Old English Metre

"Now we must honour the guardian of heaven, the might of the measurer, and his thoughts..."

I found a wonderful explanation of Old English metre by Daniel Paul O'Donnell. It’s a watertight form of poetry:

Like all early Germanic metres, Old English verse is accentual and alliterative.

In English, regardless of how many unstressed syllables are packed between two stressed ones, the distance (measured in time) between stresses does not change. This lends the language its syncopated rhythm: you have short flurries of unstressed syllables, usually in the form of the schwa, fenced off by stressed hiccups. Accentual verse exploits this by fixing the number of stressed syllables in each line.

We can usually tell breaking points in a poem by looking at where it rhymes—i.e. rhymes indicate the “underlying metrical structure” of the poem. In alliterative verse, alliteration serves the same function.

Recall what O’Donnell tells us about Old English Metre: it’s (1) accentual and (2) alliterative. But we’re far from done with the rules:

The basic line consists of four stressed syllables and at least four lesser-stressed syllables (conventionally described as ‘unstressed’). A very strong caesura (metrical break) is found between stresses two and three. This caesura is so strong, indeed, that we tend to describe the verse in terms of half-lines: the half-line before the caesura is known as the a-verse or on-verse, the half-line after the caesura as the b-verse or off-verse.

Further down we get:

The half-lines are tied together by alliteration. The rule is that one or both of stressed syllables in the on-verse must alliterate with the first stressed syllable in the off-verse. The second stressed syllable in the off-verse must not share in the alliteration.

So the rules are as follows: there are (1a) four stressed syllables and (1b) at least four unstressed ones in a line that (2) is separated by a metrical break between stresses two and three. Furthermore, (3a) one or both stressed syllables before the break must alliterate with the first stressed syllable after the break, and (3b) the second stressed syllable after the break “must not share the alliteration”.

Crazy!

Understandably, O’Donnell’s translation only partly abides by the rules (but is captivating nevertheless):

Now we must honour the guardian of heaven,
The might of the measurer, and his thoughts,
The work of the father of glory—as he, the eternal lord,
Created the beginning of each of wonders!

I wonder if such rigorous form came intuitively to the English poets of yore, or whether it was a result of meticulous re-writing, trial, and error.