Historians consider "Beowulf" the oldest extant example of English narrative poetry. As in all Old English verse, the anonymous author of "Beowulf" did not utilize rhyme. Instead, his lines feature extensive use of alliteration and assonance. Alliteration means the repeating of consonant sounds. Assonance is similar to alliteration, but it involves vowel rather than consonant sounds. In Old English narrative poetry, the repetition offered by alliteration and assonance makes up for the lack of rhyme. In the following example taken from the opening of "Beowulf," the poet repeats the "g" sound in the first line, the "th" sound (represented by the old-fashioned letter þ) in the second line, the "eh" vowel in the third line and the "sc" (pronounced "sh" in Old English) in the fourth line:
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum.
Geoffrey Chaucer died before he could finish his magnum opus "The Canterbury Tales," but the parts that he left behind nevertheless stand as one of the most enduring works of late medieval English literature. The "Tales" are a series of short narratives that a group of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett in Canterbury tell to pass the time during their journey. The stories are usually -- but not always -- comic. Chaucer was one of the first major English poets to make use of rhyme in his narrative poetry, as in the following lines that begin the "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales":
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
The 16th century courtier Edmund Spenser produced the first major English epic poem, "The Faerie Queene." Spenser unfortunately died before he could finish his epic, but scholars consider its first five books a coherent whole in and of themselves. Like Chaucer, Spenser employed rhyme in the service of narrative poetry, but unlike those of his medieval predecessor, Spenser's rhymes do not follow a simple couplet pattern. Instead, Spenser pioneered what literary critics now call the "Spenserian stanza," which features a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC, as in the following stanza from Book II, Canto V of "The Faerie Queene":
There Atin found Cymochles soiourning,
To serue his Lemans loue: for he, by kind,
Was giuen all to lust and loose liuing,
When euer his fiers hands he free mote find:
And now he has pourd out his idle mind
In daintie delices, and lauish ioyes,
Hauing his warlike weapons cast behind,
And flowes in pleasures, and vaine pleasing toyes,
Mingled emongst loose Ladies and lasciuious boyes.
The English poet and pamphleteer John Milton nursed a lifelong ambition to write an English epic to rival Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Milton finally published "Paradise Lost" in 1667 when he was 59 years old. Although critics detect the influence of Spenser on Milton's epic of the fall of man, one major difference between the "Faerie Queene" and "Paradise Lost" is worth noting: the absence of rhyme in the latter. In the preface to the second published edition of "Paradise Lost," Milton attacked the convention of rhyme, noting that Greek and Latin poets did not employ it. Later writers did not always agree about the success of Milton's experiment, however. John Dryden, Milton's near contemporary, even published a version of "Paradise Lost" that transformed the end of Milton's lines into heroic couplets. You can judge for yourself how well Milton's poem works without rhyme from the following sample taken from Book I of "Paradise Lost":
What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.