Kildare Poems

The Kildare Poems or Kildare Lyrics are a group of sixteen poems written in an Irish dialect of Middle English and dated to the mid-14th century. Together with a second, shorter set of poems in the so-called Loscombe Manuscript, they constitute the first and most important linguistic document of the early development of Irish English in the centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. The sixteen poems contain both religious and satirical contents. They are preserved in a single manuscript, where they are scattered between a number of Latin and Old French texts. The conventional modern designation "Kildare poems" refers both to the town of Kildare in Ireland, which has been proposed as their likely place of origin, and to the name of the author of at least one of the poems, who calls himself "Michael (of) Kildare". The poems have been edited by W. Heuser (1904) and A. Lucas (1995).

History

The Kildare Poems are found in a manuscript that was produced around 1330. Later, the original book came into the possession of Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, whose library was acquired by the British Museum in 1754. A first modern printed edition of the text was published by Thomas Wright in Reliquiae Antiquae I in 1841. A standard philological edition of the text is that by Wilhelm Heuser (1904); a more recent edition was offered by Angela Lucas in 1995. ==Contents==

Contents

The religious and satirical contents of the Kildare poems are thought to display ideas characteristic of Franciscan concerns, including a concern for the poor and a dislike of older, established monastic orders.), who is praised for his military exploits against the Irish and whose death is dated to 13 April 1308. • Elde, a poem about the problems of old age • Repentance of Love, a brief poem of three quatrains expressing a lover's complaint • Nego, a moral poem about denial, symbolized by the Latin word ('I deny/reject/refuse') • Erth a moral poem about earth, in two parallel versions in English and Latin ==Linguistic features==

Linguistic features

The Kildare Poems show many linguistic features common to the Middle English dialects of the west and south-west of England, from which most English-speaking settlers in medieval Ireland had come, but they also display a number of unique features that point towards an independent development of English dialects in Ireland, either because of levelling between different source dialects of English, or because of the influence of Irish. Among the conspicuous features are: • Occasional replacement of th (þ) with t (e.g. for ). This may reflect fortition of to a dental stop, as found in some later forms of Irish English. • Voicing of initial to (as in southern Middle English: for father, for fox), while older is rendered as <w> (representing or , for visage) • Loss of nasals before coronal stops: for , for pound • h-dropping in words like for his, for habbiþ • raising of short to in unstressed final syllables • metathesis in words like in consonant clusters in some words like < April, < freshe, also possibly related to similar phenomena in Irish and in later forms of Irish English ==Text sample==

Text sample

The following is a passage from the Land of Cokaygne, describing the conduct of monks and nuns: ==References==

Source: Wikipedia ↗

tickerdossier.com tickerdossier.substack.com