More metric excitement

Is it wrong to be so excited about poetry? I can't help but feel it is. There are going to be a lot of posts like this as I work my way through Stephen Fry's book The Ode Less Travelled, and I'm still only in the first section on Metre. There's Rhyme, Form, and Diction and Poetics Today still to come, I'm afraid. Usually I like to read a book, let it settle for a bit and then write about it but I am so enthralled by this that it is spilling out of me.
This morning on the train as I opened it and realised the section I had got to the evening before I felt the excitement bubble up inside me like a child who has been given a present - the metre of Anglo-Saxon poetry! There, aren't you just as excited at the thought?
Okay, I'll admit I think I probably need help. However, it really is interesting; Anglo-Saxon poetry has a completely different structure to more classical forms used by, for example, Shakespeare. The metre is not based on feet but on alliteration, it is accentual-alliterative verse. A line of Anglo-Saxon poetry is split by a caesura (break, pause) into two half-lines or hemistichs (another good thing about Stephen Fry's book is that he ensures that he explains how to pronounce all the technical terms he introduces, so not only can you write confidently about them but you can talk about them too, and bore your nearest and dearest as I am; this is pronounced hemmy-stick). Each hemistich will contain two stressed syllables - and any number of unstressed (or minorly stressed) others.
Then comes the really exciting bit, the alliteration. The first three stresses are alliterative but the fourth isn't. Fry quotes Michael Alexander's description of this as: Bang, bang, bang, crash!
Of course, one of the main things I have learned is that, as in most things, the rules of poetry are quite flexible, so sometimes the fourth syllable will be alliterative too but not usually.
Here is an example from the William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman, not actually Anglo-Saxon but written during a medieval revival (called the Alliterative Revival) of the form:

'And Clement the Coblere cauhte hym by the myddel

And for to lyfte hym aloft leyde hym on his knees.

Ac Gloton was a greet cherl and greved in the luftynge

And cowed up a caudel in Clementis lappe;'

I don't know why I find this form of poetry so appealing, I find it very natural and comfortable to read (the form, that is, not necessarily the language). Maybe it is my Anglo-Saxon heritage coming through.

A couple of purchases to report; inspired by Fry's book yesterday I went in search of Vladimir Nabokov's Notes on Prosody which is referred to. I only half-heartedly expected it to be in the bookshops and of course it wasn't. Still, while looking in the Literary Criticism section I found a volume of Selected Essays by Gore Vidal which I could not resist and then, when checking the fiction section in case someone had accidentally put Notes on Prosody there with the endless copies of Lolita, I found a novel by Nabokov which was also too much for my weak will to resist: Pale Fire. This looks a fascinating book and continues the poetry theme; the conceit is that it is a set of notes by an academic editor on a poem by a famous poet and friend who died suddenly. The blurb suggests that the notes tell more about the editor than the poem, and it looks an intriguing and different read.
Today I have picked up The Penguin Book of English Verse, a hefty collection ranging from the 1300s (the quotation above is from it) to the 1990s as I realised that, although I have a large number of poetry collections, they are pretty exclusively from the Romantic to the Modernist periods and thought I should branch out a bit.