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THE CONTEXT

OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH LYRICS

By

Robert Michael Holaday

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1981

ABSTRACT
THE CONTEXT OF THE MIDDLE ENGLISH LYRICS

BY

Robert Michael Holaday

Only within the last two decades has Middle English lyric poetry
received extensive critical attention from sympathetic readers who
attempt to account for the particular aesthetic effects this body of
poetry achieves. This study explores the possibility of grounding
such a study in a theory of literary context derived from speech-act
and linguistic models of language usage.

The study begins with a survey of the critical literature, iden-
tifying and documenting six assumptions which inform it. One of these,
termed the linguistic suitability hypothesis, holds that the ME lan-
guage was uniquely suited to the production of just such poetic texts
as have come down from the period. This is shown to be an indefensi—
ble position.

Chapter Two focusses on the notion of context, both as it has
been applied to the ME lyrics specifically and as it has been elabor-
ated in recent critical theory, most notably by Mary Louise Pratt.
These discussions are shown to be flawed and an alternative is propos-
ed. The concept of deixis, as elucidated in the work of the linguist
Charles Fillmore, supplies an empirical data base for contextualist
study of lyric poetry. Deixis refers to those elements of language-
certain of the personal pronouns, adverbs and adverbial phrases, and
verb tenses--which derive their real-world significance only from the
specific context in which they are uttered.

The body of the study surveys the lyric poetry of the ME period

from the point of view first of person deixis, then of time and place
deixis, and finally of deictic self—reflexivity. In each case the
primary objective is to establish the interest of a contextualist
reading, by demonstrating its wide applicability and by raising issues
for further study. The bearing of a contextualist perspective on
various of the issues raised in the critical literature is also point-
ed out.

The study concludes with a brief examination of a well-known text
which displays no deictic features whatsoever, suggesting nevertheless
that it can pertinently be read on the contextualist model developed

in the body of the study.

[3) Copyright by
ROBERT MICHAEL HOLADAY
1981

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Professor John A. Yunck, who directed not only this disser-
tation but a substantial portion of my course of studies at Michigan
State University, to my entire family for their unflagging interest
and support, and especially to my wife Beverly, who clearly recognized
the purpose of this undertaking even when I did not, and who typed
the lion's share of the manuscript, I would like to express my

sincerest appreciation. I am proud to be in your debts.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I: Introduction
Chapter II: A Theory of Literary Contextualism
Chapter III: Individuality and the Context of Utterance

Chapter IV: Here and Now: Time and Place and the Context of
Conflict

Chapter V: The Context of Performance
Chapter VI: Poems Without Contexts

Bibliography

iv

35

63

105

152

175

181

Chapter I: Introduction

Happily for the student of Middle English literature there is no
longer a need to begin a study of the lyric poetry in English of the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries with a justification.
Skillful and sympathetic critical attention over the last two decades
together with wide availability of the texts themselves (at least
several hundred of the best of them) in a dozen or more recent anthol-
ogies have combined to dispel the generally skeptical opinion of an
older generation of scholarship, of which George Kane's disparaging
remark that "The religious subject as a whole had a restrictive effect
upon [the lyrics'] poets" is a fair sample and one often cited of late.1
Where the older generation of critics found dogma, tedium, and doggerel
in these lyrics the critics of the past two decades have found devotion,
variety, and technical skill; and a group of poets once felt to have
little claim on our aesthetic sensibilities are now said to be "outsung
[in their own sphere] by only a small chorus of the best lyric poets
in the language."2

As a matter of fact the most recent work on the Middle English

lyrics has not concerned itSElf much with this sort of revisionist

appreciation. Beginning, perhaps, with Raymond Oliver's Poems Without

 

Names: The English Lyric, 1200-15003 the tendency has been to assume

 

a broadly sympathetic audience and to present instead of a defense an

analysis of the material from the point of view of an area of

2
technical expertise, or to provide close readings of a number of the
texts, or both. The present study belongs to the last of these types.
It is an attempt to demonstrate the relevance of a particular class of
linguistic phenomena known as deictics to a contextually motivated
understanding of this body of poetry. I will defer a full explanation
of these phenomena until Chapter Two, and their bearing on the Middle
English lyrics forms the subject of the following three chapters.
Briefly, deictics are linguistic elements whose meanings are wholly
defined by the circumstances of the situation in which they are
uttered. They have no fixed meanings, but derive them in a given in-
stance from the context of the utterance. The first and second person
pronouns and adverbials of time (now) and place (here) are notable ex-
amples.

Such a demonstration as I am undertaking here would have little
interest unless it could be shown to have some particular relevance to
these lyrics by virtue of the wide occurrence of the phenomena in ques-
tion in them; hence I will cite examples widely from the standard an-
thologies. They lie at hand everywhere, and it seems to me that this
fact in itself must be taken into account as we strive for a fuller
appreciation of the lyrics. Secondly, the notable presence of the de-
ictic phenomena in the lyrics raises a number of interesting questions
about the poetics--the presumptive, underlying rules of poetic compo-
sition-—of the Middle English period, and although a full treatment of
that subject lies outside the scope of the present study I will devote
some space to a discussion of some of the major issues involved, since
the orientation of much of this work is unfamiliar, I believe, to most

readers of Middle English literature. we will find, for example, that

3
just as it is unprofitable and perhaps even dangerous to insist on a
strict division of the Middle English lyrics into secular and relig-
ious provenances, it is unprofitable, dangerous, and in any case unten-
able to insist upon a strict separation of natural and poetic forms of
language, so that such a view, which some critics have brought to bear
explicitly (and many hold implicitly), rather hinders than furthers
our understanding of this poetry. Finally, it is one of the purposes
of this study to point out systematic interrelationships among various
motifs of the current criticism of the lyrics-~the nature and identity
of the speakers in them, their public quality, their ambivalent atti—
tude toward the natural surroundings, their conventionality of lan—
guage, their pragmatic or functional aesthetic, their fusion of the
secular and religious domains--and to ground this systematicity in the
linguistic phenomenon of deixis.

The most recent critical work on the Middle English lyrics, as I
have said, offers a close reading of the lyrics, a discussion of their
relationship to some other area of learning, or some combination of
the two. In order to place the present study within the context of
these broadening circles of critical study I want to survey several
of these works before passing on to an examination of some preliminary
issues in the remainder of this chapter.

Edmund Reiss's The Art g£_the Middle English Lyric: Essays In_

 

Criticism itself briefly surveys the field of lyric scholarship

through the publication of Sarah Appleton weber's Theology and Poetry

 

in_the Middle Englisthyric: ALStudy gf_Sacred History and Aesthetic

 

 

 

Form in 1969.4 Raymond Oliver's Poems Without Names, mentioned above,

 

was in press simultaneously with Reiss's work, so it receives only a

A
few lines of attention there in a note. I will comment more extensive-
ly on it below. The bulk of Reiss's work is taken up with close tex-
tual analyses of twenty-five individual lyrics, most of them well
known but a few that have received little or no attention. Reiss's
technique is to make use of "as many critical and scholarly tools as
I could justifiably employ" in order to see "how the poems do what
they do and how all their parts contribute to the whole" (p. xii).
This kind of close attention, which I must agree is "rarely applied
to medieval verse," produces readings which are sometimes insightful,
sometimes quixotic; but as Somerset Maugham remarked apropos of read-
ing the theatre critics, it is diverting to agree and diverting to
disagree. In any event, for the lyrics he discusses Reiss's comments
are apt to be the most extensive textually centered analyses in the
critical literature; and he performs the further service of collecting
in one place information on the MS source(s), printed editions, and
previous critical commentary.

