The Columbia History of British Poetry (12 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 47
escaped through diligence and contemplation. He is quite clear of the limitations of his work: allegory presents a certain truth, but is distanced from foolhardy assertion; redemption is like this, but this is only a story. The truth of fiction is here nicely indicated. When the poet gets to the virtue of faith, he repeats the creed for his readers, but points out that the higher mysteries of religion "in Englysshe ought not reherced be." Even the verse is assured beyond the usual competence of the fifteenth century: the
Court
is well written, with considerable metrical grace; it may only be a fragment, but it is an exceptionally well-built one.
Two other "learned poets," Stephen Hawes and John Skelton, were both members of the court of Henry VII. Skelton was probably the elder of the two and lived longer: he died in 1529. Although Hawes and Skelton are very different, they have some common preoccupations, especially in their concerns with the poet's function. They are both working after the invention of printing: a circumstance that is to have enormous consequences for a literary tradition. Both are learned poets, and both manifest slight signs of the advent of the Renaissance, chiefly with regard to what may be called the inspirational view of poetry.
Five works by Hawes survive, all only in printed copies. Three of them are allegories; the other two are a reproachful address by Christ to those who swear and a conventional celebration of the coronation of Henry VIII. The allegories look back explicitly to Chaucer and Lydgate, but owe an obvious debt to the
Court of Sapience
, which Hawes attributed to Lydgate.
In comparison with Skelton, Hawes is timid and modest. He declares that all he wants to do is to follow the steps of Lydgate, and he deplores any more frivolous view of poetry. His first known poem,
The Example of Vertu
(1503-1504), is a dream vision in which the narrator, Youth, is led by Lady Dyscrecyon to a ship; crosses the water of vainglory to an island ruled by Nature, Fortune, Hardynes, and Wysedom; witnesses a dispute amongst these ladies; courts Dame Clennes (Chastity) daughter of the King of Love; wins her by conquering the three-headed monster, the Devil, the World, and the Flesh; turns into Vertue; and has a sight of Hell before going to Heaven. Even this outline shows how Hawes espoused the didactic view of poetry: poets work "for the profyte of humanyte," and attempt to make their doctrine palatable by a transparent fiction, rhetorical devices, and a metrical vehicle.
Hawes's major work, his allegory
The Pastime of Pleasure
(1505-1506), repeats the plot of the
Example of Vertu
with many expan
 
Page 48
sions and additions. The narrator, whose name we learn is Graunde Amoure, courts the lady La Belle Pucelle and wins her by conquering two giants and a dragon; he lives long, dies, and recites his own epitaph. Hawes claims again to be imitating Lydgate and does indeed produce a very medieval moral allegory, but there are some features in the
Pastime
that hint at the Renaissance, probably in spite of their author. The hero of the
Pastime
explicitly chooses a secular life, and is inspired on his way by the reports of the goddess Famea reliable lady quite different from Chaucer's capricious counterpart. The allegory throughout is uneasily secularized: the monsters are the traditional enemies of the lover, Slander, Delay, and Malice, but are conquered with St. Paul's armor of righteousness; Venus and Cupid are on Graunde Amoure's side, but the marriage is performed by Lex Ecclesie. To win his lady Graunde Amoure has to go through an extensive educational scheme, visiting the towers of the seven liberal arts for instruction; this is followed up by a visit to the Tower of Chivalry, where he learns to fight. Most interesting of all, in the tower of Rhetoric the instruction consists of a lengthy exposition of the processes of writing poetry; and this, clumsy as it is, is the first
ars poetica
in the English language. Graunde Amoure learns that poetry is produced by rhetoric, but with one important exception-one cannot draw the subject matter of poetry from the rhetorical rule books: poetry rises from the powers of the brain, and is then shaped by the rules of art. Hawes is maddeningly woolly in details: he uses "poet," "clerke," and ''philosophre" as if they were all fully interchangeable, and he makes it clear only that he thinks the primary task of poets is "fables to fayne," and to pronounce "trouthe under cloudy fygures" (lines 717-720). The purpose of poetry is "to eschewe ydlenes," to improve knowledge, "to dysnull vyce and the vycyous to blame," and to preserve the fame of noble men (771-780). Although Hawes was himself a cautious experimenter in meter, he is fully medieval in his official indifference to any metrical component of poetry. When Hawes talks about poetry, he does so in terms of cloaked truth, misty fumes, feigned fables, and delightful rhetoric.
The end of
The Pastime
is noteworthy for the unexpected appearances, one after another, of the characters Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity (all described by the now-defunct narrator). These characters owe an obvious debt to Petrarch's
Trionfi
, probably mediated through a series of tapestries or paintings. They are iconographically very interesting, and make a surprisingly effective ending to the poem. But it must
 
