In Pursuit of the Pearl in James Merrill’s First Poems

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

  

     Readers who are neither professors nor poets are likely to stress the communication function of literature at the expense of its essential aesthetic role.  At its most vulgar this tendency appears when a schoolteacher asks a class “What is the poet trying to say?”  Scholars, too, are accustomed to tease out meaning – political, psychological, spiritual – from artistic texts as though these are subjects about which the writer may educate the reader.  While such inquiries are not altogether groundless, the fact is, of course, that the only field in which artists are expert is likely to be art.  In essence, art is self-justifying play.  All arts rise from people entertaining themselves and others by performing recreational symbolic manipulation.  Among the chief pleasures of this universal human activity is the experience of beauty in formally structured patterns, patterns of sound, of meaning, of color and movement, patterns satisfying for their own sake, regardless of reference to anything in lived experience. 

     The role of formal beauty in art is evident in forms like dance, music, and abstract painting but it is never absent from literature as well.  One advantage of critical discussion of theme is that the issues can often be more or less demonstrable, whereas perception of beauty is ultimately subjective.  One may prove that a given work has been considered beautiful by the best authorities for centuries, one may document one’s own motives for applauding a poem’s form, yet it remains impossible to force another to experience pleasure in consuming it. 

     This does not mean, however, that critics do not present judgements of value.  The primary role of a journalistic book reviewer is evaluative, and more scholarly commentators do not shrink from gauging aesthetic quality.  Indeed, their opinions are often spirited.  In appraising the work of James Merrill, many critics express an odd ambivalence.  He is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest American poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet virtually all discussion of his work includes descriptive adjectives that foreground the poet’s mastery of what Pound called melopoeia while treating this skill as a weakness.  Readers’ sensibilities are doubtless shaped by the fact that sound is the most neglected aspect of poetry today.

     In the years since Merrill’s First Poems, poetry has proceeded ever further on the path toward prosiness and the colloquial, and sound has been neglected to the point that it is imperceptible to many readers.  Like Roethke and Lowell the fashions of the time led Merrill to loosen his practice of prosody, yet from the start many readers found his work precious and over-refined.  Even in an era when academic poetry governed most critics’ standards, these poems struck readers as insufficiently vulnerable.  Merrill attracted curiously qualified praise in which his expertise was cause for applause but also for suspicion. 

     This oddly ambiguous rhetorical pattern describing Merrill emerges clearly from a perusal of New York Times reviews of his books.   The review of First Poems in the New York Times heralded the book and called attention to the poet’s “superb elegance” heralding “the rise of a new American formalism.”  Yet the critic’s reservations, though muted, were clear in the review’s title “Mannered World,” and his later reference to the poet’s “highly-mannered style.”  The Times’ next reviewer felt it necessary to mount a defense, asserting that “The verbal elegance, and the Jamesian or Proustian world he draws his people and images from, are neither frivolous nor precious.”  The third Times critic to treat Merrill’s poetry constructed a miniature imaginative flight on the now familiar theme.  “One could imagine him (or the persona of his poems) aging into a perfectly dapper Henry James villain: a Gilbert Osmond, to whom life consists of figurines to be manipulated. Brilliant, technically flawless, terribly aloof, involved in their own artifice.” He finds, however, in Water Street, an increased “humility,” as though the Christian virtues had aesthetic currency.  The reviewer of Nights and Days balances Merrill’s “suavity and technical polish” against a newfound “complexity of feeling,” noting in sum the same bipolar opposition: “This poetry fascinates and exercises the intelligence as much as it liberates the emotions.”  The commentator on The Fire Screen repeats the pattern.  In an article titled “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” he describes Merrill’s work as “elegant and cosmopolitan . . .  decorative, sumptuous, tinged with world-weariness . . .rarified” and regards the most successful poem as that least assertive of form, thus “freeing” the subject and  “compelling it to speak for itself” unlike a poem in a more demanding form which would hold “its subject still by enclosing it in a complex frame.”  Well after Merrill’s death the theme continued, with the Times writer noting his poetry’s “high, almost lacquered finish” and its “refinement, intricacy of design and formal containment,” while regretting his being “in thrall to a certain kind of poetic decorum.”  He is “a hopeless voluptuary when it comes to language” whose “hyper-refined style” recalls the Decadents.”  In short, he is “recherché” due to the unfortunate tendency for his “gifts with language” to “become his vice.” [1]

