A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS ELEMENTS IN MEDIEVAL WRITINGS

INTRODUCTION

We have written this unit not just to introduce you to the comparative analysis of the stylistic elements in Medieval and Renaissance poetry; but also to take you through some fundamental elements in poetry, without which you may find it difficult to do a critical analysis of not just Renaissance poetry, but poems of other cultures as well i.e. Caribbean, West Indian, and of course, African poetry. Such fundamental elements will enable you view any poetry with the „third eye ‟, that is, you will be able to analyse poems beyond the immediate interactive thematic level; such as understanding the poet‟s style, figures of speech and why the poet uses language in a particular way, and what effect that would have on you, the reader. You will also know that it is vital for you to learn Medieval and Renaissance poetry within the context of the cultures of the periods. Below are some of the objectives of this unit.

3.1 WHAT IS STYLISTICS? WHAT IS STYLE?

The word, stylistics, has its roots in „style‟ . Stylistics is the linguistic study of style; while style is the particular way a language is used in a particular context, period or age. That is why it is common to often refer to the medieval, 19th century, Victorian, 20th century styles. Style may also be related to an individual, group of writers, ideas or schools of thought. Style is a linguistic „mark‟, „thumb- print‟ or “identity”. It can also be defined as a linguistic exercise that describes the use to which a language has been put. It is the responsibility of a Stylistician to identify such linguistic exercise and describe it comprehensively. Anyone, including you, the student, who is engaged in this practice, can also be addressed as a Stylistician.

3.2 WHAT IS LITERARY STYLE?

Literary style reveals the relationship between Language and Art. In discussing such relationship, with your selected poems, for example, we expect you to answer such questions as why and how a particular poet, for instance, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Christine de Pisan or Philip Sidney chooses to express himself or herself in a particular way. By the use of certain literary concepts in any of their poems, you should be able to say if the views expressed therein reflect the values and beliefs of the period, or are contrary to it. When you are able to answer such questions in the process of analysing a poem, you are already interpreting or describing the poem.

3.3 POETRY AND STYLE

We may discuss poetry using brief and simple comparisons. Poetry relates to picture as both imitate nature/life. Poetry could mean the objective measurement of nature in imagination. It transforms human emotion into something experiential, soothing, and pictorial in nature. Poetry is a traveling emotion or emotion in operation, or a combination of reason and pleasure to arrive at „poetic truths‟

When a writer/poet combines the above indices to make up a poem, using language in a unique way, peculiar to him or her, in order to convey sense and beauty, we can say such a poet has used what may described as style.

3.4 STYLISTIC ELEMENTS IN POETRY

Stylistic elements in poetry refer to a particular kind of language in use. Most times, the language of poetry differs from that of ordinary language. Poetry has its own unique and systematized use of language, as the standard rule of language is sometimes deliberately violated by the poet to create a world of reason and beauty within the poem.

3.5 LANGUAGE/DICTION

In poetry, the rules that govern language are exchanged for ill-formed sentences, code-mixing of languages, misplaced and „meaningless ‟ use of words. Poets deliberately violate the established rules of language to create their own unique style. For instance, we can study John Milton‟s poem, „Sabrina Fair‟ adapted from his masque, Comus, to justify our explanations above.

The poem has 56 lines, and in between each line is a parenthesis (-). We cannot overlook the parenthesis in the poem as it is also an important part of the poet‟s language and style.

John Milton has refused to punctuate the 56 lines of his poem, or punctuate a few, but not according to the standard rules or sentences but to achieve rhythm, thus making the poem song like. Thus, we have to reorder the linguistic disorderliness found in the Milton‟s poem, the right words must be put in the right boxes and everything, anything seeming incomprehensible or unconventional must be explained and given the appropriate meaning to further justify Milton‟s stylistic aesthetics.

Example A

Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv‟st unseen

Within thy airy shell

By show meander‟smargent green,

And in the violent-imbroider‟d vale

Where the love-lorn nightingale

Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:

Caust thou not tell me of a gentle pair

That likest thy Narcissus are?

O if thou have

Hid them in some flowry cave,

Tell me but where

Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere,

So mayst thou be translated to the skies,

And give resounding grace to all heav‟ns harmonies

We observed the use of coupling in the poem above. Some lines have been structured such that naturally equivalent forms occur in equivalent positions. Linguistic items that share common semantic or phonological features are said to be equivalent.

For instance, let us look at a few verses from the above poem:

Fig. 6

A B C

Line (1) Sweet Echo, sweetest /nymph/ that lvs‟t /unseen/

Line (3) By /slow/ /meander‟s/ Margent seen

Line (6) Nightly to thee her /sadsong/ /mourneth/ well

The words “nymph”, “unseen”, “slow”, “meander‟s”, “sad song”, “mourneth” occur in equivalent positions and reflect instances of coupling.

