The Columbia History of British Poetry (9 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 34
the impatience of Jonah, and
Cleanness
builds up a complex definition of a subtle virtue through a series of negative exempla. Their unabashed didacticism renders them less popular today than
Pearl
and
Sir Gawain
, but they would have satisfied medieval artistic canons the more successfully for being uncontaminated with any obvious fiction.
One of the suggestive peculiarities of alliterative poetry is that the vocabulary, and to a large extent the meter and style, are shared: that is, the same rare words, lines and half-lines turn up in different poems across the corpus of verse. The earliest critics tended to explain this by assigning several works to the same author or by proving indebtedness; more modern opinion makes use of such terminology as
the alliterative school
or
tradition
. It does suggest that in at least some parts of the country the most important thing about being a poet was to have the vocabulary and metrics to render one's subject matterwhatever it might beinto a recognizably "poetic" mold that strongly resembled existing compositions. The stress on vocabulary is important: the Latin learned views of poetry emphasized fictional content and metrics, but words and language were usually ignored. Practical handbooks (commentaries on classical poets, rhetorical textbooks) might approach vocabulary through the explanation of figures of speech, but this seems very different from the attitude of poets of the alliterative tradition. Such poets seem to have an unselfconscious veneration for something like the Old English poet's "wordhoard": a precise, detailed, technical control of a huge variety of words, synonyms, set phrases, archaic and poetic terms drawn in large part from non-Latinate vocabulary and secular culture. They transposed a variety of medieval works into the alliterative style: the Earl of Hereford had the absurd romance
William of Palerne
translated from French into English (before 1361) for the benefit of his household; there are other romances, plays, some delightful lyrics, quasi-historical works, stories from the Arthurian cycle (the stirring
Morte Arthure
), biblical legends and many religious works. Exceedingly intricate blends of alliteration and rhyme occur: the poems "Pater noster" and ''De tribus regibus mortuis" printed with the works of John Audelay are particularly notable.
Among the best of alliterative poems are the three debate poems,
Winner and Waster, The Parliament of the Three Ages, and Death and Life
. They have barely survived in battered late manuscripts, and it is always assumed they belong to the same period, the mid-fourteenth century, though the evidence is slim. They are all dream visions. Each narrator
 
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goes out into a spring landscape, falls asleep, and witnesses a conflict or argument: in one case between the two economic principles of saving and spending; in the next, between the three ages of man, youth, maturity, and old age; and in the last, between Lady Life and Dame Death. The poet of
Winner and Waster
deploys his skills in virtuoso descriptions of birdsong, the heraldic accoutrements of his combatants, and the luxuries enjoyed by the profligate wasters:
nysottes of the new gett so nysely attyred
With syde slabbande sleves sleght to the grounde. . . .
                                                             (410411)
He has a keen satiric wit and characterizes his opposed principles very neatly (Waster says to Winner, "Thou schal birdes upbrayd of thaire bright wedis"); the poet presents an interesting (and still topical) argument on the interdependence of spending and saving; but he is less interested in sustained allegory, and the frame story of his debate does not really make sense (it does not help that the last few lines of the poem are lost). The satirist's discontent is apparent in the short prologue, where the poet makes the familiar complaint that the times are evil, lords no longer like to hear "makirs of myrthes that matirs couthe fynde" (line 20) but listen only to young fools ("a childe apon chere withowtten chyn-wedys") who repeat silly jokes. The true "maker of myrthes" composes his own ''wyse wordes," and in the end the worth of the truly valuable poet will be apparent.
The resources of the alliterative style for creating an intricate and convincing surface are beautifully deployed in
The Parliament of the Three Ages
. The precision and detail of the description of the pleasures of life in Maytime, the narrator's successful hunt with all its proper terminology, the beauty and gusto of Youth, the parade of human glory and achievement described by Elde are all brought into sharp relief by the equally powerful awareness of transiency:
And haves gud daye, for now I go; to grave moste me wende;
Dethe dynges one my dore, I dare no lengare byde.
                                                                                (653654)
Death and Life
survives only in a corrupt seventeenth-century manuscript, but it seems to belong with the other alliterative debate poems. It differs from the
Parliament
in that the splendidly specific alliterative vocabulary is used more truly allegorically: Lady Life is not just life-on-
 