     A procession of reviewers continued with the same theme since, suggesting again and again that virtuoso technique, while worthy of praise, yet was likely to signal some sort of emotional emptiness.  A few further examples of this all-but-universal judgement will suffice. 

     Secondary codes developed to imply this sort of ambivalent assessment of Merrill’s achievement include references to Wallace Stevens and to Mozart.  Helen Vendler, a partisan of Merrill’s oeuvre, after stating the opposition in her title “Ardor and Artifice,” ensures its understanding by the subtitle “The Mozartian touch of a master poet,” and proceeds to build her essay on it.  She notes opponents of Merrill’s receiving the 1973 Bollingen Prize had objected to his poetry, “a hermetic cultivation of one's sensibility and a fastidious manipulation of received forms."  Observing that the poet was consistently accused of “snobbery, affectation, preciousness, artifice, perversity, and elitism,” she enlists the author himself to concede that his early poems were a "melodic, empty-headed fin de siècle sort of thing." [2] 

     One sympathetic reader says that Merrill was a poet who preferred “wit over emotion,” who “embroidered his effects, unable to let loose in a soulful voice.” [3]  Another critic has felt it necessary to rehabilitate First Poems though her appreciation is limited by calling the poems “borrowed,” “an imitation” with “a cold, transparent medium intervening between the self and the world,” “all dressed up without much of a place to go,” and lacking “the animating spark of individual experience.”  She even accuses the elegant Merrill of “awkwardness.” [4]             

     As Vendler’s quotation of the poet’s own self-denigrating characterization of his work suggests, Merrill had heard this opinion commonly enough that he adopted it in part.  In an untitled poem from 1972 (which he chose to highlight with italics to indicate its significance in 1982) Merrill characterizes his early work in a warm but somewhat condescending tone, rich in aristocratic indulgence, using the most unassuming terms. 

  

-- Not after all a work so vile

That portions even now aren’t guaranteed

To make the simplehearted read

And who know better, smile.                [5]

 

 The most that can be said of these poems then is that they “blaze tinily,” and the awkward, slightly unusual adverb reinforces the author’s humble pose.  Of course this is in effect nothing but an unusually gracefully performed modesty topos, demonstrating rather than apologizing for literary sophistication.

     There can be doubt that Merrill is a highly self-conscious practitioner who makes considerable use of both pure sound as well as of montages of ideas and images.  The care with which he builds his lines is evident to the analyst.  Merrill’s mid-twentieth century reaction to the danger of meter and rhyme sounding child-like, mechanical, insincere, or off-putting is not to abandon traditional forms but to loosen them comfortably. 

         One need only open First Poems and glance at “The Black Swan” (also the title of the poet’s first chapbook, privately printed) to note the poet’s concern with form.  The poem’s five stanzas are visually similar, looking much like rhyme royal, an intriguing invitation to the reader much as the entrance to a meticulously tended French-style garden beckons toward the stroller.  The number of feet per line varies  5-3-5-5-5-3-4 (pentameter, trimeter, pentameter, pentameter, pentameter, trimeter, tetrameter) and the feet are basically iambic.  Merrill said of the iamb in general that “no other meter will do,” calling the foot “our virtual birthright,” [6] but this basic backbeat is subject to considerable variation.  The rhyme scheme is always AABCABC, but the rhymes are virtually always partial. 

