As a first step to the epic forms of stanza to be considered in the next paragraph a poem of the early fourteenth century (Wright's _Pol. Songs_, p. 212; Ritson, _Anc. Songs_, p. 28; Böddeker, _P.L._ no. vi) may be quoted:
_=L=ýstne, =L=órdinges, | a newe sóng ichulle bigýnne Of þe =t=ráytours of Scótland, | þat =t=áke beþ wyþ gýnne. Món þat loveþ fálsnesse, | and nule néuer blýnne, Sóre may him dréde | þe lýf þat he is ýnne,_
_Ich vnderstónde: Sélde wes he glád, Þat néuer nes asád Of nýþe ant of ónde._
The fifth line has one arsis only (as appears more clearly from that in the second stanza: _wiþ Lóue_), thus corresponding to the above-mentioned poems (pp. 99, 100); the other lines of the _cauda_ have two stresses.
Prof. Luick[114] looks upon the long lines of this poem and of several others (e.g. Wright's _Pol. Songs_, pp. 69 and 187) as doubled native verses of the progressive or Layamon form, but rhyming only as long lines. This can hardly be, as the rhythmic structure of these verses does not differ from that of the other poems quoted above, which belong, according to Prof. Luick himself, to the class of the normal, lyric rhyming-alliterative lines.
§ =61. Narrative verse.= Alliterative-rhyming verses occur in their purest form in narrative poetry, especially in a number of poems composed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in stanzas of thirteen lines, and republished recently in a collective edition by the Scottish Text Society in vol. 27 under the title _Scottish Alliterative Poems_ (ed. by F.J. Amours, Edinburgh, 1892). The poems contained in this collection are _Golagras and Gawane_ (also in _Anglia_, ii. 395), _The Book of the Howlat_ by Holland, _Rauf Coil[gh]ear_ (also in E. E. T. S., Extr.-Ser. vol. xxxix), _The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne_, _The Pistill of Susan_ (also in _Anglia_, i. 93). Douglas's _Prologue_ to the Eighth Book of his translation of the _Aeneid_ (although written in the beginning of the sixteenth century) likewise belongs to this group, as do also the poems of John Audelay, composed in Shropshire in the fifteenth century (Percy Soc. xiv, p. 10 ff.), and a poem _Of Sayne John the Euaungelist_ (E. E. T. S. 26, p. 87) written in stanzas of fourteen lines in the North of England. The stanzas of all these poems--generally speaking--consist of two unequal parts, the _frons_ written in alliterative lines, rhyming according to the formula _a b a b a b a b_, and the _cauda_ which contains five or six lines, the first of which may either be a long line as in the _frons_, or, as in _The Pistill of Susan_, a short one-beat one, with four two-beat sectional verses following. Only in the last-mentioned poem does the _cauda_ consist of six two-beat sectional verses.