metrics, Irish can be divided into two formal categories, accentual and syllabic. Early Irish accentual verse, often described as rosc (or roscad), is characterized by having a regular number of stressed feet but an irregular number of syllables in the lines. Syllabic Irish verse developed out of the older accentual forms but is distinguished by an equal number of syllables in the lines, and regularity of stress only in the line-endings, where it occurs in meeting the requirement for rhyme between final stressed words. Syllabic verse is generally organized in four-line strophes, whereas the number of lines in a rosc passage is not fixed. A later type of accentual verse is known as amhrán. The amhrán or song metres have a richly assonated stanzaic form, and are also accentual. Broadly speaking, the extant corpus of rosc, syllabic verse, and amhrán suggests three successive periods in the history of Irish versification. Among the very earliest surviving poems in Irish is the accentual (or rosc) eulogy known as Amra Choluim Cille, apparently composed soon after the death of Colum Cille in 597. While there is no syllabic verse in existence that may be dated earlier than AD 650, such metres (núa-chrutha, ‘new forms’) dominated for the next millennium. The bulk of Old and Middle Irish verse consists of two types of metre, deibhidhe and rannaigheacht, and deibhidhe is by far the more popular metre in the period of classical Modern Irish. The emergence of strict dán díreach (classical syllabic verse) and the new literary standard of Classical Modern Irish (AD c.1200-1650) was the result of a thorough and systematic investigation of both the literary and spoken forms of the language current in the 12th cent. Accentual verse finally reemerges in manuscripts at the end of the 17th cent., but references to earlier makers of amhrán, and the highly developed form in which it appears, attest to a long, unrecorded tradition.
Bibliography
Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Metrics (1961).