     An appended chart provides the data, but simply reading the text reveals his approach at once.  Merrill has composed an elaborate stanza of his own invention which is yet similar enough to earlier forms to seem natural, yet it is clearly “modern” due to the considerable irregularity of the metrical and rhyme patterns.  A courtly dance is in progress, but it is not one of absolutely predictable patterns.  Merrill’s form is sufficiently complex that the arrival of rhymes and the length of lines are often something of a surprise in spite of the overall regularity.

     The sound structure of the poem has an appeal of its own, accessible even to a non-English speaker, yet the melody, as always, is functional and expressive in support of meaning.  As the present concern is not hermeneutic, a few examples must suffice. 

     The poem begins not with an iamb but with an arresting downbeat like the “Hwaet!” that opens Beowulf.  The last line of that stanza is hypercatalectic, i. e. adding a syllable, indicating in the pace the excitement of the poet’s suspended “wonder.”  The fourth line of the second stanza includes an extra syllable in the second foot corresponding to the “thing in itself,” an object then described in regular feet.  In the last seven lines of the final stanza a regular pentameter is followed by a regular tetrameter and then four lines more disordered in meter as the speaker accepts his relationship to the extraordinary swan.

     Meanwhile, the rhyme words squirm and turn, differing with each other as much as they agree.  Thus “lawns” and “swans” are all but harmonious, while the word “draw,” with its increased difference, indicates the problem poised by the “private chaos” that accompanies the fine bird.  The effect is increased by the comparative extent to which “splendor” and “wonder” and “wake” and “lake” consort well together.

     The expressive potential of Merrill’s sound effects is secondary, though, to the altogether formal pleasure of observing theme and variations, expectations satisfied or turned in the serial experience of the reader or listener following the poem as it unfolds.  With line lengths and rhymes in flux, yet under the governance of an overall pattern, the poem is at once formally elegant and unpredictable.  Merrill resembles in form the highly conventionalized yet ever-fresh structures of a Bach fugue. 

     Those critics who find Merrill too skillful a poet link this characteristic with a lack of affect, a deficiency in emotion, yet “The Black Swan” ends, having passed through “wonder,” “pain,” and “grief,” with a declaration both direct and passionate: “I love the black swan.”  One need not venture far into biographical details (he called his professor Kimon Friar “the black swan”) to see how in fact he foregrounds feeling not only in his first book’s first poem, but throughout his career and, incidentally, his life. 

     The theme is elaborated in “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards.”  A tour de force with in six sections in varying forms, each of them a sort of cabaret song detailing one variety of love-longing, united by the opening and closing mentions of “sweet air,” suggesting the goodness of life in spite of doubts, pains, regrets, and frozen feet. 

      Two eleven-syllable lines conclude section one after six with ten syllables each, as the “hungering waves are both ornamented and limited by the thistle’s pain.  The rhymes are tightly but irregularly wrapped with an ABCBCADD pattern though a, b, and c all share the vowel-r sound.  The d rhymes state the poem’s central tension, the linkage of pain and pleasure, with the “pearl-eaters” a distant ideal of satisfied desire.  

     The second section not only builds a shapely self-contained verbal structure; it also plays against the first.  Instead of the insistent if off-base rhyme scheme of the first section there seem to be no end-rhymes at all (only the pleasant internal echo of “rambler”/”brambles” in the first stanza) until the ninth line when “blows”/”grows” comes as a surprise, only to be capped by the tenth line which resounds rhyming fully with the fifth.  Lines five and ten are also each eleven rather than ten syllables in length though in these stanzas twelve syllable lines appear as well. 

     The third section switches to shorter lines suggesting children’s verse.  Doubtless to balance the expectation of heavily stressed meters and full rhymes associated with the nursery.  The syllable count varies randomly from five to seven while rhymes are etiolated almost out of recognition, with the first two being the ironic pair of “nursery”/”mercenary” and the sinister one of “witches”/”matches.”  The light expectation associated with children’s poetry is belied by the haunting third stanza in which people, like flowers, either “fall helter-skelter” or, turning “wry like thistles,” like Keats’ bees in the Autumn Ode, deceive themselves into believing that “each latest/ Is safest, is sweetest.”

