The accident of survival or loss of antique manuscripts provides us with a questionable basis to determine answers to these questions. The existing corpus of early English poetry, invaluable in providing us with the knowledge we do have of prosodic techniques of the earliest English poets, may mislead us if we apply modern statistical analysis to measure the seeming increase of one type of verse and the apparent decrease of another. In his Canterbury fragment, Chaucer gives us a view of 14 th century England, an England far removed from its Germanic origins and peopled by Englishmen whose concerns lay not with a disappearing national heritage, but with contemporary events, problems, and customs. We feel no loss in the absence of alliterative verse in Chaucer's writing. Instead, what he borrows from contemporary influences or creates to meet current needs gives his poetry the vitality of life in his age.
Alliterative verse is a highly complex, highly sophisticated system of prosody.
The surviving manuscripts reveal that simply repeating initial consonants or vowels was not all there was to this rhythm. Scholars have long applied themselves to the task of carefully studying the Old English poems to decide what ground rules those ancient poets followed to construct their poems. Bear in mind that these scholars did not conduct their researches to assist poets today. But their findings have enabled some poets to inject fresh rhythmical schemes into their works. In the next part, we'll see how the old alliterative verse or accentual rhythm worked.