A Popular Tail-rhyme Romance
Sir Isumbras is a relatively short Middle English romance, less than eight hundred lines in length, in twelve-line tail-rhyme stanzas. This is the form of romance parodied by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tale of Sir Thopas. Tail-rhyme verse, however, was very popular in late-medieval English for recording tales of adventure and romance, and used in many Middle English romances, such as Emaré, Sir Amadace, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, Ipomadon and Sir Gowther. A typical verse begins with a group of three lines, such as this one describing the scene as Sir Isumbras arrives at his burnt-out manor, during his long slide into penuary and loss:
- ”A doleful syghte thenne ganne he se,
- His wife and his chylderen thre
- Owte of the fyre were fled.”
These lines are then expanded into a single stanza by stacking four similar triplets together, to rhyme aabccbddbeeb.
Read more about this topic: Sir Isumbras
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or romance:
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.”
—Paul Fussell (b. 1924)