Rewriting Poetry I

For the final book of the Ancient Earth series, I’ve been mulling over what poetry to write for it. Book 1′s poetry was all fantastical (less in some cases than others) which was meant to open up the story into new areas, to expose the characters to new ideas, as was appropriate for a book whose main theme was boundaries (and crossing them). Book 2′s poetry was darker, it was menacing, but in an oblique way. It was very sing-song and even playful in its verseform, but the meaning ran counter to that. They were songs of seduction. Only the bad characters used poetry in book 2.

Book 3′s poetry needs to reflect the themes of this final book. A few months ago I came across a book published by the very excellent and noble Early English Texts Society, which contained about ten different versions of what apparently must have been a fairly popular poem called ‘Erthe upon Erthe’, or ‘Earth on Earth’. It is a very simple little ditty, but it deals with quite large universal themes. It fit the viewpoint of one of the characters of the book, and I found a place where it would put an interesting spin on the development of a certain set of  other characters.

Of course, it needs to be rewritten because it’s in Middle English  (circa 1307) which is a bit hard for most people to wrap their heads around. This is what the earliest form of that poem is.

Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh,

Erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh,

Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh,

Þo heuede erþe of erþe erþe ynoh.

If you sound it out, you can actually get the sense of what it is saying, and it’s got an absolutely lovely cadence. Remember that ‘þ’ is an unvoiced ‘th’ (like ‘thin’, not ‘then’), and that there are no silent ‘e’s — they should be pronounced with an unstressed ‘ah’ sound. Oh, and that last ‘u’ is really a ‘v’. Go ahead, and read it to yourself. I’ll wait.

Isn’t that delightful? It has a natural swing to it, like a nursery rhyme. Here’s a sense translation in modern English. It’s not a lot different (except no pleasant swing).

Earth took from earth earth with woe,

Earth other earth to the earth drew,

Earth laid earth in an earthen trough,

So had earth of earth earth enough.

There is some mild debate over the origin of the poem, and current opinion seems to insist it comes from Latin, and it may have originated there — we ultimately just don’t know. However, although it rhymes, it is also laid out in alliterative verse — the exclusive poetical form of Old English –where the word ‘earth’ is the only alliterated word. Its ambiguous treatment of the word ‘earth’, which means at different times in this poem 1) a man, 2) the ground, 3) treasure, and 4) a burial pit (the earthen trough), is very reminiscent of Old English riddles. If the idea came from Latin, the Anglo-Saxons certainly made it their own, and even though it is now written in Middle English there are only 16 different words in it, most of those have very similar OE analogues or are identical (for example, the ME ‘erthe’ = OE ‘eorthe’, ME ‘droh’ = OE ‘droh’). If I were to lay money on it, I would say that there is a lost and forgotten Old English version of this poem/riddle that this one is based on, which was later expanded on (more on that in the next post).

The subject matter also seems a straight line from Ecclesiastes 12:7  (‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’) and the whole ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ bit from funeral services, which I’ve just found out isn’t actually from the bible. But the poem doesn’t have any sort of redemptive spiritual aspect, as it stands, so it’s as likely that this Anglo-Saxon/pre-Anglo-Saxon notion influenced the English burial service as the other way around.

None of which actually helps me with rewriting the poem, but I find it interesting, and does make me feel better about giving it to a character that was present during the Anglo-Saxon period, but who skipped out on the Medieval one altogether.

NEXT TIME: Reworking, Recasting, Expanding.