Eduard Sievers

Eduard Sievers

Eduard Sievers was a philologist of the classical and Germanic languages. Sievers was one of the Junggrammatiker of the so-called "Leipzig School"...

developed a theory of the meter

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

 of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative verse

Alliterative verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of many Germanic...

. This most likely would have been the theory of Anglo-Saxon prosody that Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

would have been familiar with.

A line of Anglo-Saxon verse is made up to two half-lines. Each of these half-lines contains two main stresses (or 'lifts'). Sievers categorized three basic types of half-line that were used. Here a stressed syllable is represented by the symbol '/' and an unstressed syllable by the symbol 'x'.

Type	Description	Example 1	Example 2
Type A	Falling	/ x / x	/ x x x / x
Type B	Rising	x / x /	x x x / x x /
Type C	Rising / Falling	x / / x	x x x / / x x

He also noted that three possible types of half-line were not used:

• / x x /
• / / x x
• x x / /

However the first two of these can be used if one of the 'dips' is changed into a half-stress (or 'half lift' ... notated here 'x́'):

Type D	Two stresses at start	/ / x́ x	/ / x x́
Type E	Falling / Rising	/ x x́ /	/ x́ x /