Nevertheless, Reiss's work remains the only one to devote itself
wholly to approaching each lyric "according to its own demands." The
three book-length studies which have appeared since his work all at-
tempt to ground Middle English lyric practice in one aspect or another
of medieval Christianity.5 These are Douglas Gray's Themes and Images

ig_the Medieval English Religious Lyric6, Sister Mary Arthur Knowlton's

 

 

The Influence gf_Richard Rolle and 9; Julian gf_Norwich gg_the Middle

 

 

 

Englisthyrics7, and David L. Jeffrey's The Early English Lyric and

 

 

Franciscan Spirituality.8 These works extend the discussions of

 

sources and influences and thematic classifications begun by Woolf and

Weber in the previous decade. Gray's viewpoint is the most eclectic

5

of the three. He discerns in the "inherited [Latin] tradition" an
"imaginary museum" wherein is conserved "the fruit of twelve centuries
of Christian tradition--hymns, religious poetry, commentaries, sermons,
. . . the Scriptures, the Psalter, and the Western liturgy." This
supplies collectively "an elaborate and developed theology and various
sophisticated symbolic or allegorical modes of thought" as well as
"ideas and themes, words and phrases, . . . also a rich array of vis-

' which in turn forms the material of which the lyrics are

ual images,’
constructed.9 Sister M. A. Knowlton confines herself to a study of

the influence of the two best known English mystics of the period on
contemporary poetry and finds that "Richard Rolle's influence on the
lyric literature of the one hundred and fifty years after his death

was very great, [while] that of Julian [was] very slight." She ac-
counts for the difference by referring it to their contrasting styles,
characterizing Rolle's as "effusive" with an "immediate popular ap-
peal," whereas Julian's is "reserved" and "intellectual."10 David
Jeffrey's study of the contribution of the Friars Minor to the English
lyric tradition is both scholarly and highly accessible, although many
will find that his conclusion that "the Middle English lyric is, essen-

"11 somewhat exaggerates the case. The chap-

tially, a Franciscan song
ters on "Spiritual Revolution and Popular Poetry" and "Franciscan
Spirituality", in any case, afford a useful--and fascinating--glimpse
of an era of corrupt ecclesiastical practice and deteriorating spiri—
tual morale, as it were, throughout a very large area of Western Chris-
tendom. It was within this distressing atmosphere that the Middle

English lyrics suddenly began to appear in the second quarter of the

thirteenth century, and Jeffrey's analysis goes far toward establishing

6
a causal connection by reading the lyrics as expressions of the re-
formist, popularized spirituality of the Franciscans.

As I mentioned earlier, although these works differ in assigning
the greatest measure of influence on the development and thematic
stock of the lyrics to one or another source within the Christian tra-
dition, there is substantial concurrence among the critics upon a set
of interpretational assumptions (although they are often set forward
as objective qualities of the lyrics themselves). These assumptions
effectively govern modern readings of this poetry, so pervasive are
they; most of them are shared by this study. But the possibility that
they can be grounded in an understanding of the function of deixis in
Middle English poetic practice has not been explored. In the remain-
der of this chapter I would like to document these assumptions, defer-
ring my own rationale for holding those of them which I do until the
appropriate time. In the case of three, however, which I do not hold,
I will offer refutations and alternatives.

Although the practice of the lyrics' editors has nearly always
been to separate the religious from the secular ones, recent criticism
has consistently argued that they form a single tradition. Thus Ed-
mund Reiss, for example, maintains that "the distinction between sec-
ular and religious, at least insofar as the medieval lyric is con-
cerned, seems to be both artificial and inadequate, and ofter some-
thing that gets in the way of understanding the various poems." The
distinction, he believes, arises from consideration only of the surface
of the text, its littera in contemporary terminology, and ignores the
fact that "most frequently, even when the surface of the poem appears

to be secular, there exists beneath it a moral or religious sentence

7

that represents the poem's essential significance."12 His position
and the rationale for it were substantially anticipated by John
Speirs. David Jeffrey argues that "to separate mechanically the two
'kingdoms' [i.e. the secular and religious] in a medieval poem may
obscure one of the most important premises of such a poem, which can
be that there is no sharp discontinuity between secular and religious
experience, or between the realm of God's created nature, including
his highest creation, and God himself."13 For David Manning, "the
analogy which medieval poets saw between the natural and supernatural
worlds is reflected in [a number of] poems" in which "the two tradi-
tions-~religious and secular--blend harmoniously."14 This assumption
is shared by the present study, which often cites works from the two
"kingdoms" side by side to illustrate a point. The basic linguistic
material which establishes a poem's deixis is unaffected by its sub—
ject, theme, point of view, function, imagery, style, or diction.

A second assumption of modern lyric criticism, shared by this
study, is that although these lyrics §£g_lyrics, "modern definitions
of lyric which emphasize the expression of an individual's emotion

' as Douglas Gray ex-

will clearly not be applicable to most of them,‘
presses it.15 Rosemary Woolf begins her compendious study by making
exactly this point. She warns that the Middle English lyrics "possess
very few of the qualities that the term 'lyric' may lead the reader to
expect. In English criticism the word 'lyric' has descended from the
sixteenth century, gathering associations on its way." In a note she
traces the history of the usage of the term, labelling the post-nine-

teenth century expressionist associations a la Ruskin ("Lyric Poetry

is the expression by the poet of his own feelings") as "even more

8
insidiously misleading when applied to the Middle English religious
lyric than is the [earlier] emphasis on musical qualities." Nor do
the lyricists fit our modern conception of the poet, she argues, "for
they are not concerned with the question of how they feel individually,
but only with what kind of response their subject should properly a-

' a trait she refers to as the medieval poets' "ab-

"16

rouse in Everyman,‘
negation of individuality. For Raymond Oliver such a "modern def-
inition" is wholly out of the question, for "in medieval literature,

at least, we have nothing but the embodiment of an intention; there

is no temptation to discuss the text apropos of the private experience
and mental workings of its author, a dubious enterprise even where mod-
ern poetry is concerned."17 Robert D. Stevick takes A. K. Moore and
George Kane, in particular (and Steven Manning, as well, though the
critique in his case is mitigated) to task for their failures to ob-
serve the fact that "inferences about the poet's imagination, or cre-
ative faculty, or consciousness, seem to be about as untrustworthy as
grounds for evaluation as they are deficient in providing a satisfac-

"18 Reiss recognizes, with Amanda Coomar-

tory accounting of the poem.
aswamy, an analogy between the medieval artist and the modern mathema-
tician in that "neither possesses artistic self-consciousness, at
least not in the modern sense of the term; feeling, as such-~that
which is the basis of the term 'aesthetic'--is necessarily irrelevant
to their works."19 As long ago as 1946 Leo Spitzer discounted an al-
legation of medieval plagarism by positing a distinction between what
he called the "empirical I" and the "poetic I," and he advanced the

theory that "in the Middle Ages, the 'poetic I' had more freedom and

breadth than it has today: at that time the concept of intellectual

9
property did not exist because literature dealt not with the individ-
ual but with mankind; the 'ut in pluribus' was an accepted standard."20
Similar positions may be found in Manning (p. 50) and Weber (p. 204).
The contrary assumption-~that the lyrics dg_express the thought, feel-
ing, sensibility, world view, anxiety, or other recognizably individ-
ual perception of individual poets--suggests itself particularly strong-
ly to the uninitiated reader of these lyrics, not merely because of
his necessarily modern perspective on lyric poetry in general but be-
cause of the remarkably marked tendency of the lyrics to use the first
person pronoun and to address the reader directly. The phenomenon of
dexis bears directly on this matter, and the application of it to this
assumption, with attendant problems of interpretation not generally
recognized in the criticism, forms the subject of Chapter Three.

A third interpretational assumption often put forward as a char-
acteristic of the lyrics themselves is that they are in the main func-
tional and public works rather than objects of private aesthetic con-
templation. The point is similar to the preceding one, but recogniz-
ably distinct from it. Gray, for example, notes that "The lyrics are
sometimes put to what we might recognize as 'literary' uses (e.g. in
plays), but more often than not the impulse behind them is quite func-
tional and practical." He adds that "Utility is normally put before

' contending that "The lyrics were meant to be, and were, used,

beauty,‘
sometimes in private devotion and prayer, sometimes for public devo-
tional display, sometimes to emphasize and drive home points in ser-
mons."21 In a chapter entitled "Public, Practical, Anonymous" Oliver

asserts that "most short poems from the English Middle Ages derive

their meaning from large cultural values or institutions. They are

10

social artifacts, public and useful, whose purpose can be gauged only
with respect to a larger purpose." Their points of view are "general
and public" and derive from "a handful of general sources" including
"social role or position, Scripture or religious doctrine, nonrelig-
ious doctrine or theory, and broadly religious or existential posi-
tions."22 While it is difficult to tell what is excluded by this list
of "sources" the emphasis on what is publicly accessible is apparent.
In a most interesting recent study, "The Idea of Public Poetry in the
Reign of Richard 11," Anne Middleton characterizes this quality very
sharply. Although the works she has primarily in mind are "those two

'baggy monsters,'" Confessio Amantis and Piers Plowman, and although

 

 

she tends to conceive of this quality as a feature which distinguishes
the poetry of the later fourteenth century from what precedes it, much
of her characterization applies to the lyrics as well. She finds that
certain attitudes, "which constitute the foundations of a secular and
civic piety, are attended in the poetry by explicit and coherent no-
tions about the nature of poetry, about poetry's worldly place and
purpose." Hence "poetry was to be a 'common voice' to serve the 'com-
mon good'" and "The realized presence of the poetic speaker in this
literature became a stylistic means of expressing that purpose." Fur-
thermore, "The public poetry of the Ricardian period is best under-
stood not as poetry 'about' contemporary events and abuses, whether
viewed concretely or at a distance, from the vantage point of a uni-
versal scheme of ideal order--it is rarely occasional or topical, and
it is indifferent on the whole to comprehensive rationale systems of
thought or of poetic structure. Rather it is poetry defined by a con-

stant relation of speaker to audience within an ideally conceived

ll
worldly community, a relation which has become the poetic subject.
In describing their mode of address, the poets most often refer to
the general or common voice, and the ideal of human nature that sus-
tains this voice assigns new importance to secular life, the civic
virtues, and communal service."23 Here again, the contribution of an
understanding of the lyrics' deictic elements to a fuller specifica-
tion of the "constant relation of speaker to audience" has not been
recognized. The point is taken up in Chapter Three.

