The Columbia History of British Poetry (20 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 86
The complicated thirteen-line stanza of
The Taill of Rauf Coilyear
, with its "tail" of four short lines, is used in
The Buke of the Howlat
by Richard Holland in the mid-fifteenth century. Holland, too, uses alliteration.
The Buke of the Howlat
, in seventy-seven stanzas, has an appealing Scottishness about it that differentiates it sharply from Chaucer's
Parliament of Fowls
, which clearly influenced it. The poem tells the story of an owl dissatisfied with its ugliness who persuades the Pope to ask Dame Nature to allow him to beautify himself with feathers donated by other birds. When she agrees, the owl becomes so offensively arrogant as a result that he is restored to his former state, and learns the lesson of humility. The skill and vigor of its alliterative verse, the wit and sprightliness of its description of the different birds with their human equivalents, and its unexpected but artfully managed introduction of a patriotic section praising the Douglas family, are memorable qualities of a striking and memorable poem. Holland's humor and ironywhich go along with a high seriousnessare not Chaucer's humor and irony, and his language manages to combine artfulness with a vivid colloquial tone.
With Robert Henryson (d. ca. 1505) Scots poetry comes to its full maturity. Henryson is thought to have been a schoolmaster at the grammar school attached to the Benedictine Abbey of Dunfermline, in Fife, but little is known of his life. His most important poems are
Moral Fables of Esope
and
The Testament of Cresseid
. Henryson's
Fables
are in a well-established European tradition and include elements from the medieval beast epic, but the note of quizzical intimacy with the animals is all his own, and marks the beginning of a Scots tradition in animal poetry of which the best-known example is Burns's
To a Mouse
. In Henryson's fable of the town mouse and country mouse the colloquial ease of the presentation of the mouse world is something not seen in other European examples of fable. The country mouse is uneasy when she sees the luxury of the town mouse's dining facilities: "'Ye, dame,' quod scho, 'how lang will this lest?'" When the spencer comes in and finds them merrily at dinner, they escape promptly: "They taryit not to wesche, as I suppose." Although Henryson's work has a definite European dimension, his colloquial humanizing of the animals, conveyed in formal verse (rime royal) is very much a Scottish characteristic, parallel to but distinct from Chaucer's method in
The Nun's Priest's Tale
. The quietly matter-of-fact epitaph that Henryson's Troilus puts over Cresseid's grave is related to the quality we see in the
Fables
:
 
Page 87
Lo, fair ladyis! Cresseid of Troyis toun,
Sumtyme countit the flour of womanheid
Under this stane, lait lipper, lyis deid.
Of the other poems attributed to Henryson none is certainly his.
Orpheus and Eurydice
tells the story, based on Boethius's
Consolations of Philosophy
, of Orpheus descending to the underworld in an attempt to bring back his dead wife, with a
moralitas
deriving from the English chronicler Nicholas Trivet. Of the short poems probably by Henryson
Robene and Makyne
, in the French
pastourelle
tradition, tells the story of a shepherd rejecting the love of a shepherdess only to discover too late that he loves her after all, and gives the moral: "The man that will not quhen he may / Sall haif not quhen he wald." The tale is told in sprightly eight-line stanzas with alternating rhyme; the pastoral setting is etched with sympathy, and the tone is both quizzical and matter-of-fact.
William Dunbar, the great virtuoso poet of the Scottish makars, stands alonefor metrical variety, for range of language (from "aureate" to brutally coarse) and of mood (devotional, celebratory, visionary, descriptive, moralizing, complaining, satirical), and for the skillful ways he brought his personality and circumstances into his poetry. Dunbar was the master craftsman of Middle Scots verse whom the modern Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid looked back to (rather than to Burns) as a model. Active at the Court of James IV, he celebrated the wedding of the king and Princess Margaret of England in 1503 with a formal poem. We know that he survived Henryson, for Dunbar refers to him as dead in his great poem on death with the Latin refrain "timor mortis conturbat me"; that he seems to have taken priest's orders; and that he received a royal pension from 1500 to 1513. He tried to obtain a bishopric, but in spite of many appeals to the king he was unsuccessful. His relationship with the Court seems to have been intimate: he could address both the king and the queen in terms of remarkable frankness, complaining, asking, advising, celebrating, thanking, or simply joking.
Dunbar could write delicate love poems in the courtly love tradition, such as the one beginning: "Sweit rois of vertew and of gentilnes," in a rondeau stanza with the rhyme scheme
a a b b a
, as well as much more elaborate dream allegories, such as
The Golden Targe
, a triumph of rhetorical virtuosity in twenty-five richly sounding nine-line stanzasthe stanza used in Chaucer's "compleynt" of
Anelida and
 