     Four architectural octets, recalling the septets of “The Black Swan” form the fourth section which shifts abruptly from the nursery to the drawing room and the enactment of an ambiguous love relationship in languorous lines recalling “Prufrock.”  Here the half-rhymes again are regular in their appearance ABABCDDC.  The shapely form of then stanzas is defined by the line lengths, basically pentameter with lines one, two, three, five, six, and eight approximating pentameters (though varying between ten and fourteen syllables) and lines four and seven trimeters (between five and seven syllables).

     The poet disorients his readers once more with the fifth section, an unlikely representation of the pains of love in a vignette of Henry IV seeking absolution in Canossa for what was essentially a political struggle with Pope Gregory VII in five-line stanzas with partial rhymes ABBAA.  In an example of Merrill’s meticulous attention, the penultimate line “Whatever I tasted, wherever I strayed” stands out with eleven syllables slowing and spreading the implications of the magical moment at which everything the poet encounters becomes “at once of pure pearl made.”   He here resumes the pearl imagery which had been running underground since section one and which is also informed by earlier texts from the parable of the “pearl of great price” in Matthew through the fourteenth century Pearl and beyond.  Taking readers by surprise with a sort of verbal shell game, just when Merrill seemed to have wandered from his theme, he lands suddenly in what looks like its ecstatic culmination.

     In section six, the final lyric of the variations, iambic pentameter dominates, though the syllable count ranges from ten to thirteen and even partial rhymes are so dispersed as to vanish.  Yet this conclusion is a ringing call, as the poet affirms the quest for love, however imperfect, reaching a total acceptance of the flip side of the erotic coin in what he calls the “sweet air” of the final words, which then reader realizes had been implicit from the start, but which has been justified by the series of lyrics.      

     What is most important about the form of both “The Black Swan” and “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards” is not the specific forms the poet employs or the alterations that enrich the poems meanings, but rather the fact that any reader or listener will perceive structures in the sound.  Whether consciously or not, the poem’s consumers react to the patterning.  Merrill might be compared to the masters of bebop whose wild polyrhythms and changes on melody could only be heard if traces of enough regularity to create expectations persisted.  Careful analysis of Chaucer or Shakespeare reveals considerable variation even in these canonical poets, but Merrill’s choice of rough cut rhymes and cadences that stumble or skip as often as they march distinguishes his work. 

     If the poet is showing off, it would be a shame were the reader not to enjoy the display.  Merrill’s pyrotechnics may not be to the taste of all, but they are masterfully constructed in a way impressive to anyone sensitive the sound value of words.  It is as theoretically absurd to suggest that too great a skill in managing the sound of a poem can entail a lack of strong feeling as to suggest that excessive brilliance in imagery or in narrative might imply some other faults.  In fact there is no reason to regard artistic technique and passion as in some way opposed when in fact the former is so often in service to the latter.

     Critics are simply wrong when they suggest that technical virtuosity is anything but a strength.  The error arises due to the fact that many readers, both lay and professional, retain Romantic assumptions.  The recreational manipulation of symbols called literature may cultivate the illusion of passionate self-expression.  Yet the author also may strive for a variety of effects.  A writer may, for instance, construct a description of a place or a personality.  Another may be more tendentious, stressing theme over other elements.  Story-telling may dominate some novels or poems.  The creation of beauty is a universal artistic goal; little wonder that in some works this foundational element is foregrounded.

     Most works include an array of these aesthetic ends, though they are not mixed in equal portions.  None is inherently superior to another.  A description, a didactic theme, a good story, a verbal object of startling beauty, each must be judged to fail or succeed on its own terms.  The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the fictions of Ronald Firbank are certainly not to everyone’s taste, but they have consistently found admiring readers.  Should Merrill’s fate be similar, he will be in good company. 

