This was good, but I was not totally enamored of the idea of a fully repetitive chorus, as it was just too much like the original piece. I kept looking for other repetitive lines in lyrical poems.
 
I knew that I wanted the language to be a Middle English and, because of my unfamiliarity with that language, a ‘Not-too-early’ Middle English. (Middle English covers a period of several hundred years and anyone who has read anything in it knows that the difference between early thirteenth century middle English and late 14th century middle English is . . . well, it’s almost like two different languages!). I was shooting for around Chaucer’s time, so I went straight to Chaucer.

Geoffrey Chaucer was a popular court poet and writer and therefore was often called upon to write lyrical lines for one reason or another. He has several poems that carry repetitive lines and phrases. I gravitated mostly towards his lyrics with seven line verses. His poem entitled ‘Gentilesse’ has 3 seven line verses with the final line in each repeated as the last line of each verse. His poem ‘Truth’ has four verses, each of which has as the seventh line the line ‘And trouthe shal delivere, it is no drede’. His poem ‘Complaint to His Purse’ also follows that format.

His poem ‘Merciless Beauty’ is an unusual form for him. It serves as proof that it is not just the last line that can repeat itself. It consists of 3 verses of 13 lines each where the first line is repeated in the 6th and 11th line, the second line is repeated as the 7th and 11th line and the third line is also the last line of the poem. Thus:

Youre yen two wol slee me sodeinly
I may the beautee of hem nat sustene.
So woundeth it thurghout myn herte keene.

And but youre word wol helen hastily
Myn hertes wounde, whil that it is greene
          Youre yen two wol slee me sodeinly
          I may the beautee of hem nat sustene.

Upon my trouthe, I saye you faithfully
That ye been of my lif and deeth the queene
For with my deeth the trouthe shal be seene.
          Youre yen two wol slee me sodeinly
          I may the beautee of hem nat sustene.
          So woundeth it thurghout myn herte keene.

And so on for two more verses with the same scheme. (ref 3, page 227)
This rhyme scheme seemed a bit more rigorous and a bit less conducive to making the final product I was looking for. In the end, I decided to go with a modified version of Chaucer’s seven line verses, but I had by then decided to have the last two lines be the repetitive ones, with the sixth line being identical and the seventh being thematically similar but textually different.

THE MECHANICS:
The lyrical poem that I wrote was in 4 seven line verses with a repetitive line in each one. This would allow me to keep all the elements of the original song (an introductory verse, a verse praising her artistic skills, a verse praising her combat skills, and a verse praising her courtesy). It also happens to be the same form as Chaucer’s poems ‘Truth’ and ‘Gentilesse’. I decided to use the same rhyme scheme as these poems used, which is as follows;

This bears resemblance to Chaucer’s poems but deviates it two major ways. The first is that it is the 6th line in each phrase that repeats itself and the 7th which changes from verse to verse. (See below for why I did this) The second is that the rhymes of the first two lines do not follow through to each subsequent verse (i.e. the second verse starts with DE, rather than with another AB rhyme.) In this respect the poem follows Chaucer’s less lyrical seven line verse works such as ‘The Parliament of Fowls’ and many of the Canterbury tales, which follow the same rhyme scheme that I did.

I also decided to keep the poem in iambic pentameter (10 syllables to a line with, as a general rule, every other syllable stressed). Chaucer used pentameter in most of his lyrical works, including ‘Truth’ and ‘Gentilesse.’ Other poets of the time (and before and after the time) also did stick to this meter in their works. I find when writing lyrical poetry that I favor meter simply because it makes it more . . . lyrical sounding. I also wanted to stick as much to the original feel of a Chaucer poem as I could, and this necessitated using iambic pentameter.

The Process of Translation
A quick glance at the original song compared to the period style poem will show that there was quite a transition between the two. I knew what form my poem was to take, so the first thing I decided was what exactly to do for the repetitive chorus part of the poem. After some long agonizing word play I found a refrain I really liked and that worked into the theme very well, though it transposed the 6th and 7th line.

I must confess that because of my lack of knowledge of Middle English I worked somewhat backwards in my verse formations. I wrote lists of Middle English words that would rhyme and were appropriate and I worked the lines largely around those words. This at first seems like a backward way to write a poem, but it is a process I have used to write poems in contemporary English as well.

Problems with translations:
Obviously people who read this documentation will wonder why I chose to repeat the 6th line of the verse instead of the last line of the verse, as was common in Chaucer’s works upon which this poem is based. I can only give the answer of aesthetics. While I was fully capable of changing the words around, I really thought the poem worked best as it is written.

I struggled also briefly over whether or not to capitalize all the ‘Hirs’ and ‘Shes’. Chaucer did not. I did. I chose to because this poem was written specifically to enter into an SCA competition, and proper SCA etiquette states that we should capitalize pronouns signifying our Monarchs.

I also was made aware of the fact that the spelling for ‘Wallace’ as a last name is a later period spelling. A more appropriate spelling for the last name Wallace in a fourteenth century poem would have been Walays or Wallays. I chose to instead use the later period spelling, for the simple reason that the poem was written for someone who spelled their name as Wallace. I consider this to be a creative anachronism, which seems appropriate for our society.

Chaucer was well known for occasionally taking liberty with pronunciations of words to get ten syllables into a line. I did this in one instance as well. In the third verse, second line I use the word ‘feres’ (fears) and would expect that to keep the pentameter that it would be pronounced as a two syllable word, which it is. But two lines later I use the word ‘werres’ (wars) and would expect it to be pronounced as a one syllable word, which it usually is not. I just figured that if Chaucer did it I could, too.

I had a bit of a problem deciding when to use articles and pronouns. In my first drafts of this poem, I used the article ‘the’ and the pronoun ‘she’ liberally. I read quite a bit of Chaucer poetry while writing this and found that he uses articles but only infrequently, so I limited my use of them as well. One example of where I removed a ‘the’ is in the first line of the third verse, which used to read ‘owt on the playn’ but which I changed to ‘owt on gret playn’. I only use the article ‘the’ once, though it is in the last, semi repetitive line so it actually occurs once in each verse. I use the pronoun she only once as well. (I used the pronoun ‘Hir’ very frequently, but I consider that a necessary use, as the poem is entirely based upon a lady and references to Her.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENTS
I would like very much to work with Middle English more in the future. Use of articles, proper uses of pronouns and the proper conjugation of verbs are all areas I would like to improve upon. I would also like to broaden my general vocabulary to open up some more freestyle writing of lyrics, rather than being ultimately so dependent on a variety of glossaries.

Still, all told I am pleased with this effort and may well look into translating more of my pieces into Middle English language and style.

References:

1) Burrow, J.A. and Turville-Petre, Thorlac. A Book of Middle English.
3rd edition. Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

2) Hirsh, John C. Medieval Lyric; Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and
Carols. Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

3) The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th edition. WW Norton
and Co., 1986. Pages 88-94 and 224-231.

Two websites were also used to help with specific word translations. They were:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/concise/concise.html and the University of Michigan Online Middle English Dictionary. I could not access this website directly (I had to have a student ID number), so I have to send many thanks to The Honorable Lord Olivier de Bayonne, who helped me immensely by using his ID to get the translations to specific words I asked him to get.

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This site is maintained by Ursula von Bremen - this page was  updated 25 November, 2006.