The Metrical Forms of the Poem of the Cid

Abstract

The pages that follow embody an attempt to present the verse forms of the Poema as transmitted in the manuscript in greater completeness than was possible in the study recently published in the “Revue Hispanique,” and to invite a more detailed and serious investigation of this subject than is usually bestowed upon it. It is only on the basis of a strictly critical discussion of all the questions involved in the elucidation of the text of our epic, in its relation to other contemporary narrative documents and poetic works, that the difficult problem of its verse structure can be brought nearer to a satisfactory solution. Nothing can be more contrary to the spirit of science than to judge an admittedly anomalous and doubtful form without the light shed upon it by the organic whole to which it belongs, or to explain the fissures between hemistichs of three and twelve syllables with the supposition of the equalizing effect of musical rendition when there is no evidence of such rendition and the sense has suffered as much as the metrical symmetry.