Forgotten Ground Regained
Hellhound
Inferno VI: 4-32
Whichever way I walk or turn,I see the sufferings of more sufferers.Cold rain, cursed and heavyceaselessly falls in this circle of Hell.
Massive hailstones,murky water,and snow spillfrom a dark sky,pouring across the putrid earth.The strange beast,Hydra’s brother,
barks harshly fromhoundlike throatsat the foul folk sunk in the filth.His eyes are bloodred, his beard is greasy,his belly is broad, his claws like blades;
he scratches and slashesand slices the shades.The wretched ones howl like dogs and hideone side while the other suffers the rain;those sinners turn and twist endlessly.
When Typhon’s son saw us,he spread his jaws,showed his fangs, shook with fury.My guide grabbed dirt from the groundand flung fistfuls into the frenzied maws.
And like a starving dog hysterically yappingthat quiets when food finally comes,focusing on the task of filling its belly,so did the filthy faces of the fiend Cerberus.
Part of Forgotten Ground Regained: A Journal of Alliterative Verse,
Issue 8, Fall, 2025: Norse and Icelandic Forms
Note from the Editor:
The form of this poem is directly modelled on the most common of Old Norse forms, fornyrðislag (epic meter), which is very similar to Old English alliterative verse, with two major differences: First, half-lines are treated as full lines; second, lines are grouped into stanzas eight lines long. So the basic structure consists of four pairs of two-stress lines. In each pair, the first line is linked by alliteration to the following line.
This poem loosens the Old Norse form in ways that make it much easier to write modern English poetry. There is usually only one alliterating lift in each line, and the alliterating lift is sometimes the last stress in the line. By contrast, in Old Norse, you would have two alliterating lifts in the odd-numbered lines, and only the first stress in the even-numbered lines would alliterate (never the last!) Similarly, in the Old Norse form, there would always be at least four syllables in each line (sometimes one or two more), but in this poem, we encounter lines like “cold rain” or “showed his fangs”. It is possible to imitate the Old Norse form more closely than this, but it takes work. And even with the looser form, the lilt of the underlying Norse form strikes the ear wonderfully well.
Copyright © D.A. Cooper, 2025
No part of this site may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems