The Columbia History of British Poetry (21 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 90
    For luve of Musgrave, men tellis me;
He trippet quhill he tint his panton [lost his slipper]
    A mirrear dance mycht no man see.
One does not need to know that "dirrye danton" is a dance or that "pillie wanton" is unknown to scholars to relish the movement and indeed the abandon of this stanza.
One of Dunbar's liveliest poems gives a vivid and swift-moving account of a farcical fight between a tailor and a "soutar" (shoemaker) followed by a poem making amends, in which the poet dreams an angel comes down from heaven and cries, "Telyouris and soutaris blist be ye." This line, with its gravely ironic humor, concludes each of the ten four-line stanzas that compose the "amends."
Dunbar can also be gravely reproving, as in his poem addressed to the merchants of Edinburgh, attacking them for the dirt and disorder they allow in the city. He can paint vivid pictures of Edinburgh life of the day, whether in the "dirk and drublie dayis" of winter or at other seasons, and of the intrigues and squabbles of courtiers and clergy. And he can show naive joy at the arrival of the royal treasurer to bring him his pension in a poem with the refrain, "Welcom, my awin lord thesaurer!"
Dunbar's poetry displays with a vividness sometimes Breughelesque, sometimes Hogarthian, the life of late fifteenth-century Edinburghthe Court of James IV and his queen at Holyrood, the jostling for benefices among the clergy, the behavior of merchants and lawyers, all the teeming activities of nobility, churchmen and citizenry. A sense of his own time and place is combined with a sure awareness of English, French, and Latin elements in medieval tradition, a relish of surface color and of the comic disarray of life in the world as it is. All this goes together with a sense of the transience of all earthly things and the ultimate relevance of everything to the Christian story. Dunbar may lack Henryson's gentleness and quietly ironic sympathy, but he has a range and virtuosity beyond Henryson's.
Dunbar's younger contemporary, Gavin Douglas (1476-1522), is best known for his pioneer translation of Virgil's
Aeneid
into Middle Scots rhyming couplets. This is not the sentimental Virgil of the Dido story or the plangent Virgil of
lacrimae rerum
so beloved of Tennyson: it is a vigorous epic Virgil rendered in terms of the late medieval and early Renaissance world that Douglas knew. And it is a Scottish Virgil, presented in a verse that, if it lacks the Latin poet's marvelous modula-
 
Page 91
tions of tone, achieves a quiet precision of diction impressive in its own way. A wholly original feature of the translation is the prologue to each of the books of the poem, the most impressive being those to Books VII, XII, and XIII, where Douglas paints pictures of winter, spring, and summer, respectively, not in traditional seasonal imagery but engaging vividly with the Scottish environment he knew. His description of winter is perhaps the most memorable of all such descriptions in Scottish poetry.
An earlier work by Douglas,
The Palice of Honour
, is an elaborate dream allegory written in a tricky nine-line stanza with an exuberance of decoration and an exhibitionist verbal dexterity that marks the poem as a showpiece. Douglas's "aureation" is not unlike Dunbar's, and his coined words help him in the difficult task of finding rhymes (restricted to two in each stanza). There are frequent changes of tone, marked by switches from highly Latinate terms to vigorous colloquial Scots. The poem concludes with a "ballad of honour" in three stanzas of richly chiming verse, in which the first has two internal rhymes to the line, the second three, and the third four-a piece of exhibitionist artifice. This learned and allusive poem with its frequent elaborate ornamentation is, surprisingly, not without humor, as in the self-portrait of the dreamer.
King Hart
, a much less elaborate allegory in a simpler eight-line stanza, was long attributed to Douglas, an attribution recently challenged.
Sir David Lindsay of the Mount was another Scottish poet who had a close relation with the Court, this time that of James V, whom Lindsay tutored as a child, eventually being appointed to the heraldic position of Lord Lyon King of Arms.
The Dreme of Schir David Lyndsay
, his first known poem, consists of about a hundred and fifty stanzas in rime royal. It opens with an "Epistil to the Kingis Grace," reminding the king how "Quhen thow wes young, I bure thee in myne arme," and how the poet sang to him and told him stories. We then proceed to the Prologue, where the poet describes his walking in a garden in winter, complaining of the cold, and then falling asleep as he sits wrapped in his cloak. The dream that follows is in the dream allegory tradition, but with a difference. It has an almost colloquial vividness. Dame Remembrance takes the poet down to Hell, where he sees all the corrupt leaders of the Church as well as unjust kings and lords. Then he is taken up through the seven planetary spheres (each described in detail) to see angels, Christ, and Mary before returning to Earth, whose divisions he
 