A fourth assumption which forms a constant theme in the recent
criticism of the lyrics is nicely summarized by Speirs's remark that
"There is a great deal that is of the nature of drama in English med-
ieval poetry." He particularly has the alliterative poetry and Chau-
cer in mind but clearly means to include the lyrics as well: "This
whole body of English medieval verse, in which we hear not only the
poets themselves but characters talking, is much more dramatic in na-
ture than most nineteenth-century verse is--and most twentieth-century
verse also."24 Gray's remark about "The stress on 'being there' in
meditating on the scenes from the life of Christ" picks up the same
idea.25 The point is developed more extensively by Woolf (1968),
Dronke (1977), and Zumthor (1972), whose discussions are analyzed in
Chapter Four, in which we examine the relevance of the deictic phe-
nomena to these observations.26

The fifth and sixth widespread critical assumptions have to do
with language and the lyrics. Critics have often noted that the lyr-
ics' diction tends to be conventional, unoriginal, cliched, even form-
ulaic. What is new is that, since Stevick's influential article in

1966, they have attempted to recognize this conventionality as a

12
formal feature of this poetry which contributes to, rather than de-
tracting from, its characteristic appeal. Thus Stevick, who focusses
his attention upon the correspondence of metrical, syntactic, and
ideational "structures," finds that a single, well-defined pattern
"constitutes a structure of metrical, linguistic, and quantitative
features in conformity to which the linguistic 'message' was normally
expressed. It is in light of this structure that the poetic struc-
turing of the message--that is, the poetic utterance--can be best un-
derstood."27 Because the present study attempts to further this dis-
cussion substantially, two presentations of this argument, by Stevick
and by John F. Plummer, require attention here.

Stevick begins with a given: "from the beginnings of the English
lyric into the sixteenth century, the four-stress line in rhymed stan-
zas was the norm." Because the line was relatively short, seven to
ten syllables, and "essentially iambic," these conventions, operating
in concert, "restricted the variability of the line." The coincidence
of rhyme, which gives prominence to the rhyme word and, hence, estab-
lishes "a valence for the highest linguistic stress," with metrical
stress at the end of the line tended to place linguistic terminal
juncture there, further restricting variability. The result is that
"the line and major syntactic constructions thus were generally coex-

"28 But the limited scope of these syntactic constructions in

tensive.
turn tended to dictate that "the verse norm of traditional Middle Eng-
lish lyrics was conducive to assertions and questions." These "small,
fixed, and relatively uniform" units had moreover to be presented in
"a linear arrangement of simple sequence."29

Now Stevick addresses the question of how such an arrangement can

13
be "poetic." For an answer, he appeals to a variation of the Romantic
organic structure theory and introduces a new distinction, between ex-
plicit and implicit structuring:

A "poetic" structure, in being single, must unify these "blocks"

of overt-expression patterns. Such obvious devices of organi-

zation as enumeration . . ., interview . . ., or catalog . . .

achieve unity only of an external kind: the relation between

one unit of development and the next need only be conventional

and not a consequence of the form of expression at given points

in the poem. Formulaic development such as that of penitential

prayers may develop an internal structure while conforming to

the inherited religious formulas; it so happens that most poems

of this type do not. The one type of structuring of expression

which is shared by poems that have been regarded as best, whether

secular or religious in subject, depends on juxtaposifiion of

metrical-expression units with implicit structuring.
Unfortunately Stevick does not define the term "implicit structuring,"
or the variant "implicit organization," but he finds an example of it
in the much discussed "Sunset on Calvary":

Nou goth sonne vnder wod, --

me reweth, marie, pi faire Rode.

Nou gop sonne vnder tre, --

me reweb, marie, pi sone and be.
He contends that "In neither couplet is one line subordinated expli—
citly to the other, nor are the lines explicitly coordinated"; rather
"Within each couplet the statements are connected only by the rhyme
and metrical patterning that tend to establish phonological linking
of the two statements. It is just this implicit structuring of the
expression, keeping in this instance the maximum.correlation between
line and unit of complete utterance, that elicits the pyschological,
temporal, doctrinal, and other connections the reader can supply and
sets the mode within which those connections are to be made."31

The argument, I am afraid, is circular. Stevick sets out to de-

monstrate why this poem's form is poetic. He holds that it will be

14

found to "unify" its "blocks" of "overt-expression patterns." But
that unity is not signalled explicitly in syntactic subordination or
coordination. It must therefore, he believes, be signalled implicitly
instead. Such implicit structuring, he concludes, is definitively
characteristic of poetry and gives rise to the connections we notice
when we read it.

Following Stevick's lead in a recent article entitled "The Poetic
Function of Conventional Language in the Middle English Lyric," John
F. Plummer attempts to "determine some of the stylistic implications

"32 His

of the high frequency of conventional phrases in the lyrics.
suspicion, he says, is that "the conventional phrase plays a deter-
mining role in the style of the Middle English lyrics, perhaps even
the central role in shaping what the lyric is and is not."33

Plummer contends that one of the "facts of the literary history
surrounding the lyrics" is that Dante's stipulations in "De Vulgari
Eloquentia" "have the effect of restricting the admissible vocabulary
[for poetry in the vernacular] on phonological and semantic grounds."34
That such restriction was observed by the poets seems to be borne out
by empirical studies of the lexical stock of the troubadour and trou-
vere poets. Hence, Plummer argues, "As Dante's discussion of the song
tradition makes clear, the vocabulary, the nature of the language of
the song, is an essential ingredient in determining its character,"
and he sets out to test Dante's remark against the Middle English lyr-
ics.

Unlike Stevick, who focussed on the conventional metrical struc-

ture of the lyrics, Plummet focusses on the conventional lexical item--

the cliche. He regards the stock of such conventional material as the

15

poets technical vocabulary" and declares that its value lies not in

some special meaning it might thus acquire but, on the contrary, in
its meaninglessness:

The most important effect of an extensive use of cliches in the
lyrics, I would suggest, is an alteration of the way in which
the language of the lyrics carries meaning, or signifies. The
method of signification most prominent in such a lyric is that
in which the words signify in relationship to themselves (iden-
tifying themselves as items drawn from a specific restricted
lexicon) and to the gtructure of the particular lyric in which
they are contained.3

I am not certain of the meaning of this last sentence; but insofar as
it clearly specifies a quantitative measure for an idea of crucial ime
portance to the argument which is untestable, the "prominence" of the
"method of signification" Plummer claims operates here remains in
question. To proceed to firmer ground, however:

Expressions of the poet's suffering, the lady's beauty, and the
onset of love in the springtime, for example, were couched in
stereotyped terms in order to divest, to a large degree, the
words in such expressions of their normal signifying relation—
ship to the real world, to objective reality. It is difficult,
if not impossible, to "believe" a poet who says of his love that
"Hire rode is as rose pat red is on rys; wip lilye-white leres
lossum he is," because we have seen the rose-red and lily-white
complexion so often before. The expression is opaque; we cannot
see through the words to the lady herself, but see instead the
conventional expression of feminine beauty. The signifying
relationship between the expression and the real world is short—
circuited, and the expression as a whole becomes more important
than its words, whose normal semantic values are minimized.3

