Latin - Aldhelm - Carmen Rhythmicum
‘Rhythmic Verse’: A great storm blows the roof off the church
Aldhelm, born of a noble family in Wessex, was the abbot of the monastery at Malmesbury (Wiltshire) where he had been brought up and received his earliest education. He subsequently became bishop of Sherborne, and died in the year 709 or 710. Aldhelm is the first Anglo-Saxon we know of who composed extensively in Latin, both in highly ornate prose, and also in verse. The latter in particular was an achievement of which he felt justly proud: he boasted that he had been the first ‘born of our race and nourished in the cradles of a Germanic people’ to write about Latin verse composition. Aldhelm learnt to compose Latin metrical verse, bound by strict rules governing syllable-value and scansion, handed down by highly technical manuals and exemplified by the great Classical poets. Such compositions must have required much time and effort. But alongside metrical verse, there was another more accessible poetic form — rhythmical verse — which depends for its structure on syllable-counting and patterns of stress or rhythmical beat. Before Aldhelm, it had been used mainly for Christian hymns and brief letter-poems, but he appears to have been the first to think of using it for narrative, in his so-called Carmen rhythmicum. The lines of this poem contain eight syllables each (hence the term octosyllabic verse), with the stress or beat always falling on the syllable before the last-but-one (the antepenultimate syllable: for example in the first line of the excerpt, the last word is ‘ingéntibus’ with the stress on -gen-). Pairs of lines are linked by rhyme at the end of the line, and there is also a great deal of alliteration, within and between the lines. These features and the octosyllabic form make for a richly resonant and fast-paced poetic medium which Aldhelm then used to tell the ripping yarn of a journey he made from Cornwall up through Devon (presumably on his way home to Malmesbury), during a fearsome storm, during which a church, where Aldhelm seems to have stopped over on his journey, has its roof torn right off by the high winds.