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earth, although the grass turns green at her feet; she stands for eternal life, offered to humanity through the Crucifixion. If the alliterative poets usually lavished their verbal skill on the material realities of this world, the author of
Death and Life
, like the author of
Pearl
, shows that it can also be used to present a movingly specific "fiction" of salvation.
The long poem known as
Piers Plowman
by William Langland (a contemporary of Chaucer about whom almost nothing is known) is an exception to the other works in the alliterative tradition in several ways. It is written in alliterating long lines, but it does not, in the main, employ the elaborate and obscure vocabulary of now-obsolete dialect terms used by the other authors. Langland's work, like theirs, escapes easy generic classification; it has been variously characterized as a dream vision poem, a prophecy, homily, quest, social satire, allegory, and something closely related to the drama of the period. All of these characterizations are in some sense true. Nor is Langland so comfortable with his role as poet or author as the other alliterative poets; the uncertainty of role and voice gives rise to a host of technical problems unparalleled in medieval literature.
Piers Plowman
exists in three or perhaps four versions; there are many manuscripts, but none of them is particularly authoritative. Langland, whoever he was, rewrote his work obsessively, often obliterating the bits that modern critics are most fond of; the whole work has more of the status of work-in-progress than anything else in medieval literature. Progress is the essence of the poem, and it must only have been stopped, not concluded, by the author's death. Generations of scholars have worked on establishing a text, but any discussion of the poem must reckon with the work's essential fluidity.
In main outline the "events" of the poem follow the same course in all versions: the narrator of the opening lines falls asleep and dreams, but his dream pitches him into waking life: he sees a "field full of folk" all busily alive and pursuing their various callings. A lady, Holy Church, tells him of heaven and hell, and bids him seek for truth; the dreamer, failing to understand, asks for Truth and is shown falsehood, the lady called "Meed." An extended allegory shows Meed (bribery, reward) corrupting society, but suggests that she can be controlled by the king and Reason. Reason then extends the message of reform to society: a sermon is preached to the crowd and the seven deadly sins come forward to make their confession; the whole crowd then rush off to seek for Truth. They meet Piers the Plowmanan exceedingly enigmatic guide, who offers to show them the way; the way somehow turns out to
 
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be the same thing as the plowing of the half-acre of land Piers owns. What seems like an initially hopeful scene degenerates: the agricultural cycle turns out to be too much for many of the pilgrims, and Piers's control slips. Truth sends a pardon; Piers and a priest argue about its meaning. In the earlier versions of the poem Piers tears up the pardon in a rage and departs on his own; the dreamer wakes up.
The second half of the poem shows the dreamer pursuing the quest alone: he now wants to find truth, or Piers, or the mysterious "Do wel" mentioned by the pardon; his search occupies a series of dreams, and dreams within dreams, populated by personifications of mental faculties and figures from history and Scripture. The text leads into a maze of knotty questions: Can man save his soul by intellect or learning? Can the institutions of the Church teach man how to love? After much incidental satire on contemporary affairs the dreamer is at last given another glimpse of Piers Plowman, who is now in some mysterious way identified with Christ. The problem is answered not in words, but in a vision of Christ's Crucifixion and the Harrowing of Hell. The dreamer wakens satisfied and goes to church to perform his Easter service; there he unexpectedly falls asleep again and witnesses the degeneration of religion from Christ's day to his own; the last vision is of the fortified barn Unity, besieged by all the forces of Hell and betrayed; the solitary figure of Conscience sets out, all over again, to find Piers Plowman.
The oddest thing about
Piers Plowman
is perhaps the stance of the narrator. His introduction of himself in the opening lines is full of ambiguities:
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,
Went wide in this world wondres to here.
                                                  (B.Prol.14)
Scholars disagree on whether the narrator is dressed like a sheep or a shepherda crucial distinction when imparting Christian doctrine. Hermits in the rest of the poem are presented as frauds; "unholy of werkes" sounds dubious, and wandering to hear wonders frivolous. An anxiety about the dreamer's role and a desperate urgency to find truth gradually take over the poem. The narrator in his waking moments grows ever more distrait: he is "witles nerehand" and "a fool" in between dreams; while asleep he at first merely observes, then

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