Page 88
Arcite
and by Henryson in "The Complaint of Cresseid."
The Thrissil and the Rose
, celebrating the royal marriage in twenty-seven rime royal stanzas, is another dream poem. Dunbar's use of what he calls "fresch anamalit terms celicall [heavenly]" is seen by himself as deriving from Chaucer"O reverend Chaucer, rose of rethours all," as Dunbar hails him toward the end of the poembut his "fresh enameling" is in a highly idiosyncratic style. In addition to Chaucer, Dunbar hails ''morall Gower and Ludgate laureate" and refers to their "sugurit lippis and tongis aureate," indicating again the ideal he was aiming at in this and similar poems. The allegorical action in these dream poems, with characters from classical mythology and from
The Romance of the Rose
tradition, is in fact less interesting than the sheer virtuosity of the poetic performance.
Dunbar uses his "aureation" also in religious poems, notably in "Ane Ballat of Our Lady," with its chiming musical opening:
Hele, sterne superne, hale, in eterne
  In Godis sicht to schyne;
Lucerne in derne [darkness] for to discerne
  Be glory and grace devyne;
Hodiern, modern, sempitern,
  Angellicall regyne.
His poem on the Resurrection has a grave rhetorical force of a different kind, with its striking opening: "Done is a battell on the dragon black, / Our campioun Chryst confoundit hes his force. . . ."
The most intimate and perhaps to the modern reader the most appealing of Dunbar's poems are the shorter pieces about his own position and needs, often addressed to the king. His poem of new year's greeting to the king beginning, "My prince in God, gif the guid grace," moves from words of blessing and good wishes to the expression of the hope that the king will treat him with "hie liberal heart and handis not sweir [lazy]." He could address the king in a poem with the refrain "My panefull purse so prickis me," concluding with the remark that the only remedy for his painful purse was the king's generosity. He can attack abuses at Court in bitter poems of vituperation. He can write parodies of Latin religious offices, as in his use of the Office of the Dead in his poem "The Dregy [dirge] of Dunbar Maid to King James the Fourth being in Strivilling"; speaking from "hevins glory" (Edinburgh), he asks the king to come out from purgatory (Stirling) and join him "in par-
 
Page 89
adise, / In Edinburcht." There are whole passages here in liturgical Latin: the spirit is that of the medieval Goliardic parody poems. Two poems to James Dog, Keeper of the Queen's Wardrobe, are in simple four-line
a a b b
stanzas. The first ends each stanza with the line "Madame, ye haff a dangerous dog"; the second, after Dunbar had received from James Dog the gift of clothing he sought, ends each stanza "He is na dog; he is a lam."
Dunbar can be irreverently bawdy in describing the king's sexual adventuring, as in the poem beginning, "This hinder nicht in Dumfer-meling," where the king's behavior with his mistress is vividly and amusingly described in ten seven-line stanzas with a refrain expressing feigned surprise.
Dunbar produced one notable poem in the old Scots flyting tradition of mutual abuse,
The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie
, where Dunbar and his opponent Walter Kennedy rise to heights of fantastic insult in complex eight-line stanzas with both alliteration and rhyme. Dunbar used an older kind of alliterative line, unrhymed, in
The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
, which tells of the poet's lying concealed in a meadow on a midsummer night and overhearing a widow and two married women give totally frank accounts of how they cheated and abused their useless husbands and how they spread their sexual favors around. There is something of Chaucer's Wife of Bath and a variety of medieval antifeminist traditions in this poem, whose vocabulary is complex and sometimes violently bawdy, and whose 530 alliterative lines begin: "Apon the midsummer evin, murriest of nichtis, / I muvit forth allane in meid as midnicht wes past."
Dunbar's moralizing poems are some of his best. Besides the lament for the dead already referred to, there is the cheerful seven-stanza poem with the refrain "He hes aneuch that is content" and similar poems with stanzas concluding with similar advice, "For to be blyth me think it best" and "Without glaidnes avalis no tresure.'' Dunbar shows great versatility in his use of refrains.
He was capable of moods of real abandon, well illustrated in his poem describing a dance in the queen's chamber, which moves with enormous speed. The poet introduces himself in the fourth stanza:
Then cam in Dunbar the mackar,
On all the flure there was nane frackar
And thair he dancet the dirrye danton,
He hoppet like a pillie wanton

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