" "normal seman-

Here again, key terms--"normal signifying relationship,
tic values"--go undefined, but the putative absence of these qualities
is crucial: "The reader is forced by the conventional nature of the

expression, its lack g§_information, to pay attention chiefly to the
37

 

form of the expression." Nor does it help to learn that Plummer is
using the word information "in the specific sense, defined by Shands,

of 'a "dimensionless quantity" which is defined as the inverse of

16
probability. This means that the information carried by any message
is measured in terms of its unlikeliness.'"38 Information may be so
measured-though this assertion depends again on an absent quantitive
assessment of a lexical item's likelihood of occurrence (presumably)39
--but it certainly cannot be so defined. This is no definition.
But I am quarreling. The cat is out of the bag when Plummer ob-
serves broadly that:
This impulse to minimize novelty and information, to short-cir-
cuit the signifying relationship between the message and the real
world, strikes me as being a particularly interesting instance of
the poetic function of language, which Jakobson defined as that
"set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the mes-
sage for its own sake," which promotes the "palpability of signs."
This emptying of the semantic value from.words promotes the pal-
pability of words, and consequently promotes our awareness of
poetic structure. The process liberates the sign tokens of lan—
guage from their communicative (referential) function, so that
in themselves, like musical tones, they mean nothing and EBeir
structuring within the particular lyric means everything.
Much the same claim is being made here as Stevick makes: if the lin-
guistic elements in question do not have some explicit connection with
the inherent poeticality of the text in which they are found, they
must have some implicit one--because the text is certainly poetical.
Plummer conjures up, in fact, a new language (as Stevick posits a new
sense of structure), parallel to the "normal linguistic code which
supplies the meanings for words in everyday discourse," but which is
instead "a specific specialized code, the complex of traditional as-
sociations established by the repeated use of certain words in certain
situations in the lyric tradition." It is to this latter code that
"Recourse would be had first" in order to determine "the possible
meanings that a word might have."41 The practical application of

these ideas to a lyric ("Bytuene Mersh ant Aueril") produces a rather

l7
pedestrian New Critical style discussion of patterns of poise and bal-
ance among the stereotyped-language units in the poem.

Enough has been said here, I think, to cast doubt on the explana-
tory power of Plummer's theory of conventionalized language in the
lyrics. It reduces language to lexicon and seeks its examples selec-
tively even there. It rests on intuitive, undefined concepts and un-
corroborated and perhaps untestable generalizations. Ultimately
Plummer's argument, and Stevick's as well, founder on an implied dis-
tinction (rather explicit, actually, in the case of Plummer) between
natural and poetic language. Like many others, they posit a ghost
in the machine of poetry, a peculiar undefinable quality which inheres
in that kind of language and in no other. Yet it is not the claim
that the language of the lyrics is largely conventional with which I
disagree, but the attempt to ground an explanation for this fact in
this false dichotomy. Because this position is antithetical to the
one I have taken in this study, I devote considerable further atten-
tion to it in the following chapter.l'2

Meanwhile a second attitude current among some critics toward the
special relationship between language and Middle English lyric liter-
ature needs to be examined. In this case it is not the diction of the
lyrics but their linguistic mediumr—the Middle English language it-
self-dwhich is alleged to be the source of their peculiar fitness of
expression. These literary variations of the Whorf hypothesis seem to
appeal especially to comparativists, who are accustomed to discerning
national and regional literary characters and are prone to assign the
distinctive traits they sense to the linguistic substratum, much as

distinctive qualities of the various European vintages are largely

l8
assigned to the mineral substrata. Thus John Speirs is led to ponder,
rather inconclusively, the balance between the well known levelling
effects of the pan-European medieval culture and the distinctiveness
of the various "national" strains:
But the differences between the lyrics in the different languages
are just as striking as the resemblances; and are at least as
fundamental since they arise from the differences between the
languages themselves, each language having its individual genius
and characteristics and having been shaped in expressing a par-
ticular people's sensibility and experience. . . .Every single
English song and lyric that has come down to us from before the
fifteenth century has done so in a dialect [as though the rest
had not--it is simply more easy to detect the differences in the
non-standard orthography of Middle English practice] and has
therefore, as an essential characteristic, the speech flavour
of the folk of some particular locality in England. Yet these
so English lyrics have, at the same time, such resemblances to
the lyrics of the rest of medieval Europe as to suggezg that all
medieval lyrics are, in greater or less degree, akin.
The notion that each language has "its individual genius" and is
"shaped in expressing a particular people's sensibility and experi-
ence," and that this lends "an essential characteristic" to the poetry
written in it is not carried very far here. Rosemary Woolf makes much
of it, however. In her work this premise becomes the foundation upon
which she builds an argument which aspires to explanatory adequacy,
which I term the linguistic suitability hypothesis, and which I would
like to discuss at some length here.44
In its most general form, the linguistic suitability hypothesis
attempts to account for the characteristic themes, forms, stylistic
effects (in general, any widely recognized category of literary phe-
nomena held to have aesthetic implications) of a literary corpus in a
given language during a given epoch by referring such phenomena to

properties alleged to inhere in the linguistic mediums-the language--

itself. It thus amounts to a theory of aesthetic determinism, or more

l9
properly perhaps, is both shaped and limited by the properties of the
medium the creative artist employs.

It is in discussions of the flourishing in Middle English of lyr-
ics on the subjects of Death and Christ's Passion that WOolf presents
the clearest statements of the linguistic suitability hypothesis. Why
this should be so is a point to which we will return later; in the
meantime the hypothesis itself requires examination. It will be neces-
sary to quote extensively. Here is the first explicit statement of
the hypothesis:

The more important point for the beginnings of the meditative
lyric, however, is the relationship between the Bernardine em-
phasis on natural feeling and the qualities of English in the
thirteenth century, for here there was a unique and fortunate
coincidence between religious theory and literary potentiali-
ties. The recognition and praise of ordinary human emotion
meant in literary terms that the language used to express it

had no need to be different from that of everyday life. . . .
[Olnly the vocabulary and rhythms of common speech were avail-
able to writers of the thirteenth century. The lowly status

of English ensured that expressions of love should recall nei-
ther theological analyses nor the magnificant passions of roman—
tic lovers, but only the ordinary affection and tenderness of
everyday experience. English was obviously at this time very
limited as a medium for writing: subjects which require nobil-
ity or complexity of expression were ordinarily beyond its range.
But, by a fortunate coincidence, what the language was admirably
suited to express was Egactly what the writers of the meditative
lyrics required of it.

' a three-

Woolf is suggesting here that, by "fortunate coincidence,‘
level congruence obtained in the thirteenth century among "the Bernar-
dine emphasis on natural feeling," the flourishing of Middle English
lyrics on the Passion, and some particular qualities of thirteenth
century Middle English which are evidently to be regarded as crucially
constitutive of the language at that time. That these congruencies

are offered as an explanatory hypothesis is clear from the fact that

the Passion lyric tradition is in reality the third term in a kind of

20
literary algebra:

Bernardine emphasis Peculiar nature _. Flourishing Passion
on natural feeling 'F of 13th c. M.E. " lyric tradition

Similarly, in her account of the origin and development of the lyrics
on Death in Middle English, Woolf sees a peculiar fitness to the sub—
ject in the artistic medium: "The medieval death themes . . . like
the meditation on the Passion, did not require nobility of language,
but, on the contrary, their reference to ordinary, unheightened ex-
perience was best expressed by quick, exact, colloquial language:
therefore the unique diminution of the vernacular in England made it

a perfect medium for this kind of poetry. The immediate, uncomplex
effect of the poetry was not in danger of being modified by an unin-
tended learned or courtly air, for the vacabulary, since it was rarely
used for literary or learned work or for courtly conversation, could
have no overtones except those of everyday communication."46 Here
again the attempt to achieve explanatory adequacy is clear, in that
certain qualities of thirteenth century Middle English are offered as
the principled, internal motivation for the observable fact of a flour-
ishing tradition of lyrics on death at that time.

Any reader who has even a casual acquaintance with descriptive
linguistics will have noted several problematical issues in Woolf's
presentation of the hypothesis, but in the interest of giving full
weight to her employment of the hypothesis within the broader argumen-
tative structure of her book as a whole I will defer a close inspec-
tion of these issues for the moment and pass on to an examination of
the use to which she puts the hypothesis.

