The Parsed Corpus of
Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)
PCMEP Text Information
Poema Morale
Back to PCMEP texts
About the text:
About the edition and manuscript base:
About the file:
Other:
| Text name: | Poema Morale |
| Alternative names: | A Moral Ode; Conduct of Life; I am elder than I was of winter and of lore |
| Content: | The poet of Poema Morale looks back on his past life. He warns about the transitoriness of wealth, physical delight and damnation. Instead, eternal happiness in Heaven should be sought. Poema Morale is the most considerable of the Middle English lament poems. It is also among the first English poems to consistently use rhyming couplets. |
| Genre/subjects: | moral advice, conduct of life, description of hell and paradise, lament, monition |
| Dialect of original composition: | (South) East-Midlands "I placed the original version of the Conduct of Life on the southern border of the South-East Midland dialect area around Middlesex or London." (Hill 1977: 114) For a detailed summary of relevant arguments, see ibid.: 110-114 ("The Provenance of the Original"). The arguments there concern the occurence of the river names "Avon" and "Stour" in l. 252, sporadic forms in rhymes, and shared grammatical forms. There are some other relevant dialect markers not discussed in Hill (1977). Poema Morale includes the pronoun hes. "[T]he employment of the pronoun es, is or (hes) (=them) […] is not found in any of the Northumbrian dialects, nor does it occur in the West-Midland dialect, but it is very common in the Southern dialects." (Morris 1873: xi). The version of Poema Morale in the Trinity manuscript, used for the parsed file, preserves occurrences of the nominative demonstrative se, for example, Se þe mast doð "he who does most" (l. 62), belzebub se ealde "Beelzebub the old" (l. 287). While this form does occur sporadically in a large number of different texts from the twelfth and early thirteenth century, its prevalence is much higher at this time in texts from the South-East than elsewhere. Notable example are the "Kentish Sermons" and "Vices and Virtues." Hence, this features too is likely to indicate a South-Eastern provenance of the original composition. |
| Date of original composition: | 1150-1200 Zupitza (1878) convincingly shows that Poema Morale must have been composed after at least c. 1100 and is not based on an older, Anglo-Saxon version. He cites as evidence rhymes. "In rhymes, there are words, which are unknown in the literary language of the 11th century. a) Old Norse words [...] 78 aȝe : laȝe [...] b) French words: 154 eihte : bikeihte [...] c) other words [...] 53 heorte : smeorte." [translated from the German original] (ibid: 37). Further, some exact rhymes of Poema Morale would be lost if they were translated into the language of the eleventh century (ibid.). He concludes, "Since the preserved manuscripts go back to the twelfth century, and since in addition [...] several intermediate links lie between the probably oldest manuscript L[ambeth Palace Library 487] and the original, one may well date Poema Morale at around 1170." "[T]he original, was probably written about 1180 A.D." (Hall 1920: 314). "My own view [is] that the Conduct was first written down during the reign of Henry II [1154-1189]" (Hill 1977: 107). The online version of the MED indicates the date of composition as ?c1175. |
| Suggested date: | 1175 |
| PCMEP period: | 1a (1150-1200) |
| Versification: | couplets, aa "septenary verses with one unstressed syllable or two such syllables between stresses, and a cesura after the fourth stress" (Wells 1916: 385) |
| Index of ME Verse: | 1272 (IMEV), 1272 (NIMEV) |
| Digital Index of ME Verse: | 2113 |
| Wells: | 7.25 |
| MEC HyperBibliography: | PMor. |
About the edition and manuscript base:
| Edition: | Morris, Richard. 1873. Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century: From the Unique MS. B.14.52 in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Volume 2. EETS o.s. 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 220-32. |
| Manuscript used for edition: | Cambridge UK, Trinity College B.14.52 (335), ff. 2r-9v |
| Online manuscript description: | LAEME The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (item 7) |
| Manuscript dialect: | (South) East-Midlands The Trinity manuscript "is South-Eastern bordering on Kent, with some trace of Midland influence" (Hall 1920: 327; for an analysis of some phonological features, see ibid.). "London provenance [...] [perhaps] influenced by immigration [...] from East Anglia" (Hill 1977: 107, for a summary of the relevant arguments, see ibid.) Laing & McIntosh (1995: 33) fit the language of Poema Morale to west Essex. |
| Manuscript date: | s.xii-ex, s. xiii-in Citing Wanley and Morris as authorities, Zupitza (1878: 6) states that the manuscript may not have been made much later than 1200. It was "written early in the thirteenth century" (Hall 1920: 312). The manuscript was "[w]ritten before 1200" (Hill 1977: 97). "It dates from the twelfth century" (Hill 2003: 393). "The hand that recorded Poema Morale seems to me to be different from the one to which we owe the sermons [=the main text of the manuscript], but it is doubtlessly contemporary" [translated from the German original] (Zupitza 1881: 408). |
About the file:
| File name: | M1a.PoemaMorale |
| ID: | PoemaMorale,x.y.z: x=token, y=page number, z=line |
| Word count: | 4,080 |
| Token count: | 332 |
| Line count: | 401 (400 plus final Amen) |
Other:
