Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/208

196 fusing of melody and words into an utterance of song—at last into a strophe—music worked potently, shaping the composition of the lines, moulding them to rhythm, insisting upon sonorousness in the words, promoting their assonance and at last compelling them to rhyme so as to meet the stress, or mark the ending, of the musical periods. Thus the exigencies of melody helped to evoke the finished verse, while the words reciprocating through their vocal capabilities and through the inspiration of their meaning, aided the evolution of the melodies. In fine, words and melody, each quickened by the other, and each moulding the other to itself, attained a perfected strophic unison; and mediaeval musician-poets achieved at last the finished verses of hymns or Sequences and student-songs.

There were two distinct lines of evolution of accentual Latin verse in the Middle Ages; and although the faculty of song was a moving energy in both, it worked in one of them more visibly than in the other. Along the one line accentual verse developed pursuant to the ancient forms, displacing quantity with accent, and evolving rhyme. The other line of evolution had no connection with the antique. It began with phrases of sonorous prose, replacing inarticulate chant. These, under the influence of music, through the creative power of song, were by degrees transformed to verse. The evolution of the Sequence-hymn will be the chief illustration. With the finished accentual Latin poetry of the twelfth century it may become impossible to tell which line of rhythmic evolution holds the antecedent of a given poem. In truth, this final and perfected verse may often have a double ancestry, descending from the rhythms which had superseded metre, and being also the child of mediaeval melody. Yet there is no difficulty in tracing by examples the two lines of evolution.

To illustrate the strain of verse which took its origin in the displacement of metre by accent and rhyme, we must look back as far as Fortunatus. He was born about the year 530 in northern Italy, but he passed his eventful life among Franks and Thuringians. A scholar and also a poet, he had a fair mastery of metre; yet some of his poems evince the spirit of the coming mediaeval time both in sentiment