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describes according to the latest notions of cosmography. When he reaches Scotland he meets a man who speaks the "Complaynt of the Commonweill of Scotland," listing all the abuses of the time. The poem ends with "Ane Exhortatioun to the Kingis Grace" (in ten nine-line stanzas and a coda) exhorting the king to "considder thy vocatioun," remedy injustice, punish wrongdoing, and rule in fame and honor with the ''counsell of thy prudent Lordis truew." The tone is quite different from that of Dunbar's poems to James IV. Lindsay is concerned with his country's problems and the plight of the people, not with himself and his own fortunes. The tone, sometimes even hectoring, is that of a teacher to a pupil.
The long
Dialog Betwix Experience and Ane Courteour
, in a variety of verse forms, is didactic to the point of tedium, but
The Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo
(parrot), mostly in rime royal, is vividly satirical with touches of lively humor. The
Complaynt
, addressed to the king in the octosyllabic couplets of Barbour's
Bruce
, also addresses the abuses of the time. Its tone is surprisingly familiar, very much that of a parent giving advice to a youngster, in spite of Lindsay's use of royal titles and his avowal in the final couplet of a "mynd full meik."
One of the most entertaining of Lindsay's poems is
The Historie of Squyer Meldrum
, in almost sixteen hundred octosyllabic couplets, very much in the tone of popular romance and reminding us sometimes, in its deadpan tone, of Chaucer's
Sir Thopas
. This is the story, told with a certain ironic gusto, of a real character of the time. It is followed by the
Testament
of Squire Meldrum, describing the happy musical celebration Meldrum wants at his funeral. A different kind of irony is shown in the spirited and colloquial
Complaint and Publict Confession of the Kingis Auld Hound, callit Bagshe, directit to Bawte, the Kingis best belovit Dog
, in which a former court dog confesses his misdeeds as an awful warning to the king's present canine favorite. This is in a tradition of animal poetry rather different from that of Henryson's
Fables
, a tradition that was to produce "The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck" (a greyhound) by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield and Burns's animal poetry.
Sir David Lindsay's most memorable achievement was his long play
Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis
, first performed in 1555. This work, mostly in rhymed couplets, is unique in Scottish literature, which has no other surviving play of the period. The Reformation Parliament of
 
Page 93
1560 put an end to stage plays in Scotland at the very time when a dramatic literature seemed all set to emerge, so that there is nothing in Scotland comparable to the poetic drama of Tudor and Stuart England. Lindsay's is a long, undisciplined, self-indulgent play, but its brilliance in depicting vices and follies through the language and behavior of its characters, its vivid precision in locating contemporary problems in the actions of allegorical and symbolic figures are remarkable. Revivals of the play in recent years at the Edinburgh Festival have proved enormously successful. The story of King Humanitie led astray by Wantonness, Solace, Dame Sensualitie, Flatterie, Falset, and others, until reformed by Gude Counsall and others, and of the punishment of the Vices by Divine Correctioun and others may sound in summary like abstract allegory, but the figures have enormous vitality and humor. In addition to the personified virtues and vices there are real characters, such as the Soutar (shoemaker) and his wife, the Taylor with his wife and daughter, the Poor Man, the fraudulent Pardoner, who is a great comic character as well as a villain, and the eloquently moving figure of John the Common-weill. There is moral gravity, knockabout farce, and stirring eloquence in this great ramshackle play. In its attitude to religious abuses Lindsay comes close to the views of the Reformers, but it is behavior not doctrine that he is concerned with, and he never makes any statement that would be doctrinally suspect in Catholic eyes. Nevertheless, the play together with his satirical poems helped to place Sir David in the popular imagination as a great precursor of the Reformation in Scotland. As Allan Ramsay was to put it, Lindsay's satires helped "give the scarlet dame a box" sharper than "all the pelts of Knox."
A tradition of poetry of popular revelry, distinctively Scottish, begins with two poems
Peeblis to the Play
and
Christis Kirk on the Grene
(both doubtfully attributed to James V and also, even more doubtfully, to James I), written probably in the fifteenth century. These poems in ten-line stanza with a "bob and wheel" ending are genre portraits full of color and action. They remained popular until well into the eighteenth century and were imitated by both Fergusson and Burns. What they represented, however, was in stark contrast to the mood evoked when the Parliament of 1560 set its face against what an Edinburgh Town Council proclamation of 1587 called "all menstrallis, pyperis, fidleris, common sangsters, and specially of baldrie and filthy sangs. . . ." The reformed Church of Scotland, presbyterian in government and Calvinist in theology, looked to the Bible as the ultimate authority, and
 
Page 94
because there was no translation of the Bible into Scots, it was to English versions (first the Geneva Bible of 1560 and then the King James Bible of 1611) that the Church turned. A second, even stronger factor in weakening the authority of the Scots language for serious purposes was the removal of the royal Court from Scotland to England in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England to become James I of England, taking his court poets with him. Finally, the "incorporating union" of England and Scotland in 1707, making Scotland part of the larger political unit of Britain, further increased the prestige of the language of the richer and dominant part of the kingdom. English became the language of education and of "high" literature in Scotland, and the Scots language declined into a series of regional dialects used by jesters, antiquaries, writers of pastiche, depicters of urban low life or rustic peasant life, and nostalgic patriots. Exceptions will be discussed in due course, but in general the decline of Scots as a literary language can be traced quite clearly from 1560 through 1603 to 1707 and beyond.
There was, however, an impressive Indian summer of courtly literature in Scotland in the reigns of James V (1513-1542) and of James VI before he left for England in 1603. James V, who married the French Princess Madeleine in 1537, and after her death the following year married Marie de Lorraine, daughter of the Duc de Guise, brought a Franco-Scottish atmosphere to his Court, where poetry, music, and dance flourished together. The great court poet of this and the succeeding two reigns, and also a musician, was Alexander Scott (1515?-1583). Scott wrote in a consciously courtly tradition closely related to contemporary French poetry and music. How far that tradition survived after James V's death, when Marie's pro-Catholic faction was challenged by a pro-English Protestant faction, is difficult to say. We do know, however, that after her return from France in 1561 young Mary Queen of Scots encouraged poetry, song, and dance at the Court. Scott welcomed her back to Scotland with a courtly poem in Scots: "Welcum! oure lyone with the floure de lyce. . . ." The poem combines, in a manner we have seen in older Scottish poetry, admiration and admonition. Each of the eight-line stanzas ends with the same line, "God gif the grace aganes this guid new-yeir," in a manner reminiscent of Dunbar.
Scott was an accomplished and versatile lyricist whose most attractive achievement is his love poems, written as songs but with their own verbal music. Scott puts sonorous diction, well-crafted rhythm, and

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