In the same poem, we also see the use of semantic compounding in lines, in which some words achieve intratextual (within the texts) cohesion, as such words share similar semantic nature:

Sweet Echo + Sweetest

Slow + meander

Love + nightingale

Sad song + mourneth

Hid + care

Resounding grace + heav‟ns harmonies

3.6 IMAGERY

Another stylistic feature found in the poem is the use of sensory experience and tactile imagery. Examples seen in the poem are “sweet echo”, “love-lorn nightingale”, “sad song mourneth”. The imagery merges the feelings of love and sadness of loss into one to reflect the poet ‟s love for the loved ones who have been “translated” to the “skies” as a result of which man and nature mourn the deceased whom the poet believes are dead,(though they are alive). The poet balanced the sense of love and loss, of colours, “violent-imbroider‟d vale”, and of the divine, “resounding grace to all heaven‟s harmonies” .

3.7 FUNDAMENTAL POETIC ELEMENTS

(i) Diction: This refers to the poet‟s choice of words. Two levels of meaning are often associated with diction in poetry. They are:

Denotative: This refers to the dictionary meaning attached to words in use in poetry. It is the surface or ordinary meaning of a word.

Connotation: This is the literary or secondary meaning of a word. This comprises literary and figurative and other colorations in poetry.

(ii) Imagery: Poetic imagery may appeal to the eye, (visual), ear (auditory) or

sensory experience, sound (auditory) or of touch (tactile imagery), perception of roughness, toughness/smoothness. It may also be of bodily sensations such aspain, odour or taste.

(iii) Rhythm: The song like nature of most poetry makes this a common

experience. It is based on series of recurrences, which affect one powerfully, like the rising and falling of waves.

(iv) Metre: represents the skeletal rhythm of body of poetry. It is the

mechanics of a line of poetry. Though part of the rhythm, the latter is a full and free expression of the entire lines of a poem. Poems of similar metric pattern may have different rhythms. It is also the pattern of stressed (/) and unstressed (-) syllable in a line of poetry. The stressed, syllable is also called accented or long syllable, while the unstressed (-) syllable is also called short syllable. To identify the metre in a poem, we must first determine the prevalent number of feet in the line of poem.

(v) Foot: A foot is a unit of metre; a metric foot can have two syllables, one stressed, while the other is unstressed.

(vi) Types of Metric Feet in Poetry: The following are the basic types of

metrical feet determined by the arrangements of stressed and unstressed syllables:

(a) Iambic foot

(b) Trochaic foot

(d) Dactylic foot

(e) Spondaic foot

(f) Pyrrhic foot

(a) IAMBIC FOOT: This is a two-syllable foot with the stress on the second syllable. The iambic is the most common foot in English. Examples of Iambic feet are:

Come live with me and be my love

Be low delight amuse

A book ofverses underneath the bough

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou

How fresh oh Lord how sweet and clean

George Herbert

We can reduce the above poem into a skeletal structure of itself:

(b) TROCHEE: The foot is made up of a stressed syllable followed by the unstressed syllable:

Dou ble, dou ble, Lot os barren

From the way ascertain from the womb

(d) DACTYL: The dactyl foot contains three syllables with the stress on the first syllable:

Happiness, merrily murmurring

(e) SPONDEE: The spondaic foot consists of two stressed syllables. They are mostly compound words:

far – off, wide – watered

(f) PYRRHIC: This consists of two unstressed syllables. This type of foot is not common, it is often interspersed with other feet.

in a to the

3.8 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE POETRY

Medieval poets were more concerned with issues of morality, as was the common practice in England, with the conflict between the church and the society of the period. The issue became a continuous tradition in the poems of George Herbert, John Gowen, William Langland, and Shakespeare. These poets permeated their works with Christ and Christological themes that formed the social-religious basis of medieval England. Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales was used to fight elements of a morally deficient society. In The Friars Tale, the corrupt Summoner who takes bribes from sinners was dragged to hell, an example of church corruption in medieval England.

On the contrary, most Renaissance poets were preoccupied with trivial themes of courtship and love, with either a desperate lover trying to woo or cajole a reluctant virgin, or desperately after an unyielding lover, as was the case in Spenser‟s „Amoretti LXVII: Like as a Huntsman‟ . Sometimes the subject is about beauty and love; for example, Edmund Spenser‟s „An Hymn in Honour of Beauty‟, a 300-line long poem, and „Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote Her Name‟ are entirely devoted to the subject of love. Milton ridicules the church of the medieval England, bringing the moral credibility of the church into serious questioning, though in metaphorical terms, especially in the poem, „At a Vatican Exercise‟ (See Units 2 and 3 of this Module to know more about these poems).

