The Columbia History of British Poetry (8 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
6.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 29
were all-important realities (the world of Chaucer's Parson). Despite these attempts at sanitizing fiction, however, the whole matter of the poets left an uncomfortable mental residue. Poetry was still the "lowest amongst the arts" for Aquinas, and a glance at the dictionary shows that many of the collocations in English of such words as
poet, poesy
, and
poetry
are with
fables, lies
, and
feigning
. The fabulous images of poetry could only, the philosophers said, come from the suspect power of imagination or
phantasia
in the brain. We share imagination with the animals, and we should use it only in the service of cognition. Hence "falsehed and fantesye / And cursyd ymagynacyon" are often pejorative; they appear as villains in Skelton's
Magnyfycence
and in the morality play
Hyckescorner
.
The unsavory atmosphere surrounding poetry in the learned world is reflected in the attitudes of English writers, especially those who function within the orbit of learned, i.e., latinate, culture. The popularity of the dream vision, where the poet pretends to no more than telling us what he saw in an unverifiable dream, must owe something to this unease (dreams, although themselves the products of
phantasia
unsupervised by reason, were morally blameless). Chaucer, who of all medieval writers has something of the modern confidence in the "value" of literature (but see his Retractation), is therefore rather less typical than his contemporaries. Chaucer's followers lean heavily on his example to justify themselves as serious writers, but there is still a predominantly apologetic note in their work. They often claim to have nothing but their readers' good at heart, or, at the very least, they write to pass the time of day harmlessly lest the devil find something worse for them to do. It is impossible to escape the idea that in the medieval learned world poetry must be at heart didactic. Any entertainment value was at best dubious, and at worst, sinister.
Outside the learned world, it is safe to assume, songs and stories were taken less ponderously. Indeed, the anxiety of the educated about the value of poetry points to an unregenerate enjoyment of such things; moralists take it for granted that poems, whether seen as metrical devices or as beautiful fictions, are of themselves delightful, and hence morally suspect. But there was a class of people, largely independent of the learned world, to whom poems and verse were important: those who made their living by them. There must have been minstrels, singers, storytellers, and entertainers in great numbers, but they belong to a class whose unrecorded voices have not come down to us. It is
 
Page 30
apparent, even though what we have has been filtered through the literate, that there were some poets who treated their craft as a skill rather than an inferior art and who often seem more concerned with pleasing their audience than edifying it.
It is perhaps no accident that the poetry in which these characteristics are most evident is the alliterative verse that was written down in the North and West of England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is perhaps too romantic to visualize a line of oral poets stretching back unbroken to pre-Conquest days entertaining the English-speaking population in their own tongue in the alehouse, while the "official" Latin and French culture of the governing classes pursued its parallel course in court, castle, and university. But alliterative verse does make use of Old English poetic techniques (although altered and developed); it does, like Old English, employ a highly specialized vocabulary, and the poet does present himself as a master of a difficult craft, a latter-day "scop." The pride in mastery and the sense of an important social role for the poet receive fresh impetus from the theorists of the Renaissance, whose altered priorities and exaltation of classical precedents prove to be enormously enriching, but the alliterative style itself goes out of fashion. Most alliterative poems survive in only one or two manuscript copies and owe their present fame to the scholars of the nineteenth century who rediscovered them.
The most famous of all alliterative poems are the four works contained in a single grubby fourteenth-century manuscript now in the British Library (MS Cotton Nero A, x). All four are written in a consistent West Midland dialect; we know nothing about the author or authors. The poems are technically highly skilled, learned, and full of sophisticated vocabulary wielded like a precision tool. A great many of the words are survivors of Old English, since lost, but many more are derived from French, Latin, and Old Norse, all deployed with the conscious expertise of a professional, not the self-deprecating irony of Chaucer.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
is the most accessible of these poems. It is today the most nearly classifiable of all alliterative verse: more like a romance than anything else, it purports to be an adventure from the Arthurian cycle of stories. Framed by the legendary medieval history of Britain, the story tells how Sir Gawain accepted the challenge the Green Knight presented to the court of King Arthur at the New Year's feast to take part in a beheading contest. Gawain chops off the Green Knight's head, only to find that his blow is not at all final; the
 
Page 31
Green Knight rides off insouciantly swinging his head by its hair, reminding Gawain to seek him out for the return blow a year later. Gawain keeps his word, but while searching for his adversary is hospitably received in a castle where he agrees to another game: to exchange his daily winnings with his host. While the host goes hunting, Gawain stays indoors, and on each of the three successive days his host's wife makes what appear to be attempts to seduce him. Quantities of slaughtered beasts are exchanged each evening for the kisses Gawain has received; but on the third day the lady gives Gawain a girdle that, she claims, will protect him against all blows. Gawain pays his host the kisses but not the girdle. When at last he confronts the Green Knight, the two games come together: Gawain is humiliated to realize that the Green Knight and his host are one and the same, and that at every point he has been in ignorance of the real dynamics behind the play.
The poet's extraordinary slant on chivalric adventurehis hero, a knight whose untraditional function is to stand still to be struck at and to reject a lady's advances, and the central part played by embarrassing, not heroic, situationsis set off by the virtuoso command of the knightly terminology of armory, courtship, and hunt. The elaborate description of Gawain's red-and-gold emblem, the symbolic pentangle, complemented by the lady's bright green girdle Gawain puts on over it, suggests a theory of signs far subtler than Petrarch's allegorical secret messages. The poet's cunning in interlacing the ideals of chivalry with the ethics of medieval Christianity and his skill in posing a moral conundrum so subtle that no two critics agree entirely on just where Gawain went wrong and how serious his sin was would put him on a level with Chaucer, if comparisons between two such different modes were not pointless.
The Gawain poet presents his subject as one who is fully in charge of it; he requests a hearing, ''if ye wyl lysten this laye bot on littel quile," and promises a poem "with lel letteres loken" (linked with true staves) in proper alliterative style. The long lines with their four stresses linked by alliteration are divided into unequal clumps by a short rhyming "bob and wheel"; this device controls the narrative and descriptive units (thus averting the tendency of alliterative verse to run on shapelessly), and often provides a witty or surprising "cap" or turn to a stanzaas in the surprising mention of the greenness of the strange knight at the very end of the first description of him. The poet's control is asserted explicitly when he insists on the importance of his digression on the signifi-
 
