By THLaird Colyne Stewart
A knife so sharp it cuts the sun,
Bright glinting on the helmet done,
The hound baying at his heel,
The forks forged from shining steel,
Acorns grow in a field,
Rodent spread on his shield,
AND in his harness ventures forth to fight;
Soap he renders out of the fat,
Pounding rivets, pummeled, hammered flat,
The quill held in calloused hand,
Letters wrought, the small, the grand,
Mixing ink in white shell,
Pounding on training pell,
AND learning values from his worthy knight.
Reading all books that come to hand,
Behind the thrones of Royals stands,
Carves the meat in feasting hall,
Fearing not the weather’s squall,
Brewing beer, and sweet wine,
Walking through both oak, pine,
AND aids his squire-brothers as he can;
Teaching both in hall and the field,
His worth of measure well revealed,
Cooking over pit of fire,
Being knightly he ‘spires,
All these works by one soul,
Done not for writ or scroll,
THESE are the things that make a mighty man.
OK. This is a priamel.
That is to say, it’s a type of German poem that throws around a lot of
seemingly unrelated ideas until tying them together at the end. So the lines of
this priamel throw out a lot of
details about different stuff, but in the end we learnt hat it is all stuff
that Berend has done. Berend, having a Dutch persona, would have grown up
hearing the work of the mineesingers (hence my choice of German poetics).
While the genre of the poem is the priamel, the form I used is called leich. The leich was a
lyric form, similar to the French descort,
which was widely used between circa 1200 and 1350. Poems written as a leich were designed to be sung. It could
use irregular stanza forms and could be non-repetitive (or it could use a
standard stanza form and repeat verses). Regardless of its regularity or
irregularity of stanzic form, it was isostrophic (which meant all stanzas
conform to the first stanza). They generally had a lot of short rhyming units
and could use different types of rhyme.
So I built a stanza form of two 8-syllable lines, followed
by two lines of 7-syllables, two lines of 6-syllables, and ending with a line
of 10-syllables. This is not a standard stanza form; I wanted to be able to
enjoy the freedom of having the option of having an irregular stanza form. The lines
were rhyming couplets (AABBCC) while the last line (D) would rhyme with the
last lines of the following stanzas. I decided to go with four stanzas, and
split them equally in half (so two stanzas per half). I did include a little
tiny bit of repetition by having the first three 10-syllable lines start with
the same word (which I also decided to render in capital letters). I mainly
used end-rhyme, though there is some alliteration in there too.