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be admitted that however fascinating
The Pastime
sounds in description, it is wearisome to read. Henry Morley said Hawes "was held by the ears when he was dipped in Helicon"; he certainly had a tin ear for language and an unfortunate devotion to the Lydgatian metrical pattern known, damningly, as the "broken-backed line." His works were nonetheless very successful in the early years of the sixteenth century if we can judge by reprints and imitations; and any attempt to assess the literature of the period must come to terms with his popularity.
Hawes's last known work,
The Comfort of Lovers
, is an obscure personal appropriation of the characters of Amoure and Pucelle, who engage in a dialogue about their difficulties in love. The question of poetry arises again: the narrator explains that his only comfort in life comes from reading prophetic accounts of his own happiness with his lady in Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, and in finding letters written to them both on the walls of buildings. This sounds weird enough, especially when taken in conjunction with an image of the Holy Ghost later in the poem that carries the inscription: I do enspyre oft causynge grete prophecy / Whyche is myscontrued whan some do enclyne / Thynkyng by theyr wytte to perceyve it lightly." The kindest way to assess this dark saying would be to consider it the first appearance in English of the Renaissance idea of poetry as "divine fury," closely related to prophecy and inspiration. Hawes's contemporary, Skelton, certainly espoused such a view; Hawes puts it forward only surreptitiously, in a poem full of mysterious emblems, hints, riddles, and private references. What is new in Hawes is his combination of theories of perception with traditional rhetoric to produce a theory of poetry, and his timid hints at a greater significance to poetry than medieval theory allowed.
Skelton, on the other hand, is the English answer to Rabelais: genuinely learned, arguably humanist, master of an astonishing range of vocabulary from the ornate to the crude, and a violent satirist, who spent his later years in attacking, with sporadic fervor, heretics, the introduction of Greek, and Cardinal Wolsey. He first appears as the tutor of the young Henry VIII, and is spoken of respectfully by Caxton as a scholar learned in Latin texts. Skelton's English work includes prose translations from Latin; his verse ranges from a conventional elegy in formal rhyme royal to hectic and shapeless diatribes in a meter of his own invention, and often includes many lines and tags in Latin. He refers to himself as "poet laureate" in most of his poems; this seems to mean that he had been awarded honorary degrees in rhetoric and was
 
Page 50
entitled to wear a special robe; he had an official position at court, although he was not the only poet laureate around. He eventually became a literary character in his own right: comic anecdotes and rude jokes that had collected around his name appeared in 1561 in a booklet,
The Merie Tales of Skelton.
Skelton would have been a controversial figure in any period; in his own day the combination of scholarship, egotism, coarseness, and irreverence (he wrote parodies of the funeral service for two "knaves," his former parishioners, and another, "Philip Sparrow," for a pet bird) brought him under attack throughout his life. In his allegorical dream vision,
The Garland of Laurel
, Skelton provides a humorous self-defense. In a dream he sees Dame Fame asking Pallas if she may strike Skelton out of her register because he is so unproductive. Pallas summons Skelton to answer the charge; the trumpets blow to call all poets to judge, and Skelton is warmly welcomed by Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. He is given a tour of the castle and grounds; he sees crowds of inferior folk, entertainers and rogues, dispersed from the gates by a blast of cannon fire. He is then taken to a blissful garden featuring a phoenix and serious poetry, and finally meets the Countess of Surrey and all her ladies, who are busily making him a "cronell of lawrell" (a ''garland" or crown of silk and gold embroidery work.). He hastily composes eleven little lyrics in various meters to praise the ladies before returning to Fame, where an enormous, but, we are assured, selective list of his works is read out. The thunderous applause of the assembled poets wakes him up. Latin verses at the beginning and end of the work name Skelton as the English version of Homer, and more oddly, of Adonis.
This bizarre work is typical of Skelton in that it starts from the abstract, generalizing medieval allegory, complete with astrological setting and formal rhyme royal, which could be expected to work towards some sort of defense of the poet's learned academic role. The
Garland
, however, develops metrical and thematic variations that are highly personal and frequently desperately obscureat one point Skelton descends into code to hide the real name of an enemy (deciphered in 1896 as Roger Statham; we are not much wiser), also known as Envy-ous Rancour. Skelton's sponsor at the court of Fame is Pallas, goddess of wisdom and learning, and the "poets" who turn up to hear his case include such learned authors as Cicero, Livy, and Vincent of Beauvais.
Clearly Skelton sees himself as a learned scholar rather than a versifier, and no mean one either: he makes the three great English poets
 
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greet him with veneration, and remarks with satisfaction that none of them is a poet laureate. But he does not consistently try to dazzle us with learning; among the verses offered to the ladies is a little poem that starts:
By saynt Mary, my Lady
Your mammy and your dady
Brought forth a godely babi!
And he includes in the list of his works such titles as "The Balade of the Mustarde Tarte" and the "Gruntyng and the Grynninge of the Swyne" (unhappily now lost). Although the
Garland
pretends to be a charming occasional poem with a particular personal frame of referencea visit to the Countess of Surrey and her ladies at Sherriff Hutton castleit is now clear that the frame is largely a poetic fiction. Skelton may have composed this amalgam of conceit, insult, obscurity, and charm as his apologia, or it may be an elaborate joke: the portrayal of a sulky Fame being overwhelmed by the combined forces of Pallas, the notable writers of the known world, the Countess of Surrey, and Skelton's great list of works is very funny. Skelton suggests at the beginning that the whole dream might be the result of drinking too much. He hints at the old pose of the poet-who-has-annoyed-the-ladies, and offers the pretty lyrics in recompense. In all, it is an extraordinary blend of the personal and peculiar with the abstract and theoretical.
Although the role of public spokesman might seem appropriate for an official poet laureate, Skelton's work is most often dominated by his idiosyncratic voice and contentious personality. In the early
Bouge of Court
he is consistently allegorical and manages to keep personalities out; the villains are thoroughgoing allegorical abstractions. But where the opening of the poem has some resemblances to the
Court of Sapience
, the narrator's dilemma is not about putting the actual world into a divine perspective but with finding something suitably serious and allegorical to write about. Once asleep, the narrator finds not a world of abstract wisdom but a ship called Bouge of Court ("court rations") steered by Fortune and inhabited by a series of sinister characters, who so terrify the dreamer that he jumps overboard and wakes up. The rogues, traditional courtly bugbears such as Flattery, Riot, and Deceit, are characterized both by the dreamer (who calls himself Drede "Fear") and by their own speeches with a shrewd satirical eye: Skelton likes the

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