Old use of modern words?
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Old use of modern words?
Hello all,
I'm a singer studying a piece of music by John Ireland, the song I'm taking a look at is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "English May". (I really don't know much about Rossetti, so there's no pressure). In the music, at the end of the phrase, there's a funny usage of a word, and I haven't quite figured out what he's trying to say:
But here the hedgerows pine from green to grey
While yet May's lyre is tuning, and her song
Is weak in shade that should in sun be strong:
And your pulse springs not to so faint a lay.
Does anyone know what he means here? One of my problems is that 'lay' is usually a verb, but the structure of the sentence clearly indicates that the word is supposed to be a noun. sigh
Any knowledge about Rosetti's use of old English terms in this poem would be immensely appreciated.
Thank you!
Best Answers
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Lay is an old word for song, much used in mediaeval times. I'm disappointed that a definition of this usage isn't included in the online OED, but my 1979 OCD defines it thus: Short lyric or narrative poem meant to be sung; narrative poem; song; (poet[ic]) song of birds.
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DavidCrosbie
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In fact there's a full explanation in the online OED.
The Old French lai was a romantic or historical adventure story sung by a minstrel. English changed the spelling to lay and used the word to mean the same thing. But it gradually lost the sense of this particular type of song until by the sixteenth century it was used as a poetic way of simply saying 'song'. This continued for a couple of centuries. But then it became confused with German word Lied. The German title Niebelungenlied (an epic poem nothing like an Old French lai) was translated as Lay of the Niebelungs instead of 'Song of the Niebelundgs. And lay came to mean 'popular historical ballad'.
So writers like Walter Scott and Thomas Macaulay revived the old sense of lay as 'minstrel's story in song' with their nineteenth century ideas about what minstrels and their songs had been like. See Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel and Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.
Rossetti was just ignoring this 'revival' use of lay He couldn't repeat the word song, so he used a poetic synonym.
It has also been used from the fourteenth century for 'birdsong', but that's not what Rossetti meant.
Answers
Thank you both very much, this is very helpful, and clears things up for me. Understanding the definition of the word, along with the history behind the definition and changes to it, puts me much farther ahead of where I was.
Thank you again!