> Pardon me for changing the subject being discussed, but would someone tell > me something about Macaronic Verse? Is it always a "burlesque" > form as the > dictionary implies, or is there a body of more serious work? > Are there, for example, macaronic heroic couplets? A few inquiring minds > want to know. . .
The dictionary I cited before says, among much else, that in Middle English examples "whole lines of Latin are frequently inserted as quasi-refrains, and since the metre of both languages often matches, macaronic verse may have been an important vehicle for transporting the accentual rhythms of Medieval Latin into English." The authors go on to say that Ezra Pound and T S Eliot "transformed the macaronic into a serious and important technique of poetic composition, allusion and structure." The fashion for the macaronic may have declined too early for heroic couplet writers. However, if you hadn't provoked me to think about it I might never have come across gems like William Drummond's Scots/Latin 'Polemo-Middinia'. Here's a flavour of it: Nymphae quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea, Seu vos Pittenwema tenent seu Crelia crofta Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et skeeta pererrant Per costam, et scopulis lobster mony-footus in udis Creepat, et in mediis whitenius undis Patrick Roper ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
