32 CHAPTER IV LYRIC AND MISCELLANEOUS POETRY OF THE The Earli- As we have already seen, one of the distinctive marks of est Eng Middle English poetry was the triumph of the new metres, lish Lyric. and nowhere is that triumph more complete than in the lyrics of the period. Yet their interest, unlike that of certain other kinds of contemporary poetry, is very far from being merely prosodic it depends largely on their intrinsic beauty and charm. It has been claimed that the earliest English song in rhyme is the boat song-not as it has been sometimes strangely called, the ballad-of King Canut: : Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely And here we these muneches sang. Yet there are obstacles to this claim; and it should not be forgotten that the fragment occurs for the first time in a chronicle written a century and a half after the incident which it purports to record. More remarkable are the fragmentary hymns of the mariner turned hermit, St. Godric of Finchale, which exhibit rhyme and the new metre before 1170, the year of his death. Two rhymed fragments of verse, set for singing, survive from the latter half of the thirteenth century; and to the same period belongs the famous Cuckoo Song 'Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu 'the earliest secular composition in parts which has hitherto been discovered -a Canon or Round for six voices'. This, apart from its historic interest, is admirably vigorous, and shows a fresh and most English delight in Nature. Songs of To the very end of the thirteenth century belongs a collecLove and tion of the first importance now known as the Harleian MS. Religion, 2253, consisting of poems said to have been written down at Leominster Abbey, in the south-west of England. This, and a few other collections of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, supply us with our first notable body of English song. The greater number of the poems, and the earliest, are religious. Though Christian, they carry with them something of the gloom which is part of the older pagan faith, and is inseparable from Anglo-Saxon poetry. Life is a show, at once sorrowful and transitory, and the world is 'but a brotil tree': Now shrinketh rose and lylie flour, Ne is no quene so stark ne stoure, In the beautiful Love Rune of Thomas de Hales, this warning is repeated the warning that sounds again in Villon's most famous ballad and one of Shakespeare's most perfect songs, that 'golden girls and lads all must, like chimney-sweepers, come to dust : Where is Paris and Heleyne, That weren so bright and fair of blee? Ector with his sharp meyne, And Caesar rich of worldes fee? As the shaft is from the clee. On the gloom of the present waits the gloom of the hereafter, lit only by the hope of salvation through Christ and his Mother. The lyrics in praise of Mary are among the most beautiful of all, and have something of the lover-like fervour which we meet later in Crashaw. This quality, like that which inspires the poems of earthly love, was doubtless due to the influence of the French trouvères, and it is significant that many poems in the famous Harleian 2253 are in French: yet it has been pointed out that the love poems of the period are by no means slavish renderings of the amour courtois, but that they have a freshness and sweetness which is English, and of the people. The most famous and charming of them is that in praise of Alison In certain of the poems love and nature are blended, as when a lover sings: Blou, northerne wind, Send thou me my sweeting, Blou, northerne wind, blou, blou, blou ! Another poem puts the romance and joy of a season into a single lilting line: Lenten is come with love to town. 1 Speech. 2 Power. 3 I have had a stroke of luck. 4 Turned. C Political A third utters an old fancy with fresh delight and grace: Besides poems of love and religion, there were also many political songs of hate or scorn. One of the earliest of these is a poem written after the battle of Lewes (1264) and directed against Richard of Almain, brother of the reigning king : Sir Simon de Montfort hath swore by his chin, Hadde he now here the Erl of Warin, Sholde he never come more to his inn With shelde, ne with spere, ne with other gin. Richard! thah thou be ever trichard Songs of this kind are frequent throughout the following hundred years. The most notable writer of them is Laurence Minot. Minot, whose period of activity covers the middle years of the fourteenth century. Minot's poems are chiefly in celebration of the English victories against the Scotch and the French. He taunts the former thus, after Halidon Hill: Middle Metres. Bot, loved be God, the pride is slaked Of them that war so stout on stede, His poem on the siege and taking of Calais begins thus: And mourning mun ye have to mede; Sir Edward shall ken you your creed. Minot's poems are written in many metres, employing both rhyme and alliteration. They vary greatly in quality, but the best of them have vigour and point; and Minot's scorn for his country's foemen never degenerates into scolding. The general effect of Latin and French upon the new English prosody has been discussed earlier in this volume, and from this point of view, as from others, it is noteworthy that several of the religious songs in the collections we have mentioned are written in a blend of English with one or other of these languages. Rhyme has now become essential, and alliteration has ceased to be so. It is still freely used for ornament, but the full revival of it, to which we have made earlier refer1 Blackbird 2 Lark. The last four specimens are quoted in almost all the works dealing with the lyric of the period, but there are many other poems of hardly less charm. See Early English Lyrics (Chambers and Sidgwick) and Mr. E. K. Chambers's masterly terminal essay. 