 

  

 

1.  Anthony Harrigan, “Mannered World,” New York Times, July 8, 1951; William Meredith, “Images and Reality,“ May 3, 1959; X. J. Kennedy, “Four Fashions of Contemporary Verse,” New York Times, November 25, 1962; Gene Baro, “New In Poetry,” New York Times, June 26, 1966; Daniel Hoffman, “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” New York Times, August 2, 1970; August Kleinzahler, “Changing Light,” New York Times, November 7, 2008.

 

2.  The New Yorker, March 4, 2001.

 

3.  David Mason, “Merrill’s Intimations,” The Hudson Review Summer 2015.

 

4.  Rachel Hadas, “James Merrill's Early Work: A Revaluation,” The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4337717. 

 

5.  Merrill, James, From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976 (1982).

 

6.  Both phrases are quoted in Bill Pahlka, “James Merrill's Secret Scansions,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 59, No. 4 (winter 2017). 

Thematic and Structural Function of the Hypermetric Lines in Beowulf

     The hypermetric passages of Beowulf must have stood out as dramatically for the poem’s original listeners as they do on the page for readers of modern editions. Oddly, though, a review of past Beowulf criticism reveals that virtually no attention has been given their function in the poem. Considering that the poet's command of the subtleties of his language and his technical skill as a versifier have been amply demonstrated, it seems likely that this strikingly anomalous metrical variation must have been consciously employed toward specific ends. Indeed, examination of the three loci in Beowulf where hypermetric lines occur indicates that they serve to reinforce important thematic concerns in each instance, and, further, that they play a significant role in the design of the poem as a whole.
     Past analysis of the hypermetric lines has, for the most past, been descriptive, merely noting their existence and attempting in various ways to assimilate them as variations of some ordinary line. The discussion in Pope's The Rhythm of Beowulf [1] is perhaps the most prominent example. Several critics have, however, broached the subject of the aesthetics of hypermetrism. B.J. Timmer expands upon the sketchy and impressionistic comments by Sievers, [2] but his treatment, too, is vague and incomplete. He regards the first Beowulf passage as a “slowed” section and all but dismisses the other two. Viewing the phenomenon in general, however, throughout Old English poetry, he lists three functions for hypermetric lines: 1) slowing (and this for Timmer is generally associated with expressing solemnity, portent, or simple emphasis), 2) opening and closing speeches and other divisions of poetic material, and 3) a specialized “gnomic” use hypothesized since gnomic texts have a disproportionately large number of hypermetric lines. Apart from this rather suggestive contribution, other commentators have been exclusively concerned with technical prosodic classifications, with historical origins, or they have weakly assented to the received idea of “slowing.” [3]
     The first hypermetric passage (11. 1163-1168) is part of the description of the victory celebration at Heorot following Beowulf's struggle with Grendel. Beginning in the middle of a sentence, it tells of Wealhtheow's entry into the hall, of Hrothulf and Hrethric sitting together in friendship, and of Unferth, obedient at the feet of Hrothgar. The overall scene is one of triumphal festivity, and the specific details stress the present peace between members of the royal family and between loyal retainers and their lord. The queen passes before this tableau of harmony almost like a divinity of order, but with her address to Hrothgar the spell is broken and the normal line length returns.
     The Beowulf does not, though, paint this picture of national beatitude without including very clear suggestions of its contrary. The reference to future discord within the household over succession to the throne gives to the adjective “godan” the ominous, characteristically dark coloration that tinges even the most joyful scenes of the poem. The image of Unferth's faithful role, emphasized by his physical position, is complicated by the disclosure of his fratricide, thus problematizing his own nature and implying even more strongly that the harmony of the royal family is only temporary.
     Still, this passage does appear at a time of high rejoicing, one of the most “optimistic” moments of the poem. Sievers original comment that the extension of the line would slow reading and induce a tone of solemnity is probably just, but — even ignoring this effect — simply due to the indisputable fact that their greater length causes these lines to stand out in the text, they seem to constitute something of a vignette, a miniature of “the happy kingdom,” in spite of the fact that the seeds of destruction are explicitly present as well.
