Georg Rudolf Weckherlin; The Embodiment of a Transitional Stage in German Metrics

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: E?The Romance Metrical Technique The French metrical technique, as has already been hinted, formed the bridge between the accentuating principle of early Germanic poetry and the alternating system of the period we are now entering. In the words of Paul: 32 Eine starkere Veranderung der Rhythmik wurde durch den Einfluss der romanischen Metrik veranlasst. Das Prinzip der romanischen Lyrik ist feste Silbenzahl und Unabhangigkeit vom natiirlichen Accent, abgesehen vom Versschluss und von der Casur; selbst diese verlangt nicht immer bestimmte Accentuation. These sentences, with one important stricture which will be made shortly, seem to me to contain an adequate, if brief, description of the Romance technique. A few examples, taken at random from old and contemporary French poetry, will, perhaps, clarify the purport of the passage. Lines 360i-61 of the Chevalier au Lion of Cretien de Troyes 33 read: Dessor une coute vermoille Trouverent la dame seant. In the same octosyllabic verse (nine syllables for feminine lines) is the Roman de Rou of Wace,34 from which lines 119-20 are quoted: Des que tierce del jour entra Que la bataille cumenga. The strictly alternating character of these four lines, with -weak e -syllables in arsis, is faithfully handed down to Frenchpoetry of our own day. I quote a celebrated passage from Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, 35 Act III, Scene 9: (ed. Weinhold, Paderlborn 1880) were probably written between 1240 and 1255, trSgt durchaus, as the editor tells us, introd. p. 21, den Charakter des deutschen erzahlenden Verses aus der guten Zeit des dreizehnten Jahr- hunderts. Deutsche Metrik, Pauls Grundriss n', Abteilung 1, p. 935. From Chrestomathie de 1'ancien frangais, ed. Karl Bartsch, llth edition prepare...