Page 32
cance of the pentangle: "and quy the pentangel apendes to that prynce noble / I am intent yow to telle, thof tary hyt me schulde." The last lines are linked to the opening; the poem is presented as a finished artifact whose seeming completeness is belied by the ambiguity of its moral message.
The richness and subtlety of the alliterative style is even more fully displayed in another poem, now entitled
Pearl
, from the same manuscript. The speaker of the poem tells us he is a jeweler grieving for a lost pearl. He falls asleep on the flowery mound in a garden where he lost his jewel; his dream takes him into a marvelous landscape where he sees, across a stream, a beautiful maiden who is somehow the lost pearl. The main body of the poem is a dialogue between the uncomprehending dreamer and the wise maiden, who must explain the nature of heaven, the system of celestial rewards and the value of innocence. The poem analyzes brilliantly the strange blend of possessiveness and love in human grief: the dreamer never explains who his pearl is (although he hints that she is his baby daughter), but his love and longing for her are transmitted through his incredulous delight at her reappearance and his last gesture of throwing himself into the stream to rejoin her, only to awake again on the mound that is more clearly than ever a grave. The dreamer never really understands the nature of the heaven he is shown, but he is dimly comforted at the end. The poem is explicitly didactic, but the instruction is qualified by the reversal of roles: the maiden, an infant at her death, a female illiterate, is now the instructor, and the dreamer her slow pupil. Heaven is by definition beyond human comprehension, but here its paradoxes are dramatized; the last have become the first, and the dreamer is reduced to an appeal to affection alone because nothing else he hears seems to make sense to him:
quen we departed we wern at on;
God forbede we be now wrothe;
We meten so selden by stok other ston.
                                              378380)
While the images of
Pearl
are the earthly analogies of light, jewels, and running water, the heart of the vision is a close borrowing from the book of Revelation, to which the poet appeals as the authority of guaranteed truth and which validates his own work as an individual revelation of the very same truth. The poem is an extraordinary blend of emo-
 
Page 33
tion and an intellectual analysis of that emotion; the dreamer feels intensely, and the maiden discounts his feelings as irrelevant to the real happiness he ought to be seeking. The poem can easily be summarized as a series of Christian truisms, but the poet demonstrates that those truisms conceal enormous complexities.
Pearl
represents the most complex marriage of style and content in the whole body of alliterative poetry. The verse combines heavy alliteration with a complex rhyme scheme; the poem has an elaborate numerological structure; its 101 stanzas are linked throughout by concatenation, and the last line is almost the same as the first. It is, as has been remarked, like a highly wrought jewel box made for the pearl; the precision and detail of the frame contrast starkly with the numinous and unspeakable reality it contains. The whole poem suggests the complex unity of the single gem that is its main symbol. The detail and precision of the analysisas in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
still allow for diverse conclusions. Critics vary in their censure of the dreamer as they do on the precise nature of Gawain's sin: but in both poems the central medieval paradox, that man is a miserable sinner who is still promised a chance at perfection, is highlighted and not resolved. Both poems present an unattainable ideal, and both contrast it with inevitable human inadequacy, temporality, and grief: "the faut and the fayntyse of the flesche crabbed." The otherworldly ideal offered can only be expressed by images and implications and rereadings of the existing worldthe reader must learn that jewels on earth are "really" fading roses, but that heaven can to some extent be apprehended in terms of actual roses and pearls, earthly light and human love. Paradoxically it is the jeweler's all-too-human love for his lost Pearl that enables him to ''see" the New Jerusalem and understand an unimaginable bliss.
Pearl
implicitly asserts a much more profound view of poetry than any medieval theorist dared to present.
Many other writers in the alliterative style show the same authorial confidence in their skills and the same pride in their technical virtuosity. The poets write with a notable lack of apology, but often with a forthright acceptance of the didactic function of poetry. The other two poems in MS Cotton Nero A x both address themselves to moral virtues, and open with straightforward assertions: "Patience is a poynt, thagh hit displese oft," and "Clannesse, whoso kyndly cowthe comende / . . . Fayre formes myght he fynde in forthering his speche." Both poems go on to explore the meanings of the virtues of patience and cleanness (or purity) by focusing on their opposites:
Patience
defines its virtue by describing

Other books

Vive le Sleepover Club! by Narinder Dhami
Anathema by David Greske
Enforcer by Hill, Travis
A Perfect Grave by Mofina, Rick
Shadow of Reality by Donna Fletcher Crow
Ruling the Void by Mair, Peter.