notes to chapter 3 221
- Of course this, too, was at issue: Anglo-Saxonism created the myth of that na-
tional border. Anglo-Saxon has just as often been claimed as the ancestral heritage of
Denmark. - Abbot, LI, 87.
- William Quinn, “Hopkins’s Anglo-Saxon,” 25–32.
- The history of philolog y reveals a great deal about the disappearance of the
“mark” for accent on English writing. When Old English texts were translated into
modern English, the modernized editions “changed the accentuation” of the Old En-
glish texts or deleted the accent marks altogether. Edwin Guest, in his 1838 History of
English Rhythms, writes “they change the accents, which in certain cases are used to
distinguish the long vowels; they compound and resolve words; and they alter the
stops and pauses — or in other words the punctuation and versification — at their
pleasure” (9). Guest brings up OE accent again on page 16: “there can be little doubt
that modern accentuation in our language is mainly built on that of its earliest dialect;
and that we must investigate the latter before we can arrive at any satisfactory arrange-
ment of the former.” And again, on page 277: “of all meters known to our poetry, that
which has best succeed in reconciling the poet’s freedom with the demands of science,
is the alliterative system of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors.” In a review of an Anglo-Saxon
dictionary, Henry Sweet proclaimed: “A serious fault of these two editors is that they
both deliberately suppress the accents of the MSS in their texts” (Sweet, Transactions,
119). - A typical (and relatively easy) line from a poem by Barnes: “An ‘zoo they tod-
dled hwome to rest, / Lik’ doves a-vlee-en to their nest, / in leafy boughs a-swäyen”
(Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, 51. - Abbott, LI, 162.
- Abbott, LII, 222.
- Barnes, An Outline of English Speech-Craft, iii.
- Abbott, LI, 163.
- Ibid., 246.
- Ibid., 231.
Chapter 3: The Institution of Meter- Perkins, History of Modern Poetry, 41.
- “A Poet of Content,” rev. of Shorter Poems by Robert Bridges (454–55).
- Green, “Robert Bridges: Studies in His Work and Thought to 1904,” 93.
- Bridges published this poem multiple times, as XXIV Sonnets, Ed. Bumpus,
1876; LXXIX Sonnets, Daniel Press, 1889; LXIX Sonnets, Smith, Elder & Co. Vol 1.,
1898, and in The Poetical Works of Robert Bridges, 187. - Norman MacKenzie, commentary, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
470–71. MacKenzie notes that Hopkins suggests revisions to l. 3, “’Tis the joy the
foldings of her dress to view” in Abbott, LI 35, 89, 141, and 243. Hopkins took such
issue with the line that he omitted it from his translation. - Abbott, LI, April 3, 1877, 35. He goes on to say that Bridges has not reached
“finality in point of execution, words may be chosen with more point and propriety,
images might be more brilliant etc.”