The Three Dead Kings - Poetic Form

Poetic Form

Along with other poems in MS. Douce 302, The Three Dead Kings is written in a dialect of Middle English local to the area of Shropshire and west Staffordshire.

The poem has an extremely unusual structure, combining a four-stress alliterative line, a tight rhyme scheme, and regular use of assonance. The structure of the rhymes, abababab in the first eight lines of each stanza and cdccd in the final five, combines with the alliteration, and the use of the same final consonant on the fourth stress throughout the entire stanza, to produce an additional pararhyme between pairs of lines:

Þen speke þe henmest kyng, in þe hillis he beholdis,

He lokis vnder his hondis and his hed heldis;

Bot soche a carful kl to his hert coldis,

So doþ þe knyf ore þe kye, þat þe knoc kelddus.

Hit bene warlaws þre þat walkyn on þis woldis.

Oure Lord wyss us þe rede-way þat al þe word weldus!

My hert fare fore freȝt as flagge when hit foldus,

Vche fyngyr of my hond fore ferdchip hit feldus.

Fers am I ferd of oure fare;

Fle we ful fast þer-fore.

Can Y no cownsel bot care.

Þese dewyls wil do vs to dare,

Fore drede lest þai duttyn vche a dore.

(79-91)

(Roughly translated: 'Then speaks the last king, he looks in the hills / He looks under his hands and holds his head; / But a dreadful blow goes cold to his heart / Like the knife or the key, that chills the knuckle. / "These are three demons that walk on these hills / May our Lord, who rules all the world, show us the quickest way out! / My heart bends with fright like a reed, / Each finger of my hand grows weak with fear. / I'm forcefully afraid of our fate; / Let us quickly flee, therefore. / I can give no counsel but worry. / These devils will make us cower / For dread lest they shut each escape."')

A few other Middle English poems use a similar thirteen-line stanza, but The Three Dead Kings has the most elaborate structure: medievalist Thorlac Turville-Petre refers to it as "the most highly patterned and technically complex poem in the language".