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Reading Melville
The sound of Melville's language is that of her native late 16th-century Fifeshire Scots, not that of modern standard English of whatever geographical area. Her artistry and technical skill are all the more apparent when her work is correctly pronounced as Scots. This is no easy task in view of the vagaries and the often very anglicised spelling of her scribes and printers; by 1603, when Ane Godlie Dreame was first printed, the traditional Scots system orthography had long started to break down under the impact of imports of English printed books). Her lines also need to be correctly scanned: Melville did not write unmetrical doggerel. The standard Middle Scots written termination "-is" (marking plural nouns or the 3rd person singular) is almost never to be given syllabic value; the same often applies to the past participle ending ‘-it’. is likewise  while - as so often in Middle Scots - intervocalic "v" is very frequently elided (cf. ‘Hallowe'en’ and ‘o’er’). Like all the vernacular poetry of late 16th- and early 17th-century Scotland, Melville's work uses much alliteration, and so “k” in words beginning "kn", and "w" (pronounced as "v") in words beginning "wr" should be voiced, e.g. ‘vretchit’ for written ‘wretchit’. The guttural consonant "ch" should always be given its proper value, even if spelled "gh” and the sound represented by ‘ow’ in words like ‘downe’ and ‘crowne’, or by ‘ou’ in words like ‘out’ and ‘about’, is ‘oo’, as in modern spoken Scots.)  As her rhyme-schemes show, in Melville’s Fife-Angus dialect, words like "peace", "cease", or "heid" and "deid" were pronounced as "pace, sayss, hayd, dayd" (cf. modern Ulster pronunciation).  Like other Scots poets, Melville makes occasional use of ‘southern’ pronunciation of certain sounds for the purposes of rhyme; for example, when written "moir/more" is rhymed with "gloir" or "befoir" it is not pronounced as "mair". The richer the Scots in which Melville’s lines are read, and the more accurately they are scanned, the greater their musicality. In her song lyrics, the lines are well shaped to the melodies she chose, and when sung, these poems are deeply affecting. The impact of Melville's work in general is greatly heightened by being heard: Ane Godlie Dreame proved to be an effective performance piece at the Elizabeth Melville Day Symposium on 21 June 2014. Also suitable for performance by two voices is the lengthy penultimate poem in the Bruce Manuscript, a dialogue between the soul of someone in great spiritual distress - perhaps even dying? - and a soberly consoling spiritual counsellor.