Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/198

Rh The prosody of the older Cornish literature has little in common with the strict system of Welsh. Though one does find alliterations and "internal" rhyming and correspondence of consonants, they do not seem to be at all systematic, but are only either introduced as casual ornaments or purely accidentally. The rules of the older Cornish prosody have more in common with those of Breton, except that, but for one case in the Dramas of a five-syllabled couplet, and the rather irregular Add. Charter fragment in the British Museum, there are only two lengths of lines, seven or four syllables, and the caesura is not very definite.

The seven-syllabled lines are the more common. The whole of the Poem of the Passion is in stanzas of eight seven-syllabled lines, rhyming alternately, but written as fourteen-syllabled lines; and the greater part of the Dramas is in lines of the same length, though with varying arrangements of rhymes. Sometimes whole passages of four-syllabled lines occur, and frequently four-syllabled lines occur in the same stanza with those of seven syllables. The rhythmic accent seems to be trochaic, and the heptasyllabic line to consist of three trochees and a long syllable, but as the stress accent of words is absolutely disregarded, and the strong beats of the rhythm sometimes fall on mono-syllables which out of poetry would probably be enclitic or proclitic, or at any rate very slightly accented, one can only be sure of the fact that the poet of the Ordinalia was careful to count his syllables exactly, and to make the last syllable of every line rhyme with the last syllable of some other line. The author of the Poem of the Passion was not quite so careful, and Jordan was still less so. Diphthongs, as in Breton, are occasionally counted as two syllables, a y followed by another vowel is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant, and there are occasional elisions and perhaps contractions,