Older English

I. Pronouns
Singular Plural
Subject thou ye
Object thee you
Possessive Thy, thine your

Notes:
1. Ye in “fossilized” expressions: e.g. “Ye gods!” and “Hear ye!”
2. Archaic churchly speech and song e.g. “O ye of little faith” and “O come all ye
faithful.”
3. Not the “ye” in fake old signs such as “Ye Olde shoppe”: Here the letter is not a Y but
the old runic letter thorn Þ for a th sound; it is just “The Olde Shoppe.”

II. Verb forms

1. The second-person-singular form of the verb ended in -st or -est.
e.g. “Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep / Thy heritage” (Wordsworth)
e.g. “Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave / Thy song” (Keats)
2. A few common verbs are exceptions, and take only -t.
e.g. “O rose thou art sick” (Blake)
e.g. “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours” (Keats)
3. Keats disagrees with Shelley on the past tense of “art,” at least when addressing a
bird.
e.g. “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” (Keats)
4. Full conjugation:
Modern Present tense Past tense Modern Present tense Past tense
Thou singest sangest Thou art wert
He sings singest sangest He is is was
Thou hast hadst Thou goest
He has hath had He goes goeth
Thou dost didst Thou lovest lovedest
He does doth did He loves loveth lovedeth
5. Romantic poets sometimes switch back and forth between the modern and archaic
verb endings when they need to add or subtract an unstressed syllable to make the
meter come out right, or jus to make a line sound better.
e.g. “He singest loud his godly hymns / that he makes in the wood.” (Coleridge)
(“makest” becomes “makes” because Coleridge wants a line of six syllables here;
“makest” would make seven.)

III. Unusual word order

1. English was mainly a verb-final language: the verb usually came at the end of the
clause, especially if it was a subordinate clause.
2. English was mainly an SOV language (i.e. subject-object-verb) and occasionally
OSV, but it is not predominantly SVO. e.g. “I this poem hate.” (SOV) “This poem I
hate.” (OSV)

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 3. English poetry before the twentieth century was conservative and preserved verb-final
constructions. Latin, a verb-final language, may have been an influence.
4. Because of the demands of meter and rhyme, poets wanted more options in word
order.
e.g. postponed verbs in “When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared” (Coleridge)
e.g. “The source of human thought is tribute brings” (Shelley)
e.g. confusing: “A slumber did my spirit seal” (Wordsworth): what seals what?
*functions of “did”: it holds the place of the verb as if it were SVO, allows the poet to
have an uninflected form at the end to rhyme with “feel” because the past tense do not
rhyme (“sealed” vs. “felt”). It also provides a syllable where the meter needs it.
5. Often an adjective will follow the noun it modifies: e.g. “of aspect more sublime”
(Wordsworth)
6. Sometimes a noun will come between two adjectives, a habit borrowed from Milton:
e.g. “the fretful stir / Unprofitable” (Wordsworth)
7. Occasionally a preposition will be postponed: “All breathing human passion far
above” (Keats)

IV. The do-forms

1. After about 1750 the do-forms were used for emphasis, but before that there was little
difference between “I love thee” and “I do love thee.”
2. As a filler, it is semantically almost null and can weaken a poetic line.
e.g. “the sun does arise / And make happy the skies” (Blake): sounds naïve and folksy
e.g. exception: “A slumber did my spirit seal” (Wordsworth) because there is strong
alliteration and because everything else about the line is dense with not quite certain
meanings.
Prosody: The Study and Practice of Poetic Meter
1. In Middle English and Early Modern English, the vowel in -ed (past tense) was
usually pronounced, adding an unstressed syllable to the verb. We still say it in e.g.
“seated.”
2. If the syllable was not pronounced, the spelling convention was to omit the -e- and
insert and apostrophe (e.g. “bless’d”).
3. If it was pronounced, leave the -e- in (e.g. “light-winged”).
4. Qualitative meter (stressed and unstressed syllables), metrical feet, and accents

Disyllables (two syllables)

◡◡ pyrrhic, also known as dibrach (two short/unstressed syllables), “da-da”

◡– iamb (a short syllable + a long/stressed syllable), “da-DUM”

–◡ trochee, choree, “DUM-da”

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 –– spondee, “DUM-DUM”

Trisyllables (three syllables)

◡◡◡ tribrach

–◡◡ dactyl

◡–◡ amphibrach

◡◡– anapaest, antidactylus

◡–– bacchius

––◡ antibacchius

–◡– cretic, amphimacer

––– molossus

5. Monometer: a line of one metrical foot

Dimeter: two
Trimeter: three
Tetrameter: four
Pentameter: five
Hexameter: six
Heptameter: seven
Octameter: eight
e.g. iambic pentameter: if the feet are iambs, and if there are five feet in a line
e.g. dactylic hexameter: If the feet are primarily dactyls, and if there are six to a line
6. Caesura (indicated by / ): Sometimes a natural pause occurs in the middle of a line
rather than at a line-break. E.g. “It is for you we speak, / not for ourselves” (The
Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare)
7. Enjambment: incomplete at the end of a line. The meaning runs over from one poetic
line to the next e.g. “I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are;” (The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare)
8. Modern editions often put a grave accent over the e when it is to be sounded, as in
“learnèd” or “blessed.”
References
Ferber, Michael. The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry.