Hearts Parade of a Lyrical Life

Analysing an Amalgamation of Authorship

Thursday, October 12th

After airing out my frustrations with Ryan yesterday I felt good, A weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Clearly he didn't share the same sentiment though as he didn't show up to meet us by the gate today before class, Grace asked if I knew anything about it.

"We talked yesterday, it got pretty heated. He's probably upset." I told Grace, she nodded in acknowledgement and we all walked into class together.

Ryan was sat in his usual spot by the front, Grace had to sit with me to work on our analysis together, Kayla and Lucy followed suit. He wasn't alone, he was with Oliver I reassured myself, though I didn't even know who Oliver was. Ryan didn't look happy, but he still looked toward me, as if holding a puppy dog face might urge me to change my mind about how I felt. It wasn't that simple though, as cute as he was I still blamed him.

I looked through the poem and explained to Grace what I had discovered in the library, she nudged me on the shoulder, impressed, "Look at you detective! Do you even really need me?" Grace joked.

As much as I wanted to figure it out by myself, who was I to deny a little help? Especially on a group project where it's expected anyway. "Yes, I do." I responded smiling, I noticed Ryan turn to look at me sat behind him and attempted to ignore him as I continued with my work, "There's this one part I need help translating, it doesn't make any sense to me." I highlighted two lines of the poem on our shared document and added a comment to the side for Grace to see.

"On it." Grace tapped away at her computer going to find out the meaning of that elusive line, while I moved on to try to find the significance of the old English language.

Kayla and Lucy were clearly messing around, Ryan wouldn't stop looking in my direction, for once it felt as if Grace and I might be the only ones actually focused on our assignment. People often used the in-class time to mess around since it was the morning and most of us were still in a daze for waking up not 30 minutes earlier, but we were on a roll, and more importantly, I had extracted some interesting theories as to why old English was being used.

I typed away at our document, writing down my ideas for Grace to look through after. Since there was so much analysing to do before we could even start on our essay we had to take a lot of notes before even attempting to organise our thoughts.

The Old English language is an intentional tool to tell the story as if it were something that had happened in the past. The more civilised Shakespearean English is a ruse to attempt to portray the intelligence of language choice to the reader, though upon closer inspection, the words used are incorrectly placed, and grammatically incorrect. This too is intentional, a facade of intelligence that proposes the idea that our main protagonist of the poem too believes he is smarter than he is in reality, the situation feeling so complex at a glance but really being quite simple once you 'dumb it down'.

I showed Grace my findings and looked over what she had written regarding the lines I found so confusing.

These lines are interestingly portrayed, "Mine rape doth cowered" uses the term "rape" which in old English means 100 of something, indicating that this characters 100 sheep, as can be inferred from the line before, were not enough to win over the affections of the princess. Furthermore, there is a double meaning here of "rape" historically meaning to take something by force, to seize it, this additional meaning referring to how the jester cowered before the princess, as it felt she had stolen his heart. Interestingly though, the grammar here is incorrect...

After we had read through each other's works Grace commented on mine, as I did on hers, "Oh my god, yours fills in the gaps of my thoughts!" Grace said excitedly. "I was stuck on the grammatical inconsistencies, I think you've good a good reason as to why."