B.D. Gets Down (S)onnet

[B.D.]

What a great way to jump back into the fray. I'm going to be concentrating on biographical sonnets pertaining to lesser known characters and events in history.
Well, thats the plan. I only hope my brain hasn't rusted up completely.

Good luck everyone.

B

2. Benvolio's Aside
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showpo...5&postcount=14

3. Stressed and Unstressed
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showpo...5&postcount=19

4. Uriah the Hittite Delivers the Warrant
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showpo...8&postcount=24

5. Charon
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showpo...8&postcount=33

[B.D.]

Westminster, 15th century


Northumberland, still claggy on my tongue,
can nae muck up my quill. The Master rails
“Affairs of state must have the speech of Kings!
The noble words that came by Norman sails
across the channel, that’s what we use here.”
I heed his call and pen each day’s events:
deliveries of venison, the hour
a fine is paid, petitioners’ laments.

But when I can, I give the common man
his native deer, his calf and nae their veal.
I give the shepherd hounds to watch his sheep;
and in my house I’ll teach my growing son
our English speech and of its stony will,
then dream of Wigton wan I’ve gaan t’sleep

[Cher]

I briefly thought of Robert Smirke until I realised I was in the wrong centuary and in the wrong craft anyway… I’m afraid I’m lost but at least I know I’m in Medieval Streets. Something to do with Joan of Arc perhaps?. Something to do with the break of English from French and the birth of English as a Nobleman’s language?

Good luck to you too

Cher

[NicS]

Hi BD: Intriguing. Are the references to animals only language-based, or are we dealing with a smuggler/poacher here? Northumberland! What a great way to start a line of iambic pentameter. The rest of the line lives up to it:

Northumberland, still claggy on my tongue

I hadn't heard of the word "claggy", but found it in an online Cumbrian dictionary. It sounds like what it means. Great line! Best of luck with JuPo.

[B.D.]

Cher and Student,

Thanks so much for commenting.

Cher,
Your last guess is spot-on (although the fact that you had to guess means that I haven't lived up to my end of the bargain). I usually sit on a poem for a solid month before posting, so this time limit is very unsettling. But at least I'm writing again.

Student,
No, the animal words were presented soley for their English roots, but I see now that I should switched up the subject matter a bit so as not to create a dead-end Avenue.

Thanks again for your time.

B

[Pearl]

Enjoyed your piece. Yes, the reference to the passage from French to English is
clear, either in the first lines when you refer to the Normans, and then the pride of the Englishman and which language he'll teach to his children.

Enjoyed this bath in the past.

Paula

[Dunc]

bd

I'm intrigued to know whether you have an historical model in mind for N? Being myself a fogey waiting for rap to fade away, I have great sympathy with lost causes and railing against change.

Whoever N was, let's hope he wasn't in London for litigation, since as no doubt you know Law French endured in English courts till the time of the Commonwealth (and they still haven't completely shaken the Latin habit, though they're getting there).

My main problem with the poem is the voice. I suspect giving your rural gentleman a regional accent isn't really helping your picture here. Your point is that he speaks 15th cent countryside still-Anglo'd English and is proud of his speech so he refuses to sound too like the Frenchified London-and-administrative English of Chaucer, no? (Of course, even in Shakespeare's day and beyond, London English seems to have had quite a thick northern accent anyway.) I can't place him in modern Northumberland from the accent you give him, but worse, I can't place him in the 15th century countryside either.

But - a bold try. I enjoyed the read. Regards / Dunc

[HowardM2]

Interesting piece. I do have some questions about historical accuracy, though. I'd tend to think conflict between competing versions of "English" (whether the Frenchified London or the "purer" more Saxonic countryside version) would have more likely occurred in the 14th rather than the 15th century. The work of the Pearl Poet, for instance, dates from the 1360's/1370's and, though it contains a higher percentage of Northumberland Saxonisms than the East Midlands London version, is already heavily Frenchified, as well. And I'm not certain that all the words you mention in the octave entered English through French; I suspect a couple, such as "lament," may well have come directly from ecclesiastical Latin (though I don't have the resources available to check up on this, alas).

All of which are at most very minor and easily adjustable nits (if true at all). Certainly, the premise and most of the execution are quite good as it stands.

[B.D.]

Dunc and Howard,

Thanks so much for the in-depths.

Dunc caught me red-handed. The sum of my knowledge of Northumbrian dialect consists of only what I've gleaned from various websites and a few passages in books. I simply liked the idea of a country gent trying to muscle his tongue into the affairs of state, but I suspect that Howard is correct and I'm a century off my mark.

There is a section of Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English that discusses the importance of the Chancellery at Westminster under Henry IV.
He maintains that it was this centralized document office that set the standard of the words that should remain and those that were discarded (stone: ston in the south, stane in the north). And he goes on to say that, instead of abandoning duplicate words (ask, demand), definitions were slightly altered to accomodate two words with essentially the same meaning.

If I can sort out the voice and the timeline, I may just have something here to revise.

Thanks for the help, gents.

B

[cookala]

I'm not up on history as Dunc and Howard are, but I did enjoy this and think yes, you definitely have a keeper in this to be tweaked later on. Good start to JuPo!

[MEHope]

B.D. a good start, I'll let others dig deeper, it did for me what poetry needs to do surprise me with language and content. Later I'll think about time.

Thanks,
Mary

[Dunc]

bd

Quickly trying to track the enFrenching of northern English, I find the Scottish poet John Barbour (c. 1320-1395) using noble, solace, propyrtie, couplit, assayit in one excerpt from his The Bruce (1375) of 16 lines, and in another of 38 lines, arrayit, abasyng, vassalage, avantage, power, destroy, barganing, certes and mercy. That's not a lot of French in 54 lines, but enough to make the point as far as the literate fraction of northern society was concerned. (I take your N to be literate but to hold his inferiors in affection.)

Barber's writing is essentially the Anglian of Northumbria found from the Humber through the Lowlands to Aberdeen or beyond in his day. The fix, as Howard implied, is just to swap 14th for 15th atop your poem, no? Regards / Dunc

[B.D.]

Thank you Pearl, Cookie, Mary and Dunc for the kind words and encouragement.

And thanks for the interst and the recommended reading, Dunc. It's obvious now that I have to take the fellow out of the Chancery and back in time. I'm looking forward to investigating new locales for him.

You know, sometimes I think I enjoy doing the research for a poem more than I do writing the damn thing.

Ah, well. Here comes number two.

[B.D.]

Time consumed my pity long ago
and blame’s a knife that pierces all the players.
So when the curtain comes down on the show
the guilty stack in layers upon layers.
The meddling friar, Tybalt to be sure;
for R.& J. all that I’ll say is this:
When love casts out its charming, perfumed lure
the fish it hooks deserves its prickly kiss.

There’s only one I mourn. Mercutio,
who spreads his wit and blood across our stage.
I swoon to his sad oratorio
after the sword invades his bony cage;
and when he dies I find myself struck dumb.
To all the rest I curse and bite my thumb.

[ADK]

Hi B.D.,
It's so nice to have you back, plus we get ten of your poems at one go. I hope you'll be posting some of these to Scansion. Maybe I'll even have another run at it.
ADK