We have already seen, in the cases of lyrics on the Passion and

21
death of Christ, that the linguistic suitability hypothesis provided
Wholf with a principled way of accounting for their abundance and
their stylistic force--the notion being that the thirteenth century
lyricists were following a linguistic line of least resistance. But
any literary abundance is a relative one; specifically, in this case,
it is relative to the Marian lyrics (which will flourish in their turn
in the fifteenth century) that the Passion and death lyrics are abun—
dant in the thirteenth century. But Woolf's application of the lin-
guistic suitability hypothesis to this group of lyrics leads her into
contradiction and unresolved paradox. Whereas the hypothesis can be
said to account for both the quality and the quantity of Passion and
death lyrics, WOolf divides the two functions and restricts its ex-
planatory scope to a quantitative claim only in the case of the Marian
lyrics. Nothing inherent in the hypothesis itself suggests that it
will have different explanatory capabilities in the cases of different
thematic groups of poems; Woolf is forced into this inconsistency be-
cause she judges the Marian lyrics to be of lower quality than those
on the Passion and death, an opinion which stems from the fact that
these lyrics do not appear to derive from a well-defined Latin tra-
dition. The Marian lyrics are a problem for her.

I mean by a quantitative claim a statement of the following sort,
taken from the chapter on "Lyrics on the Virgin and her Joys," from
which many like statements could be adduced: "In England in the thir-
teenth century, there was, as we have repeatedly observed, a perfect
coincidence between the traditions of meditative piety and the poten-
tialities of literary expression. But to this felicitous coincidence

the devotion to the blessed Virgin was an important exception. By the

22
thirteenth century England had had quite a long history of Marian
piety. . . . But for its expression in vernacular literature there
was lacking an adequate language and secular models. Therefore,
whilst the large bulk of religious poetry in France chiefly consists
of poems to the Virgin, England before the revival of secular love
literature at the end of the fourteenth century has comparatively
few."7 The argument proceeds Ex silencio through a recitation of all
the various strains of lyrical Marian piety well attested from the
continent but sparsely so from England: prayers of penitence to Mary
the interventrix in general, at the hour of the sinner's death, at
the Last Judgement; hymns of praise to the Virgin's beauty, and to her
nobility. When, however, Woolf takes up a discussion of the paucity
of English lyrics praising Mary by celebrating and exploring her scrip-
tural types, together with the allied group of lyrics which revel in
the paradoxes growing out of her title of Mater Dei, she appears to be
losing the courage of her former conviction. Searching for an explana-
tion for this relative paucity in the psychology of a growing familiar-
ity among audiences with what was once not merely fresh but arrestingly
and startlingly so, she suggests that only "well-turned variation . . .
or perfect poise in expression [can] make the familiar startling." but
that "since poise, as we have already said, was beyond the range of
English in the earlier Middle Ages, the unwillingness to use paradoxes
might be explained as the inspiration of literary good sense."48 Put
simply, Woolf suggests that the earlier Middle English lyricists had
the sense not to try to write lyrics they knew their language was un-
equal to. Such an explanation, though it asks us to credit an untold

number of poets with extremely nice stylistic judgement they do not

23

as a group generally display in this period, does accord perfectly
with the version of the linguistic suitability hypothesis she posits
and invokes here and in the passage cited just above. But it is clear
that, though it affords her a witty throwaway line, Woolf is unwilling
to rest her entire case for the paucity of these lyrics on this single
hypothesis. She therefore adduces another, in this case the theologi-
cal hypothesis that "the celebration of the Virgin's unique position
does not accord well with meditation upon Christ in His humanity."9

Such inconsistent and partial reliance on the linguistic suita—
bility hypothesis prepares us, in a sense, for an even more startling
deviation from it, indeed a reversal of it, which follows in twelve
pages. Discussing the (also scarce) lyrics devoted to meditation on
the Nativity, one of the five joys of Mary, Woolf remarks that "It
would have seemed a most reasonable guess that if the authors of Lat-
in poetry chose, despite the difficulties of their linguistic medium,
to suggest the poverty, helplessness, and sweetness of the Christ-
Child and the loving-kindness of His mother, that the vernacular poets
of the thirteenth century, writing in homely English, would also have
provided meditations on the Nativity, deliberately exploiting its emo-
tional potentialities. . . . Yet, not only did writers ignore the sub-
ject, but also in the poems on the five joys where the Nativity had to
be described the treatment is exceptionally formal and dogmatic."50
Such poems deal a double blow to the linguistic suitability hypothesis:
they are abundant in Latin, despite the "difficulties" of that lin-
guistic medium, and rare in "homely English," despite the perfect suit-
ability of that one. That Woolf is sensitive to the tendentious nature

of the argument g§_silencio is beyond question; why then pursue it so

24
far? I think the answer lies in the fact that she is committed to the
linguistic suitability hypothesis on other grounds, which we will take
up shortly, and has in any case a ready explanation for the un-English
behavior of the Marian lyrics in the claim that they were never really
part of the English tradition until much later: "The lyrics to the
Virgin form a much less homogeneous group than do those on the Passion
and death. Whereas the latter are direct offshoots of one central
tradition, the Marian lyrics spring from a number of miscellaneous in-
fluences. Unlike the other lyrics, for which there are scarcely any
parallels in other languages, the lyrics to the Virgin are an offshoot
of a western European tradition which, though it was part of English
spirituality from an early date, did not become firmly rooted in Eng-

lish literature until the fifteenth century."51

But the response to
this sort of observation is obviously that, though a group of lyrics
may appear to be heterogeneous from one point of view, or when one set
of analytical criteria is applied,'that heterogeneity disappears when
another set is applied. "Miscellaneous" influences, in short, are so
only by virtue of one's cataloguing system and not by virtue of innate-
ly "miscellaneous" properties. Indeed, the "one central tradition" to
which Woolf refers here as though it were a given is in fact a point
at issue: its existence is one of the primary arguments of her book.
To ask, then, whether the heterogeneity is real or apparent is to
ask whether the analytical criteria are well motivated, a question
which bears directly on the problem of explanatory adequacy. We ob-
served earlier that Woolf's adoption of the linguistic suitability

hypothesis seems to have been motivated in the first place by precisely

the desire to achieve this level of adequacy; and indeed the linguistic

25

suitability hypothesis does provide a principled analysis. In aban-
doning it and reverting to external justifications WOolf weakens not
so much her case for the hypothesis, which she never presents expli-
citly anyway, as the reader's conviction that it can be made to account
for quantitative literary phenomena at all, or indeed whether it is
wise to assign any causal explanation to felt quantitative deficien-
cies where literature is concerned. Yet the chapter on Marian lyrics
closes on exactly this point, by vaguely asserting that the fact that
thirteenth century English lyricists did not produce more of these
lyrics is itself problematical: "there was here no simple literary—
devotional situation, as for the Passion and death lyrics, and whilst
the problems do not show themselves in lack of quality, they do in
lack of quantity."52

Hence by dividing its qualitative from its quantitative scope
WOolf brings the linguistic suitability hypothesis into unresolved
self-conflict. What then is the reason for bringing such a powerful
explanatory device into play in the first place? I believe the answer
lies in WOolf's adherence in principle to the same distinction between
natural and poetic language as we observed in Stevick and Plummer,
but with this important difference, that in her case the distinction
collapses by a "fortunate coincidence" of early Middle English with
contemporary poetic themes, so that the poetic language i§_the natural
language at that epoch.

The clearest indication of Woolf's adherence to the poetic lan-
guage thesis, apart from its general implication in such passages as I
have cited above, is to be seen in her discussion towards the end of

the book of the aureate sixteenth century style which supplants the

26

medieval style. Here she traces the latter's literary legacy into the
sub-literary hgrag form: "Though the pressures of contemporary style
made continuity with the medieval tradition impossible in any poetry

of literary pretensions in the sixteenth century, in sub-literary forms
there did remain some direct influence from it [in verses in the horag
where] though it has no literary merit it does show the continuity of

a low, unadorned style in contexts where the verse was unobtrusive

because subordinated to a picture."53

Even a casual glance at a fac-
simile of Blake's Jerusalem.will show what a deal of difficulty there
can be in separating, let alone subordinating, verse from picture, but
it is the notion of the relegation of the medieval "low, unadorned"
style to sub-literary genres in the sixteenth century which is trouble-
some. Style here is clearly identified with the concept of a literary
language; literature cannot be written in any other form of language;
what is written in another form of language is sub-literary at best.
Though it may yet possess a "colloquial and ironic vitality" which
allies it with the common speech implied by the term natural language,
verse written in this style must give way in the sixteenth century be-
fore a changed concept of literary language. Hence Woolf cites the
new sixteenth century style as one of four causes of the end of the
lyric.

