The metres of late Cornish were usually rather more assimilated to English, but apparently some memory of Celtic prosody lingered on. Lhuyd quotes a proverb, of which he gives two versions, in the old three-lined metre known in Welsh as the _Triban Milwr_, or Warrior’s Triplets, which is found as early as Llywarch Hen’s Laments for Geraint ap Erbyn and for the Death of Cynddylan, in the sixth century. Lhuyd himself wrote a Cornish Lament for William of Orange in what he claimed as the same metre, a singularly inappropriate subject for the language of a nation of loyal Jacobites, as the Cornish certainly were as late as 1715. Boson (Gwavas MS., f. 7) wrote a short elegy on James Jenkins of Alverton, also in rhyming triplets. The curious little song, which is all that remains of Jenkins’s poetry, seems to show indications of a feeling for internal rhymes and something like a rudimentary _Cynghanedd_, but there is not enough of it to reduce to any definite rules. Even in Boson’s verses and in those of Gwavas and Tonkin of St. Just (not the historian), in the Gwavas MS., the old system of counting syllables and taking very little account of the stress accents of words, is occasionally found, but generally in the later verse the extra unaccented syllables freely introduced show that a sense of accent and beats of rhythm had come in.
I. Five- (or four) syllabled lines, with occasional six-syllabled, rhyming A A B C C B. From the fragment on the back of Additional Charter 19,491 in the British Museum, late fourteenth century.
_Golsow ty cowedh_, (5) Hearken, thou comrade, _Byth na borth medh_, (4) Never be ashamed, _Dyyskyn ha powes_ (6) Alight and rest _Ha dhymo dus nes_. (5) And to me come near. _Mar codhes dhe les_; (5) If thou knowest thy advantage; _Ha dhys y rof mowes_, (6) And to thee I will give a girl, _Ha fest unan dek_ (5) And truly a fair one _Genes mar a plek_. (5) To thee if she is pleasing. _Ha tanha y_; (4) Go take her now; _Kemmerr y dhoth wrek_, (5) Take her to thy wife, _Sconye dhys ny vek_ (5) Refuse thee she will not _Ha ty a vydh hy_. (5) { 181} And thou shalt have her.
It is probable that this metre is intended to be five-syllabled throughout, except that a “feminine” or double rhyme is occasionally allowable (e.g. _powes-mowes_), and that the light first syllable of a line may be omitted. This accounts for the two six-syllabled and two four-syllabled lines respectively. In the rest of the poem there are lines of four, five, seven, eight, and even nine syllables. The whole fragment of forty-one lines, though not much earlier than the _Ordinalia_, is much less regular in rhythm, and is much less syllabic.