4 Treacherous, ence, is not as yet. Stanzas of varying length and complexity are used: one of the most important of these is the romance sestet, subsequently burlesqued by Chaucer in Sir Thopas. In some cases this is followed by a quatrain: in others the quatrain follows the romance octave. The famous six-line stanza of Burns is found, as so frequently in the Mystery cycles. And if the metres are French, they are already handled with somewhat of that licence which is later to become one of the most precious qualities of English poetry. There fall also for consideration here a remarkable group of poems which, with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are preserved in a single manuscript, and were almost certainly all composed during the latter half of the fourteenth century. The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, with Gawain itself, have Cleanness, been attributed to a single author, and in the case of the first Patience, three this attribution seems reasonable and almost certain. The Pearl. The author's identity, however, remains undiscovered, despite the various attempts which have been made to prove that he is either Huchoun of the Awle Royale', or Ralph Strode, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. It is established that in general his language is that of the extreme north-west midland.1 All of the poems, including Gawain, use alliteration; but Cleanness and Patience are written in rhymeless quatrains of four beats, whereas Pearl uses twelve-lined rhyming stanzas grouped in batches of five, and possessing each a recurrent terminal refrain. Gawain and its metre have been discussed elsewhere. Cleanness retells, with considerable force, certain stories of Scripture embodying the praise of purity. Patience, on the whole a better poem, paraphrases the Book of Jonah, and points a moral inculcating endurance and trust in the Divine Will. There is much spirit in the description of the tempest beneath which the windes on the wonne water so wrastel together'; and there is a quaint portrait of the wylde walterande whal' which swallows the prophet ' withouten touche of any tothe'. But by far the finest of the three poems is Pearl, in its first intention the lament of a bereaved father for his daughter, whose name, as the symbol of the pearl seems to indicate, may well have been Margaret. While he is searching in vain for his 'precious perle withouten spot' amid 'bloomes black and blue and red that schines full schir against the sun', his grief overcomes him and he falls into a swoon. He has a vision of his daughter, who reproves him for his sorrow, since what he lost was 'but a rose that flowered and failed as kind (nature) it gave '-a rose which is now become a pearl of price. He tells her that through her death he is become a 'joyless jeweller', but would be a joyful one could he cross the water that separates her from him. 1 Charles Osgood, Introduction to his edition of The Pearl (Belles Lettres Series, D. C. Heath & Co., Boston). 2 Cf. I. Gollancz, Preface to his edition of Patience (Clarendon Press). The New She comforts him with parables, and with the assurance of her bliss. He has a vision of the heavenly city' of great renown', glorious with all manner of jewels; and after a vain attempt to join her, he awakes. Attempts have been made to show that this poem is a mere allegory embodying no personal grief; but few who have read it closely and with sympathy will adopt this view. Nor is it very profitable to scan this pearl of poems too closely, as some have scanned it, for flaws of structure and phrasing. After pedantry has wrought its worst upon it it remains a thing of high beauty and spiritual worth; and the unknown who made it and its fellows is certainly one of the great poets of his age. Our next chapter leads us to a greater still. CHAPTER V CHAUCER, LANGLAND, GOWER IN Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400), the morning star of Prosody. song', we reach the most consummate expression of mediaeval thought and art in English poetry, together with our first great earnest of the Renaissance. The language in which he wrote the London variety of the east midland dialect— had been gradually simplified through more than two centuries, and was slowly moving toward its modern form : little by little, the elaborate Old English inflections had been levelled under a few common forms, and were now well on their way to disappearance. A relic of the old speech and syntax survived in the syllabic value given, in most cases, to the final -e; and this matter becomes very important in relation to Chaucer, since failure to understand its prosodic significance led to the belief, entertained for many generations, that the form of his verse was crude and broken. As we have seen, the old alliterative metre which had been the staple of AngloSaxon poetry had been temporarily revived at this period, notably in the later romances. We shall deal later in this chapter with its handling by Langland: Chaucer, however, partly through training and environment, partly from a sure poetic instinct, rejected this form in favour of measures which disregarded alliteration and ensued rhyme and a comparatively strict accentual regularity. He took over certain of the rhyming metres which had become acclimatized in England— notably the octosyllabic rhyming couplet: his use of certain others was to a large extent affected by contemporary French practice. It has been noticed that, despite his great general debt to Italian writers, he borrows the form of Italian verse only in one brief passage 1-doubtless because the measures which he had independently perfected gave him full satisfaction. Cf. W. P. Ker, English Mediaeval Literature, p. 227. |