at the end of each of these eight consecutive lines. The poet’s aesthetic virtuosity is particularly evident in the rather astonishing line 77, where the poet breaks the rules of classical alliterative verse and includes a half-line with only one stressed syllable— the single word an, meaning “alone,” is in fact alone in its half-line: olooet beolo loa ban an— “Until there is just the bone, alone” (Greenfield and Calder 1986, 291). These and other features, such as the consistent use of parallel phrases and clauses without transitional words (a device, called “asyndetic parataxis,” fairly common in Old English poetry), make the details of the poem very difficult to decipher at some points, though the overall elegiac theme is clear and, ultimately, the craft of the poem is noteworthy.

   Bibliography

   ■ Greenfield, Stanley B., and Daniel G. Calder. A New Critical History of Old English Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1986.

   ■ Krapp, George Philip, and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie. The Exeter Book. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 3. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936.