My purpose here is not to represent Rosemary WOolf's work as pri-
marily a defense of the poetic language thesis, which it certainly is
not, but to show how she uses this thesis, and in particular the lin-
guistic suitability hypothesis, in support of her general thesis of

the rise, flourishing, and sudden decline of the lyric in Middle Eng-

lish. It is significant that the thesis is allied with such

27
teleological criticism, for it agrees with and is tacitly supported by
the widely held doctrine of linguistic decline. Although there is no
direct evidence in her book that Woolf supports such a notion, it is
consistent with both her general thesis of decline and her specific
application of the linguistic suitability hypothesis. We have already
seen the internal inconsistency in her use of the hypothesis; it re-
mains to examine the hypothesis itself, in order to determine precise-
ly the nature of the claim it represents and the evidence to support
it.

A close inspection of Woolf's presentation of the linguistic suit-
ability hypothesis shows a rather narrow conception of its linguistic
base, as is the case with Stevick and Plummer. If we conceive of lan-
guage as a complex system which integrates a syntax, a lexicon, and a
phonology, we will notice that Woolf, like Plummer, seems clearly to
confine her attention to the lexical component only. When she states
that "The recognition and praise of ordinary human emotion meant in
literary terms that the language used to express it has no need to be
different from that of everyday life" she seems to mean by language
"the vocabulary and rhythms of common speech," which she asserts were
the only form of language available to writers of the thirteenth cen-
tury. Indeed, "the more successful would be the poem," for it would
be devoid of "associations of learning or grandeur" which "would im-

"54

pair and perhaps destroy the meditation. Again, the death themes

',a language

were best expressed in "quick, exact, colloquial language,‘
"not in danger of being modified by an unintended learned or courtly
air, for the vocabulary . . . could have no overtones except those of

everyday conversation."55 I have already pointed out how closely

28
allied with the poetic language thesis this emphasis on the colloquial,
the everyday, the unlearned is, but it is clear from these passages
that these terms have no more than a morphological significance for
Woolf. Yet it is the lexical stock of the thirteenth century lyrics
that makes their language colloquial, and not their colloquial lexicon
that defines thirteenth century Middle English. The lexicon is not
the language. It is, in fact, according to contemporary medieval as
well as current linguistic theory, a superficial element of it. The
Modistic theorists of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries regarded the
various syntactic phenomena of accidence, concord, and agreement as the
fundamental linguistic reflection of the relationships among things in
the realm of existences; they accorded, as does modern linguistic
theory, only an attenuated significance to words as lexical elements,

56 Hence, the "vocabulary

and still less to their phonological shape.
and rhythms" of "Quick, exact, colloquial" thirteenth century Middle
English, even could these terms be defined precisely enough to test

the proposition, cannot have been any more constitutive of that lan-
guage than they would be of modern English. The colloquial lexicon,
then, becomes the final term in a series of reductions in Woolf's argu-
ment: poetic language is identified with natural language; natural
language is identified with colloquial language; colloquial language

is identified with colloquial lexicon. The linguistic suitability hy-
pothesis, then, as Woolf presents it, simply collapses and encapsulates
this reductive series by asserting the aptness of the last term in the
series for the practice of the first.

As I mentioned above, the poetic language thesis is taken up in

greater detail in the following chapter. It is important, I believe,

29
to dispose of it entirely in order to appreciate the possibility in-
herent in its logical opposite, so to speak, a "natural language"
theory of literature. Such a theory, which I term Contextualism, can
be founded upon a thorough study of the phenomenon of literary deixis,

and it forms the balance of Chapter Two.

30
Notes
lGeorge Kane, MiddleE nglish Literature: A Critical Study of the

Romances, the Rengious Lyrics, Piers Plowman (London: Methuen, 1951),
p. 179.

 

 

 

2Stephen Manning, Wisdom and Number: Toward a Critical Appraisal
of the MiddleE __glish Religious Lyric (Lincoln, Nebraska: The Univer-
sity ofw Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 32. See also p. xi, n. 1, wherein
views similar to Kane's held by Brook, Speirs, Kar , Mbore, and Robbins
are documented. Sarah Appleton Weber, Theology and_Poetry 12;£h2“!197
dig English Lyric: A Study gf_Sacred History and Aesthetic Form (Colum-
bus: The Ohio State University Press, 1969), p. 227-28, n. 4, traces
the attitude as far back as a work published in 1911 by Frank A. Pat-
terson (Thg_Middle Egglish Penitential Lyric [New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press]), citing the Kane passage as well. Edmund Reiss, in

 

 

 

 

Press, 1972), p. x, limits himself to the comment that the works of
Kane and Moore "did not act as any sort of vanguard to further critical
or scholarly activity." Perhaps he is not thinking of the possibility
of corrective critical activity. On the other hand, he rates W. T. H.
Jackson, The Literature gf_the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1960), for his evaluation that the Middle English lyric

has "a pleasing naivete and simple charm, but also a monotony of theme
and lack of technical skill" (p. 275), adding "such comments as this
confuse surface sophistication with literary merit and reveal a preju-
dice linking good medieval poetry with courtly tradition" (p. ix).

 

 

3Poems Without Names: The English Lyric 1200-1500 (Berkeley: The
University of California Press, 1970).

 

4Reiss, p. ix-xi.

 

5A fourth book, V. J. Scattergood's Politics and Poetry 13 Egg
Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford Press, 1971) would appear from
its title to have a different orientation. It was unavailable for
examination for this study. Charles Muscatine's Poetry and Crisis in
EEE Age 9: Chaucer (Notre Dame and London: The University of Notre Dame
Press, 1972) examines the work of the Pearl poet, Langland, and Chaucer
against the background of fourteenth—century political history, but is
silent on the lyrics.

 

 

6Themes and Images ln_the Medieval Religious Lyric (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

 

 

7The Influence of Richard Rolle and of Julian of Norwich on the

MiddleE ng lish Lyrics (The Hague: Mouton, 1972).

 

 

 

8The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln:
The University of Nebraska Press, 1975).

 

9Gray, p. 3.

31

10Knowlton, p. 183. Since the ISO-year period of Rolle's (c.
1300-1349) influence does not begin until mid—fourteenth century, about
a century and a quarter of the earliest work of the period cannot be
accounted for by this means.

11Jeffrey, p. 261.

12Reiss, p. xiii.

13Jeffrey, p. 14.

14Manning, p. 105.

15Gray, p. 59. See also his comments pp. 10 and 60.

 

 

léghguggglish Religious Lyric ig_the Middle Ages (Oxford: The Ox-
ford University Press, 1968).

17Oliver, p. 6. See also p. 8. The reference to "the embodiment
of an intention" derives from J. V. Cunningham's Tradition and POetic
Structure (Denver: A. Swallow, 1960). Oliver quotes the following
passage from p. 263: "A work of art is the embodiment of an intention.
To realize an intention in language is the function of the writer. To
realize from language the intention of the author is the function of
the reader or the critic, and his method is historical or philological
interpretation."

 

18"The Criticism of Middle English Lyrics," Modern Philology, 64
(1966), 103-17.

19

 

Reiss, p. xiv.

20"Note on the Poetic and Empirical 'I' in Medieval Authors,"
Traditio, 4(1946), 414-22.

21Gray, p. 37.
22011ver, pp. 11, 32.

23Anne Middleton, "The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of
Richard II," Speculum, 53, 94-114.

24Speirs, p. 33.
25Gray, p. 33.

26Peter Dronke, The Medieval Lyric (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1977). Paul Zumthor, Essai dg_ppétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil,
1972). Stephen Manning's many remarks about the "dramatic lyric" (pp.
ix, x, 3, 9-11, 22, 32, 33—55 passim, 138, 173n.) often seem to contra-
dict this assumption, viz. "At their most dramatic, the religious lyrics
merely straddle the boundary between the two types [i.e. dramatic lyric
and song]" (p. 9). In fact, the distinction in Manning's mind seems

 

 

32

to correspond with the distinction between modern, "intensely person-
al," and medieval conceptions of lyric: the former are dramatic lyrics
and the latter songs. The distinction between the two lies in the dif-
fering "attention they pay to their sound, and in the degree to which
they utilize their lyric situation." The song "exhibits a regular
meter and accents its rime" while the dramatic lyric "exhibits frequent
metrical irregularities and favors enjambement" (p. 3). These quali-
ties have no bearing on the sense of drama being discussed here and in
Chapter Four. As for the criterion of the lyric situation, "In the
song, the speaker is not sharply characterized; he tends to be anony-
mous, or Everyman" while "In the dramatic lyric, the speaker is sharp-
1y characterized because . . . he unconsciously (or consciously . . .)
betrays a considerable part of his personality" (p. 35).. This aspect
of Manning's distinction collapses with the second general critical
assumption discussed above.