This does not mean that medieval poets did not write on the subject of love at all. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer‟s poem, „Merciless Beauty‟, expresses how the beauty of a female admirer pierces and penetrates his heart, injuring his heart:

You yen two wol slee me sodenly
I may the beautee of them not sustene
So wondeth hit thourghout my hertekene.

Chaucer‟s poem of love is well arranged, soothingly directional, and purposeful and this makes it different from the desperate and reckless Renaissance lovers captured in poems of Edmund Spenser.

Most medieval poets were preoccupied with the value of life; hence John Skelton‟s „Phyllyp Sparrow‟ uses a pet bird, the sparrow, to condemn human excesses like alcoholism. Many of the themes of the Middle English period such as sexual licentiousness, greed, bribery and corruption are expressed in his poem. Perhaps, after the sparrow has taken a keen look into and watched man‟s affair closely, it warns, asking God to quickly interfere in human affairs:

Vengence I ask and cry
By way of exclamation
On whole creation
of cats wild and tame:
God send them sorrow and shame.

John Skelton asks God to rise in vengeance against people for their atrocities on animals as well as caution them against their inhumanity to one another; the poet‟s apparent reflection on medieval atrocities and injustices.

3.9 DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE/DIALOGUE IN POETRY

It was characteristic of medieval poets to combine dramatic monologue with dialogue in their poems. Such practice was part of the literary style inherited from the Classical Greeks, Latin and Rome. The verses of the early Greek and Rome were written for the stage until a few centuries ago when most poets and playwrights like Shakespeare and Moliere composed and presented their plays in verse, a concept wherein a play is written as a speech to be presented by a character (other than the author) at a particular moment. In this form of poetry, the speaker addresses other characters in the poem who remain silent (dramatic monologue). If the listener replies, the poem becomes conversational or a dialogue. Most of the verses of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales made apparent use of the dialogue or conversational versification. In the Tale, one speaker speaks and steps aside for another. It was also popular with works of the contemporaries of Geoffrey Chaucer or his influences like Petrarch, Dante and Virgil.

3.10 RELIGIOUS IMAGERY AND CULTURAL AESTHETICS

Most medieval poetry mixes religious images with cultural aesthetics to achieve a general aesthetics of the poem.

John Milton‟s famous epic, „Paradise Lost ‟ , displayed a good use of imagery to achieve a form rich in religious and cultural aesthetics. The explorative figurine in „Paradise Lost ‟ probes our origin, thus making the poem historical in perspective. Like the previous epics before it, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, all epics tell stories, be it primary or secondary epics. Only that such stories are

often woven around religious beliefs and ancestries.

Thus, Satan, talking to his nearest mate:

With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes
That sparkling blaz‟d his other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge
As whom the Fables name of monstrous size,
Titanic or Earth-born, that warr‟d on jove.
By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast
Created hugest that swim th‟Ocean stream:
The Pilot of some small night-foundered skiff
Deeming some Island, oft, as sea-men tell,
With fixed Anchor in his scaly rind
Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night
In rests the sea, and wished Morn delays:
So stretched out huge in Length the Archfiend lay
Chain‟d on the burning Lake.

Religious imagery mixed with cultural aesthetics also occurs frequently in George Herbert‟s „Easter Wing ‟ . The emblematic poem begins by addressing the Almighty God, and discussing the Edenic disobedience of the first man and woman and its consequences, and how Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden. The simple epic poem reflects humanity‟s sorrow and actual spiritual decay and the resurgence of the spiritual hope and growth of the poet. George Herbert‟s poem is reproduced here:

Lord, who createst man in health and store
Through foolish he lost the same
Decaying more and more
Till he became
Most poor
With thee
O let me rise
As Larks, harmoniously
And sung this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me
My tender age in sorrow did begin
And still with sickness and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne
That I became
Most thine
With thee
Let me combine
And feel this day thy victory
For if I my wing on thee
Affliction shall advance the plight in me

3.11 BORROWINGS AND POETIC TRANSPORTATION AS STYLE

Generally, it is impossible for a poet to write in a given or preferable literary language without being fully alive to his/her commitment to traditional literature. Poets must write as part of a cultural and linguistic source, that is, poets must write as part of a people, and not/never as a „nobody‟. That is why poets are often influenced by language and cultural borrowings, and sometimes discuss people‟s history and myths in their poetry, reflecting their cultural and emotional attachment to the period or age. However, this does not mean that they do not borrow literary elements, devices and style from foreign cultures. For instance, Medieval English poets inherited the Latin, Greek and Roman expressions that had become part and parcel of Medieval English. It is, therefore, impossible for these medieval poets to completely ignore the foreign traditions that grew with Medieval English Literature and culture. This observation reflects greatly in their works and became part of the styles of medieval verses. For instance, major parts of Geoffrey Chaucer‟s The Canterbury Tales share similarities with Boccaccio‟s Decameron, and had appeared in earlier tales of John Gower, John Bromyard‟s Summa Praedicantium and Jerome‟sAdversus Jovinianum.

