Old English metre Old English metre Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is "Beowulf", but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition. The most salient feature of Old English poetry is its heavy use of alliteration. The basic Anglo-Saxon poetic line consists of two half-lines, connected by alliteration. This means that there is a word or syllable in the second half-line, which will alliterate with one or more important words or
Old English eth is replaced by thorn). In contrast with Modern English orthography, that of Old English was reasonably regular, with a mostly predictable correspondence between letters and phonemes. There were not usually any silent letters—in the word "cniht", for example, both the and were pronounced, unlike the and in the modern "knight". The following table lists the Old English letters and digraphs together with the phonemes they represent, using the same notation as in the Phonology section above. Doubled consonants are geminated; the geminate fricatives /, and cannot be voiced. Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent