End-rhyme and alliteration sonotations in Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the"Gawain"-poet.

Abstract

Alliteration and Anglo-Norman influenced end-rhyme were vigorous, alternative, vernacular verse-forms in the latter third of the fourteenth-century in England. Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain-poet's vernacular poetry embodies concern with interpretation, modification of verse forms and knowledge of register and the associational pull of sound patterns. These poets' work demonstrates interest in laws of usage but also the hubristic drive of crafters working to "sette" their precious creations "sengeley in synglere" (Pearl 8). Used for sense-making and sensuality, sound-patterning is both an interpretive element and a given of end-rhyme and alliterative verse. Sound-echo interactions in poetry influence connotation and, hence, denotation. Comparative and contrastive groupings generated by underlying or site-specific referential sound-patterns create sonotations: sound-cued patterns of denotative interaction and accumulations of connotation. I write of sonotations to explicitly invoke consciously-crafted, linguistically bound sounds. My interpretive, comparative, sound-pattern analyses of rhyme and alliteration are focused upon prominently patterned sound in relation to specific words (chapter two), characters (chapter three), settings (chapter four) or an entire poem (chapter five). These foci reflect concern with linguistic, narrative, allegorical and ethical interpretation. Particularly in allegorical, dream-vision or pilgrimage literature, words and characters (e.g. Truth) can act as guides to revelation or damnation. Settings (e.g. New Jerusalem) can be goals of narratives. Expanding my scope, I introduce interpretations of the influence of sound-patterning on word-usage, character perception and persuasion and the emotive and temporal effects of setting before I present a sonotation analysis of a poem (Pearl) which incorporates these sound-cued elements. As sound, alliteration and rhyme are sensual, as patterns they are structural. They create associations, while the divine and heroic is represented in medieval reverence by unity, singularity and oneness. Yet, the one and the ineffable are not the materials to hand for workers in words. My study demonstrates how these thoughtful, post-Babel poets negotiated the sensual and rhetorical influence of sound-patterning as they balanced the solas and sentence of their poetry.