Forming the dawn-song

1.

We have a tradition, going back at least to the late twelfth century, of songs sung by lovers regretting that dawn requires them to rise and potentially part. Two names for this tradition are the alba and the Tagelied, but perhaps its most common name in English is the aubade.

The aubade can stand alone as a short lyric piece, or it can sit as an inset lyric within a larger narrative. Notable inset aubades occur in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but there are many more examples.

In Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright book X, Kin-Bright and Qwerthart sing an aubade on waking at the clifftop above the underworld.

2.

The form I use for their dawn-song is not, as far as I know, one that has any particular name: it is a stanza rhyming ababcbc, with the sixth line one beat shorter than the others, so, if you want to be technical, ababc5b4c5. I wanted a rhyme scheme that would recall the surrounding rhyme royal stanzas, at the same length, while audibly staying distinct.

The song has a refrain at the end of its first three stanzas, telling the daylight to 'flee', which commits every stanza to something rhyming with flee for its first c-rhyme. The fourth and final stanza breaks the pattern, as Kin-Bright recognises and laments the responsibilities that mean they have to get up. The c-rhyme here is a different word, but still retaining the same -ee rhyme sound. The fourth stanza's last line, where the refrain should be, ends two beats shorter than it ought to run, for a stronger sense of curtailment: it steps down in length compared to the preceding line just as the preceding line did compared to the stanza's first five lines.

3.

There are moments within the dawn-song of narration, explaining who is speaking when. These are of course wholly implausible: people do not often sing songs which include strange third-person interludes about who is talking, and the narrational parts are not extra-metrical, rather they fold into the overall scheme, so they must form part of the inset lyric.

I chose to do this for two reasons, first, because such asides confront readers more clearly with the crafted and crafty nature of the whole experience, and, second, because a number of my models also do this, possibly in part because of the first reason.

4.

The dawn-song is the place in the whole epic with the most erotic imagery—pointedly, more such imagery than the slightly earlier stanza about the two of them sleeping together. The images are intense, but (I hope) strange for us, because I borrowed them from sources less familiar to some present-day readers.

Between my breasts, like deer midst lilies fed,
my love I hold

This adapts historic English translations of Song of Songs. I promise that the lilies are in the original, but obviously if the source offers me a lily image, I'm going to keep it.

Like spear-store great and thousand shields outspread,
like wealth of arms

Song of Songs again, and borrowed while thinking about how martial-minded both of these characters are.

As bright as suns,
as sheen as moons, and terrible as host
with banners raised

Song of Songs again. Did I mention that one of the ways these people are screwed up in the head is that they really love a good terrible host with banners raised?

Of garden walled, and secret spring, I boast

A particularly famous image from Song of Songs (4:12).

My love upswells;
her beauty graceful richest lily weaves;
no tongue might speak the springing fire that dwells
in overtumbling edges of her leaves

A concise, intensifying rewriting of 'Tiger-Lilies' by Michael Field (before you assume that 'Michael Field' was a man, or one person, google). The lilies are, again, in the source. This bit and the phrase 'secret spring' are probably as explicit as the entire poem will ever get (sorry).