Oops! Poetry

A very thorough and encouraging response to The Exile of Morgan Red-Maw I got also included a section saying that the only thing missing from my style homage was the occasional pieces of verse dialogue. Now, I haven't written poetry of any kind in basically a decade.

Buuuuut I had to admit they were right, so here we are.

The verses in The Wooing of Eve are in two forms: The rhyming parts are an early form of deibide scaílte, a form which still exists today, but the Old Irish version is a lot looser and has a lot fewer rules, so if you happen to be an Irish poet, please don't be too harsh on my disregarding several of the elegant structures of the modern version. I'm specifically modelling them on the quite pleasing flow I found in Immram Brain/The Voyage of Bran, a quite early "mythological cycle" text:

https://celt.ucc.ie/published/G303028/index.html

http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/branvoyage.html

(Original, then translation; the one from paragraphs 33 to 60 is what I'm referring to here)

It's even looser than I am, and only adheres to its 7/7/7/7 A/A/B/B when it feels like it (again, that's just the feeling of this era of poetry), but when it does I really enjoy it. It also seemed fitting since one of my verses is basically "what if the Manannán scene from that was a boss fight". Forgive also the stray unstressed syllable in one of the lines; English is generally a stress-based language in its flow, while...well historical Irish poetry went back and forward about this but in this era was more strictly syllabic.

The other form I'm imitating is rosc or retoiric, which is used somewhat flexibly in the medieval material, but generally refers to non-stanzaic verse with short lines featuring a lot of alliteration, especially between the last word of one line and the first word of the next. The very oldest are even kinda loose about this alliteration, and one of the oldest examples of this is paired with a couple rhyming lines, so I made that the model for Eve's verse (although in the specific example I'm thinking of, Amra Choluim Chille, the rosc is paired with an A/B/A/B stanza), and she uses that earlier, looser kind of rosc. Ryohei's is the slightly later (but still relatively early) form with more regular line length and more frequent alliteration (especially between lines as mentioned); it's modelled on Conall Cernach and Cet mac Magach's addresses to each other (yes, in Mac Da Tho's Pig, no, I can't get through one of these without mentioning it, take a shot), and like those and other standalone rosc signals a shift in section via shift in form rather than stanza.

The one rule I did try to keep to across all of them was having the last syllable/word/phrase/line of each poem echo the first; this dúnad, "conclusion", was regarded as extremely important in syllabic verse (and is sometimes found in other forms).

All this is a lot of effort to go to so that approximately three people in the world can get what I'm going for in trying to present these snippets as seeming older than the prose tale that's grown up around them, but I think they're pretty neat. I don't think they'll become a regular feature, but I will almost certainly do more occasionally.

And of course, huge thanks to https://itch.io/profile/thaliarchus once again, for taking a look at my initial attempts and pointing out what was and wasn't awkward, and generally improving all of it.