3.12 LANGUAGE/DICTION

English became a literary language at the end of the twelfth century; thus, new kinds of prose and poetry appeared on the literary scene. However, writers still composed their works in French or Latin, or in the English of the medieval period, but with influences of the recipient cultures in their verses. Chaucer‟s generation of English speakers used medieval English, which is inconsistent with modern users of the English language, who had to cope with problems relating with pronunciation in their writing. For instance, the word /knight/ was pronounced by Chaucer as /knict/, not /nail/,the word /care/ was also pronounced by Chaucer as /kδrd/ not /kε:δr/ as in modern English. Evidence of mispronunciation inconsistent in Chaucer‟s verses can be further seen in his poem, „Merciless Beauty‟:

Fig. 10

eyes will slay

Your /yen/ two /wol/ /slee/ me /sodenly/;

them resist

I may the beautee of /hem/ not /sustene/

keen

So woundeth hit thourghout my /herte/ /kene/

And but your word wol helen hastily

would

green

My /hertes/ wounde, while that hit is /grene/,

eyes suddenly

Your yen two wol slee me /suddenly/;

beauty them

I may the beautee of /hem/ not /sustene/

truth faithfully

Upon my /trouthe/ I sey you /feithfully/

life

That ye ben of my /lyf/ and deeth the queen

truth

For with my deeth the /trouthe/ shall be sene

eyes suddenly

Your /yen/ two wol slee me /sodenly/;

beauty resist

I may the /beautee/ of /hem/ not /sustene/

heart

So woundeth hit thourghout my /herte/ /kene/

As seen in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer above, the language used is inconsistent with the modern day English. The reason for the disparities can be traced to rhetorical and linguistic styles and the division of literature into high, middle and low styles measured by the density of vocabulary. It is also an attempt to follow St. Augustine‟s instruction that writers should write with the speaker, subject, audience, purpose, manner and occasion in mind.

Chaucer‟s style used the decasyllable, borrowed from French and Italian forms, with riding rhyme and Caesura in the middle of a line. His metre developed into the heroic metre of the 15th and 16th centuries.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE

Differentiate between Style and Literary Style.

4.0 CONCLUSION

In this unit, we have discussed stylistics, style, literary style, poetry and style, stylistic elements in poetry as well as comparisons of medieval and Renaissance poetry.

5.0 SUMMARY

In this unit, you have learnt about:

. The foregrounding of the term, stylistics, in style;

. The definitions and meaning of style;

. Poetry and style;

. Fundamental elements in poetry;

. Comparisons of medieval and Renaissance poetry.

6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT

1) Can stylistics be separated from style? Discuss.

2) Analyse the literary style of one of the poets discussed in this unit.

3) State the fundamental poetic elements.

4) What is style?

7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING

Babatunde, Sola and Adeyanju, Dele (2002). Stylistics and Poetry in Language Meaning and Poetry. Ilorin: Haytee Press.

Bateson, F. W. (1996). English Poetry. London: Longman.

Beaty, Jerome (1965). Poetry from Statement of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.

.Kennedy, X. J. and Gioa Dana (2007). Introduction to Poetry. Boston Pearson: London.

Lukeman Johnson (2014). Style and the Verse. Ibadan: Macmillan.

Ogunpitan, S. A. (1999). The Grammar of Literary Studies. Ilupeju: Arimus International.

Olujide, T. M. (2002). „Stylistics and Poetry in Language, Meaning and Poetry‟ . In Sola Babatunde and Dele Adeyanju (Eds.) Papers in Honour of E. E. Adegbija at 50. Ilorin: Haytee Press.

Oriola Stanley and Patricia Ogbuehi (2010). „Tayo Olafioye: A Discussion of Style in the Modern Nigerian Novel in AAU‟ . African Studies Review, Vol. 9, June.

Oriola, Stanley (1988). Demystifying Literature - A Literary Examination

Manual for Undergraduates. Yaba: Akinsayan Publishers.

Samuel, Samuel (2013). Language and Style in Poetry. Jos: Help Press.

Smith, A.J.M. (1965). (Ed.) 100 Poems. New York: Methuen.

Thomas, Dylan (1957). The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: Macmillan.

Tyge, Caltwin (2004). Style and the Stylestician. New York: Catwill Publishers.

Yankson, Kofi (1987). An Introduction to Literary Stylistics. Nigeria: Pacific Correspondence College and Press Ltd.