27Stevick, p. 114.
281bid.

29Stev1ek, p. 115.

3°1b1d.

311b1d.

32John F. Plummer III, "The Poetic Function of Conventional Lan-
guage in the Middle English Lyric," Studies iB_Philology, 72(1975),
367-85.

33Plummer, p. 367-68.

3['Plummer, p. 370.

35Plummer, p. 371.

361bid.

37Plummer, p. 372.

38The reference is to Harley Shands, "Outline of a General Theory
of Human Communication," in Essays iB_Semiotics, ed. Julia Kristeva et
al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 359.

39And note that the question is not whether "we cannot see
through the words to the lady herself" but whether the poet's con-
temporary audience could or could not. No use to speak of a conven-
tional language which does not demonstrably become regarded as such
until five centuries after it is spoken.

40Plummer, p. 372-73. Roman Jakobson's essay, of which more in
Chapter Two, is entitled "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style 12 L227
guage, ed. T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960). The quota—
tion is from p. 356.

33
41Plummer, p. 374.

42Like Stevick and Plummer Raymond Oliver finds that what he
calls "the generalness of the poems--their commonplaces and proverbs,
their relative lack of modifiers, the self-explaining metaphors, the
universally clear and accepted ways of organizing sounds, rhythms, and
structures" is the source of their "peculiar excellence" (p. 135).
Unlike them, however, he accounts for this simply by making a virtue
of these qualities, calling the best of the lyrics "graphic, defini-
tive epigrams" and claiming that "the essence of good 'anonymous short
poems' is shortness, as opposed to verbosity, and a spare, generalized
anonymity, as opposed to a detailed subjectivism" (p. 136). The "ar-
gument" is tautological (though in fact it is meant as a summary and
not as a substantive argument).

43Speirs, p. 51.

44The term explanatory adequacy was put forward by Noam Chomsky
to describe a grammar which goes beyond mere saving of the appearances
(this is termed descriptive adequacy) to provide a principled account
of the facts of the language, "in that the linguistic theory with
which it is associated selects this grammar over others, given primary
linguistic data with which all are compatible," because it takes into
account "some empicical assumption about the form of language," that
is, about language itself or language in general. See Aspects gf_rhg_
Theory gf_Sy2tax (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1965), p. 24—27.

45weo1f, p. 23—24.
46wdoif, p. 77.
471100113, p. 114-15.
48W601f, p. 133-34.
491bid.
50Woolf, p. 146-47.
SlWoolf, p. 157.
52W601f, p. 158.

53Woolf, p. 366-67. See note 2 above for Reiss's comment, in an-
other context, that the confusion of surface sophistication with liter-
ary merit reveals a prejudice which links good medieval poetry with
the courtly tradition.

54W'oolf, p. 23.

55W’oolf,p. 77.

56By far the best introduction to Modistic thought is G. L. Bur-
sill—Hall, ed. and tr., Grammatica Speculativa 2: Thomas g§_Erfurt,

 

34

The Classics of Linguistics (London:Longman, 1972). In addition to
a Latin text and translation of this important work Bursill-Hall pro-
vides a 126-page introduction and a selective bibliography.

Chapter II: A Theory of Literary Contextualism

The question of the relationship between natural or ordinary
language and literary or poetic language has exercised the criticism
of this century perhaps more than any other. While the New Critics
simply have assumed an absolute distinction between the two, the
Structuralist poeticians and their Russian forebears have recognized
the problematical nature of the relationship and have sought to ground
the distinction in some linguistic (that is to say ostensibly object-
ive) features of the two. As Mary Louise Pratt has shown, their at-
tempts to do so have been, from the beginning, unsuccessful; but the
failure is an instructive one. I will summarize her critique of the
Structuralist natural versus poetic language argument by way of intro-
duction to a contextualist perspective which I believe avoids the dif-
ficulties encountered by the Structuralists but at the same time pro-
vides a principled and well-motivated way of examining literary texts
as discrete entities of discourse which are distinct from conversa-
tions, telephone directories, transcripts of trial proceedings, and
any other imaginable form of discourse whose provenance is the quo-
tidian affairs of men. By grounding this perspective in the notion
of context I mean to locate the discussion of the Middle English
lyrics which follows exactly at the interface between the palpable
linguistic forms they are and the aesthetic and intellectual inter-

ests they induce. It appears that a little discussed feature, known

35

36

as deixis, shared by all natural languages, occupies exactly this
pivotal position and it can be shown to function crucially both in
the determination of syntactic structure at the sub-discourse level
and in semantic interpretation at the discourse level. Charles J.
Fillmore has devoted the most extensive attention to this phenomenon,
and it will be necessary to summarize his work in some detail. This
done, I will attempt to extend a few of the most obvious implications
of deictic theory into literary criticism, suggesting especially a new
approach to genre classification, and focussing specifically on its
implications for the study of lyric poetry.

In a careful, cogent, and I think seminal study entitled Toward

§_Speech Act Theory 3; Literary Discourse Mary Louise Pratt mounts a

 

 

powerful critique of the structuralist distinction between natural and
poetic language in order to move "toward integrating literary discourse
into the general description of all our communicative activities."1
If this impulse seems to err on the other side of an excess than the
one she opposes, it can be understood as characteristic of the mood of
a good many contemporary analysts who are impatient to demonstrate the
value of broadly discourse-centered study for the study of literary
discourse. Like St. Augustine, they often find themselves cast in the
role of apologists for humble "natural" language texts which, when
careful attention is devoted to them turn out to be highly ordered and
skillfully composed linguistic phenomena in their own right. From this
perspective "literary" texts fare none the worse for being associated
:with "natural" ones. But, to return to the specific question at issue,

'that very distinction is suspect, at least in the terms in which it

Ines most recently and aggressively been cast by the Structuralist

37
poeticians (the term is Pratt's). Pratt's critique of their position
is twofold: first, the distinction itself rests on a faulty analogy
between the subject studied by structural linguistics and that studied
by literary criticism; and second, the features of usage claimed to be
characteristic of literary discourse can be shown to be integral to
non-literary discourse as well.

The first phase of Pratt's critique rests on a careful analysis
of Russian formalist and structuralist metatheory.2 Fortunately for
her project there is a good deal of such analysis (these thinkers were
nothing if not metatheoreticians) and it is strikingly consistent.

For ijenbaum, Sklovskij, Jakobson, Tynjanov, Tomasevskij, and Brik,
as well as more recent thinkers like Todorov, Levin, and Barthes,
there exist two distinct domains of language whose scope is defined,
as in this citation from the Prague School Theses of 1929, by refer-
ence to extra-linguistic reality: "In its social role, language [lg
langage] must be specified [distinguer] according to its relation to
extralinguistic reality. It has either a communicative function, that
is, it is directed toward the signified, or a poetic function, that
is, it is directed toward the sign itself" (tr. Pratt).3 Pratt sees
this bold excursion into the linguistic no-man's-land of realdworld
information as the initiating step in a four-step procedure intended
to establish the "principle of specificity" by (1) defining literature
as a linguistic category; (2) postulating an opposing linguistic cat—
egory containing all and only nonliterature; (3) redefining grammar in
such a way that its domain is all and only nonliterature; and (4) as-
¢:ribing to nonliterature all and only those properties described by

s t ructuralist grammar .

38

Although nothing in this bare outline of a procedure seems in it-
self problematical,4 when one recalls that the subject matter of struc-
turalist linguistics was, in fact, taken to be only ;§_langue and not
l§_parole, it is apparent that any analogy postulated between the lin-
guistic structures discovered by structuralist linguistics (which are
confined to the level of l§_langue) and the observable structures of
poetic texts (phenomena observable on the level of l§_parole only) is
necessarily an apples-and-oranges proposition. Yet exactly such an
analogy was proposed by the structuralist poeticians, and proposed
often. Pratt cites many examples, among which is the following: "A
folklore work is extraindividual and exists only potentially . . . it
is a skeleton of actual traditions which the implementers embellish
with the tracery of individual creation, in much the same was as the
producers of a verbal message (l§_parole in the Saussurian sense) act
with respect to the verbal code (lg_langue)" (Jakobson and Bogatyrev,
tr. Pratt).5 A similar relationship between the individual work and
the tradition was posited for all literature, and not merely folklore.
The crucial point here is that in separating poetic from ordinary lan-
guage the structuralist poeticians assumed, rather than demonstrated,
the existence of a set of specifically poetic structures and norms for
their distribution parallel to those linguistics was discovering in the
realm of ordinary language. But, as Pratt points out,

the structural linguist's grammar is not a description of

any set of utterances at all, and it is even more emphatically

not a description of how language is used in a given utterance

and context. A structuralist grammar-~an inventory of phonemes,

morphemes, and rules for combining them—-bears no substantive

resemblance at all to the inventory of devices, conventions,

and norms which makes up the langue the poeticians were pos-

tulating for literature. Nor are there grounds for equating

the two. The so-called grammar of communicative language can
exist apart from the so-called grammar of poetry, but the

39

reverse is not so; the latter exists only by contrast to the
former.