     The second hypermetric passage (11. 1705-1707) occurs after Beowulf's defeat of Grendel's mother, again during a victory feast in Heorot. Hrothgar praises Beowulf in extravagant terms, saying that his glory is spread among every people, that he rules with power and wisdom, and reaffirming his own debt to Beowulf and his intention of rewarding him. Though the hypermetric passage again begins in midsentence and gives the appearance of being casual and unmotivated, it is placed in precisely the same sort of celebration as the first. Again, it stresses feudal ties, the power of a just ruler and the stability derived from strong social bonds among allies. All the major areas of heroic excellence are included in the grand encomium: fame, power, and wisdom. The moment is one of total success, optimism, and order. The only cloud that might be imagined on this bright horizon is the fact of Beowulf's eventual doom, presumably familiar to the poem's audience.
     The third passage (11. 2995-2996) is a part of Wiglaf's speech during Beowulf's obsequies after his death in combat with the dragon. While the location of the passage following the third of the three major battles of the text exactly parallels the other two, the occasion can no longer be a joyful one. The speaker's very name, Wiglaf, suggests the woeful destructive potential of war. Indeed, after the death of the hero, the entire society is in the position of a vulnerable remnant of survivors, rather like Finn's decimated troop mentioned earlier. Wiglaf is attempting to place the danger of a Swedish attack upon the leaderless state in a historical context by recounting incidents of old battles. Specifically, the hypermetric lines tell how Hygelac rewarded Wulf and Eofer for bringing him the arms of Ongentheow. He is said to have given them generous gifts of land and rings and the presentation is said to have been altogether fitting in view of their extraordinary and valiant deeds. Thus, for the third time, the hypermetric lines evoke a victory celebration, a time of reaffirmation of the bonds that hold society together, but in this instance the prosperous and united kingdom is available only to retrospective contemplation. Its strength is mentioned only while alerting the company to the grave perils that await them. The identical placement (after an engagement with a monster) and semantic content (the strong and well-ordered monarchy) only heighten the contrast of this moment with the first two. Something essential is gone with the passing of Beowulf; never again will such stable and glorious rule occur.
     In formal terms, the hypermetric lines serve to delineate the major narrative divisions of the text. Like ornaments or flourishes following each battle, they reinforce the poem's tripartite structure. However, they also preserve the two-part division implied by Beowulf's age, location, and species of enemy being the same for adventures one and two, yet different for the third. The pattern, then, is a statement which is then repeated (sometimes with variation), and completed by an answering third term that contradicts, complicates, or extends the initial proposition. This design is both known as a rhetorical formula and familiar from such other forms as the standard American AAB blues lyric.
     It is noteworthy, too, that each of these passages is shorter than the one before, dwindling from six to three to two lines. This pattern coincides with the thematic movement of the story as a whole as it moves from the early victories to the hero's inevitable death as the possibility of “the happy kingdom” becomes more and more elusive. The first passage only hints at the potential for fighting and discord, though quite explicitly, while by the last the anxious national mood provides the context, though the information in the hypermetric lines themselves is full of nostalgic well-being. These two scenes are absolutely symmetrical mirror-images in that the first is a situation of unreserved joy that contains the seeds of its own degeneration into chaos, while the last is a scene of immediately threatening chaos in which joy is present only in traces of memory. These surround a calm second passage in which the problematic status of heroic values and polity is momentarily concealed. In this way the group of three passages repeats the structure evident within each individually, privileging in the end neither side of the antinomies order/ disorder, peace/ war, virtue/ vice, and so on.
     It is significant, too, that each of the passages begins in midsentence. This technique smooths over the otherwise abrupt transition between line lengths and maintains the tension-filled ambivalence of the contrast between a condition of secure felicity (flourishing briefly or recollected from the past) and the harsh realities of life among the Danes and the Geats. The sudden change in metrical convention is then masked in the same way that the contradiction-laden seams of society are masked in ordinary social interaction as illustrated in this series of passages.
