BACK PAGES: THE –BER MONTHS
Here’s the original:
Thirty dayes hath November,
April, June, and September;
Of XXVIII is but oon,
And all the remenaunt xxx and I.
That’s from “Middle English Lyrics,” a W.W. Norton Critical Edition, which drew it from a 15th century manuscript. By “the 15th century” we mean “the 1400’s,” that makes the grandfather of our “Thirty days hath September” more than 500 years old.
In case the last two lines of Middle English aren’t clear—it may have been a few years since studying Roman numerals in elementary school—they say (own translation) “Of 28 is but one, and all the remnant 30 and one.”
Earlier in our history, rhyme aided memory. All sorts of adages, saws, morals, and so forth rhymed because repetitive endings can be cues for recollection. “Red at night, sailor’s delight;/ Red in the morning, sailor take warning,” would be a classic example of rhyming with tutorial significance. But now, educators have caught on that children go through a rhyming phase early in their language learning, so teaching materials frequently lean on rhyme to convey concepts about phonetics, syllables, and the like. Often this drifts into gibberish: “The fat cat sat on the mat,” and so forth. In the process, the old type of rhyming—rhyme with reasons—has been overwhelmed and radically devalued.
At the same time, we are still in the grip of an old historical mistake: assuming all languages shared a similar structure. During the Renaissance, with its excitement over rediscovering the Ancients, it was “logical” for people to try applying the well-developed Roman descriptions of their own language and poetry to English. (The college prep curriculum in Robert Frost’s day, around the turn of the last century, concentrated on the classics, meaning those of Greece and Rome.) But English is not an inflected language (it does not use word endings to indicate case and tense), and compared to post-Roman languages like Latin or Spanish, it is very poor in rhymes. Thus many amateur poets handicap their own efforts by thinking poetry has to rhyme and anything that rhymes has to be poetry—when mere rhymed lines are better described as verses.
We’ve strayed away from the turn of the seasons, which brought the “30 days” rhyme to mind. For an older native Vermonter, the onset of goldenrod and asters and “good sleeping weather” makes the bones grind. Here’s my own, new rhyming verse:
September and October,
November and December—
They all end in brrrrrrrrrr
When fire turns to ember.
Quivers, shivers and slivers can be sent to [email protected]
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