| General notes: | Poema Morale has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Hall (1920) offers an extensive description of the phonology (ibid.: 317-320), inflection (ibid.: 320-327), vocabulary (ibid.: 327) and metre (ibid.: 327) of the poem. Hill (1977) offers detailed information on the relation between the manuscripts (ibid.: 97-106), the metre (ibid. 115-116) and the literary background (116-128). Morris' (1873) edition, used for the parsed file, includes a fair number of emendations. For example, he includes in squared brackets initial letters that are not legible in the manuscript anymore (e.g. lines 234 and following). None of these alterations are indicated in the parsed file. If users are interested in these editorial changes, they should directly consult Morris' edition. Poema Morale survives in seven manuscripts dating from the late twelfth to perhaps as late as the first quarter of the fourteenth century, which indicates an extended period of time in which the poem enjoyed popularity. The seven manuscripts are the following: Trinity B.14.52 (used for the parse), Lambeth 487 (the second preferred manuscript, from the twelfth century), Egerton 613 (with two attestations), Jesus College 29, Digby 4 and Fitzwillian McClear 123. For a discussion of the manuscripts and their connections, see Hill (1977: 97-106). The Trinity manuscript was picked over the Lambeth manuscript for the electronic file because it is considerably longer (Trinity: 400 lines vs. Lambeth: 270 lines) and because this choice results in a close match between the original and manuscript dialects, both falling within the southern East Midlands dialect region. |
| Remarks on parses: | The parse is based in part on the translation of the text in manuscript Lambeth 487 and Egerton 613 in Morris (1868: 158-182). Sometimes, the translation is not literal enough as a basis for the parse. Furthermore, the manuscript used for the parsed file, Trinity B.14.52, contains a few additional lines. The line breaks in the electronic text file follow Morris' edition (1873: 220-32). Even though the poem is narrated through a first-person speaker, the text is not generally tagged as direct speech. There are several scribal mistakes in the base manuscript. In particular, words have accidentally not been copied, which often severely corrupts the sense. In such cases, missing words were added from manuscript Lambeth 487 or Egerton 613. All additions are made explicit as comment CODE in the parsed file. The following words were added: l. 33 is; l. 40 he; l. 43 ne; l. 69 do hit; l. 90 hyphen between particle and verb; l. 94 en for ar in þen (for þar); l. 102 nusten; l. 192 he; l. 200 him; l. 233 is; l. 246 nolden; l. 253 hit; l. 255 weren; l. 379 scal. l.21 and elsewhere, the expression "to do well" is tagged as object with an adjective head, NP-OB1 (ADJ well). l. 71 And ofte god can more þanc þan þe him ȝieue+d lasse. The word þan is usually a comparative ("less than") or a temporal subordinator ("when"). But it is here assumed to be an oblique form of the determiner ("(to) that one"), parsed as NP-OB2. The intended interpretation is "God often knows more thank for him who gives less." Typically indirect pronouns should end in -m not -n (þam not þen). However, the parse is still plausible because some (though not all) other indirect pronouns also end in -n in the text, for example the interrogative hwan (instead of hwam) in line 105. l. 91 The word wi is tagged as an interjection here (MED). l. 129 Senne lat þe & þu nah him … The word nah is problematic. Possible readings are a form of the secondary negator "not" or a negated verb, "to not own." Consequently, the translation of this phrase is either, "Sin leaves you, and not you it," or "Sin leaves you, and you do not own it." The former interpretation is used for the parse, with right-node raising of the second conjunct. l. 136 Ne bidde ich no bet bie ich alesed a domesdai of bende. The syntax suggests that the second part of the line is a verb-first conditional, "were I redeemed on Doomsday from bonds." However, this makes poor sense in the context. The Lambeth manuscript does not have the pronoun ich and thus allows the interpretation as a non-finite complement, "to be redeemed on Doomsday from bonds" (although the absence of the non-finite marker to is conspicuous). The parse follows the conditional reading. A CODE comment points out that the meaning is obscure. l. 303 contains the expression foh ne grai. According to the Middle English Dictionary, it is here used as a noun in combination with a colour term and means "a kind of particolored fur." The expression has been tagged as a single noun. The hortative expressions l. 307 Late we…, l. 308 do we…, silde we…, l. 309 Luue we… , l. 339 werie we etc. are parsed as IP-IMP with an overt first person plural subject. The same is true for the form ute in l. 337 … ute we …. |
References
Hall, Joseph. 1920. Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Oxford: Clarendon. (Part I: Texts - available online), (Part II: Notes - available online)
Hill, Betty. 1977. 'The Twelfth-Century Conduct of Life, Formerly the Poema Morale or A Moral Ode.' Leeds Studies in English n.s. 9. 97-144 (available online)
Hill, Betty. 2003. 'Trinity College Cambridge MS. B.14.52.' Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12.4. 393-402.
Laing, Margaret & McIntosh, Angus. 1995. 'Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 335 (B.14.52): its Texts and Their Transmission.' In : Beadle, Richard & Piper, Alan J. (eds.) New Science out of Old Books: Studies in honour of A.I. Doyle. Aldershot: Scolar Press. 14–52.
Morris, Richard. 1868. Old English homilies and homiletic treatises (Sawles warde, and þe wohunge of Ure Lauerd: Ureisuns of Ure Louerd and of Ure Lefdi, &c.) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. EETS o.s. 29, 34. London: N. Trübner & Co. (available online)
Morris, Richard. 1873. Old English Homilies of the Twelfth Century: From the Unique MS. B.14.52 in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Volume 2. EETS o.s. 53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (available online)
Zupitza, Julius. 1878 . 'Zur Poema Morale.' Anglia 1. 5-37. (available online)
Zupitza, Julius. 1881 . 'Zur Poema Morale.' Anglia 4. 406-10. (available online)