     The fact that hypermetric lines are particularly prominent in gnomic verse is also suggestive. Gnomic associations may highlight the teaching function of these scenes, their paradoxical content (related to the popularity of riddles in early Germanic literatures), and the resulting sense of poetic didacticism as the revelation of mysteries. In these passages, the listener or reader sees encoded the governing ideology of the time: in terms of personal values such as courage and wisdom, and social values such as peace, loyalty, and hierarchy, but these are no sooner defined than they are radically interrogated and finally revealed, not as hollow, but as inexorably, tragically self-contradictory. The existential anxiety of Beowulf's vague subjective sense that he must have done something wrong is not a contemporary misreading. It constitutes the great and poignant strength of Old English verse that it expresses the love for pleasures of this world in terms the more moving for the realization that those pleasures are only temporary.
     In the hypermetric passages of Beowulf the same attitude is applied to the subclass of social pleasures and the result defines the poet’s characteristic tone, one common throughout Old English poetry. He always sees through his material, but he does not for that reason dismiss or replace it. His inscription of defeat within victory and victory within defeat defines a heroism beyond bravado, a heroism born of the struggle with the mercilessly frustrating terms of existence.
     The tendency to undercut the heroic simultaneously with its presentation is inherent in the distinctively Germanic poetic usage of litotes, so pervasive in Beowulf as well as, for instance, in the Nibelungenlied. While this device was relatively little used among the classical rhetoricians, it is favored not only by the writers of Germanic epic, but also by the Minnesinger who recount the similarly problematic wars of the heart where pleasure and pain are closely linked. The fact that even the Germanic gods were limited by mortality seems emblematic of the fact that this culture resisted the comfort of imaginative absolutes on heaven as well as earth.
     As much as the moral imperatives of heroism were in fact mandatory, they were simultaneously seen as hollow. The function of the hypermetric passages in Beowulf seems clear. They serve formally to define the major sections of the text and to epitomize its theme. They isolate moments depicting the happiness of a peaceful and strong court in which people joined securely by deep loyalties are exultant with success. This wish-fulfillment dream court forms a contrast to those one encounters in the poem where cowardice, subversion, dissension, and the appearance of mighty foes are ever-present dangers. The passages follow each of the hero's encounters with prodigious enemies almost as a series of sighs of relief that for the time being people possess ephemeral peace, but they end as suddenly as they began, providing foreboding in the first two instances and realization in the third of the fact that stability is an illusion and fate is inscrutable. The hypermetric passages insist upon what much of the text implies: that the heroic ideology is at once imperative and inadequate. It is this double-bind that gives Beowulf its grandeur and its tragedy.




1. Pope, J.C. The Rhythm of Beowulf, rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.

2. Timmer, B.J. “Expanded Lines in Old English Poetry,” Neophilologus 35 (1952), pp. 226-230.

3. Bliss, Alan J. "The Appreciation of Old English Metre," in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. ed. Norman Davis and C.L. Wrenn, London: Allen and Unwin, 1962, pp. 27-40.  Here Bliss argues that the regular OE line is close to speech rhythms while the longer line is more artificial and poetic. Repeating the notion that hypermetric lines slow the movement of the verse, he suggests that they increase its continuity and fluidity as he thinks there to have been no pause after the recitation of a longer line.
     In “The Origin and Structure of the Old English Hypermetric Line.” Notes and Queries, n. s. 19 (1972), pp. 242-248 Bliss is primarily concerned with setting forth a historical theory deriving the OE hypermetric line from a primitive Germanic model. Here he says that the rationale for the use of such lines “remains mysterious” and “no convincing explanation for their function” has been adduced.
Hieatt, Constance B. “A New Theory of Triple Rhythm in the Hypermetric Lines of Old English Verse,” Modern Philology, 67 (1969), pp. 1-8 claims that the hypermetric lines would best be scanned with three measures to a verse rather than four.