The force of Pratt's argument derives from the underlying assumption
that the differences that do exist between literature and nonlitera-
ture can be specified only with reference to "how language is used in

a given utterance and context,"

which leads her ultimately to explore
the relevance of speech-act theory to literary criticism, or at least
to the criticism of prose narratives. We will turn later to the set
of problems her perspective raises about the relationship between a
text and its context.

Not only does the assumed distinction between the two language
realms lead to the faulty analogy between linguistics and poetics we
have just examined, but it also leads to the unfortunate and insupport-
able conclusion that ordinary language, like the grammar which describes
it, is "utilitarian, prosaic, mechanical, practical, and automatized."
These qualities, of course, were exactly what structuralist linguistics
claimed for its discovery procedures and its formal models, and they
constitute the grounds for its claim to avoid the mentalism which had
flawed the work of earlier centuries. But, as Pratt shows by reference
to the work of William Labov, they cannot accurately be attributed to
ordinary language but rather to the grammatical model of it which
"only undertakes to describe those aspects of language that can be ac-
counted for in terms of dummy constructions, grammaticality, r§l§§.dg
service and the action of a mechanism."7

Labov's work, Pratt argues, provides not merely insight into but
eloquent evidence of both the creativity and craftsmanship of a great
many practitioners of what are called natural narratives. A natural

narrative is produced any time anyone recounts an incident; it is thus

40

among the most common and widespread of speech events, virtually an
everyday occurrence with nearly everyone. Labov collected a number of
such narratives in the process of studying Black English Vernacular,
his term for the speech of young urban blacks. His interview tech-
nique, designed to elicit speech as nearly unmonitored as possible, in-
cluded asking the informant whether he had ever been in a situation in
which he was in danger of being killed. Labov became fascinated by the
exceptional verbal virtuosity displayed by many of the informants in
these narratives and by the high value the vernacular speech commun—
ities placed on such virtuosity. In a volume Of essays entitled'Lagf

guage $E_the Inner City he published a number of these narratives to-

 

gether with an analysis of their structure and content.8 It is not
necessary to repeat Pratt's summary of Labov's work, for it is her own
application of it to literary studies that interests us here.

Ranging widely through the narrative fiction of the western liter-
ary tradition for her examples, Pratt shows that all six of the ele-
ments of the prototypical narrative Labov identifies may be found in
works of literature as well. To cite a brief (and foreshortened) ex-
ample from among many: narratives ordinarily include, near the begin-
ning, what Labov calls an orientation, which serves to "identify in
some way the time, place, persons, and their activity or situation."
It precedes the first narrative clause, defined by Pratt as a clause
"with a simple preterite verb, or in some styles, a verb in the

simple present, which introduces the complicating action with which
the narrative proper begins, and follows the abstract, "a short . .
summary" which "encapsulates the point of the story."9 Pratt contends

that, just as Labov's model predicts, these three elements occur in

41

their proper order in the first twenty pages of George Eliot's SgLag
Marner. The title itself constitutes the abstract, for that is its
customary function in literary works. The twenty-page description

of Raveloe, its inhabitants, and Marner constitutes the orientation
(a particularly leisurely one, even by eighteenth-century novelistic
standards). And the sentence "About this time an incident happened
which seemed to open a possibility of some fellowship with his neigh—
bours" constitutes the first narrative clause and marks the beginning
of the complicating action and the narrative proper. Clearly then,
despite the fact that Labov's analysis of narrative structure is
quite abstract and entails some ambiguous and problematical concepts

' or the

(such as the notion of "encapsulating the point of the story,’
crucial term "narrative clause" itself), the organizational plan of a
literary narrative can be shown to duplicate that of a nonliterary one.
Pratt argues that this fact directly contradicts the poeticians' claim
that literary language has a distinctly different structure from that
of ordinary language.

This is the first part of Pratt's argument. She shows that the
structuralist poeticians' claim to have grounded poetics in the study
of a form of language (called literary) as well motivated and defined
as the form of language (called ordinary) upon which linguistics is
grounded, is untenable, since it rests upon a faulty analogy where
its theory is concerned and a myopic view of language where its prac-
tice is concerned. Labov's work on natural narratives supplies the
crucial evidence for her demonstration of the latter point.

But more than this, Pratt argues, Labov's context-dependent ap-

‘proach allows us to specify in a much more interesting way the nature

42
of the relationship between literature and nonliterature and signals
the need for criticism to shift its attention to new questions.
"Labov in effect translates the rather opaque question 'Has the poetic
function dominated the verbal organization of this message?‘ into the
broader and more meaningful questions 'What is the speaker trying to
do in forming this discourse?' and 'What does the hearer do when he
receives it?‘ It is the answers to these questions which motivate
Labov's statements about the formal properties of his data. His anal-
ysis, in other words, is context-dependent, anchored in the circum-

stances surrounding the utterance."10

Although no one would deny the
opacity of the question whether the poetic function dominates the ver-
bal organization of a message, the analysis Pratt offers as a substi-
tute is equally problematical. Surely it is naive to suggest that
questions about authors' intentions or readers' responses are "broader
and more meaningful" than the poeticians' questions, especially in

the aggressively pragmatic shape Pratt gives them. The very fact that
proponents of these two approaches (they are, after all, not new ques-
tions) have tended to regard themselves as holding sole title to the
interpretation of a work should have suggested to her that author and
reader will make uneasy bedfellows in any theory that purports to medi-
ate their claims upon the work. But I wish to examine in some detail
Pratt's concept of context-dependency in order to clarify its relevance
to the theory of contextualism I am developing here.

First it is necessary to try to specify exactly what Pratt means

by context. Its locus classicus for her appears to be Jakobson's

 

touchstone essay "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," but

context-dependency is a quality she attributes rather to the critical

43

work of Labov than to Jakobson:

Labov's data make it impossible to attribute the aesthetic

organization of prose fiction to "literariness," but his

methodology shows us what we can attribute it to: the nature

of the speech situation in which the utterance occurs, in which

the speaker and his audience are engaged. The formal and

functional similarities between literary and natural narrative
can be specified in terms of similarities in the speech situa-
tion and their differences identified in terms of differences

in that situation. . . . Thus the point of departure gets

shifted from the message (to use Jakobson's terms) to the

addresser, the addressee, and the context.

The notion of the engagement of author and audience plays a par—
ticularly central role in Pratt's own analysis, since the norms and
conventions governing their reciprocal expectations and responsibili—
ties in a given circumstance can be at least provisionally specified
and departures from them can be claimed to induce certain aesthetic
effects. For example, as we have seen, the normal case is for a nar-
rative to preface the complicating action with an orientation; this
is in recent linguistic usage the unmarked case.12 But it is possible
for a narrative to open without an orientation, or with an incomplete
one; this constitutes the marked or deviant case and as such it is not

surprising, Pratt suggests, that we have a special term for it, the

opening ip_medias res, though there is no such term for openings with

 

full orientations. This kind of norm, and the possibility of signifi-
cant deviation from it, derives from the ostensible structure of nar-
rative itself. Others Pratt explores derive from the set of conditions
held to be necessary for a particular type of speech act to be correct-
ly or appropriately performed (termed appropriateness or felicity con-
ditions) and from the norms governing the exchange of speeches in a
conversation (termed the cooperative principle). All such norms in-

xnolve interactions between speakers and hearers in specific contexts,

44
and are thus held to be themselves context-dependent. Pratt holds
that the incorporation of this notion of context-dependency into her
view of literature allows her to circumvent the structuralists' prob-
lem of circular definitions of literature and poeticality. But her
analysis is seriously weakened by her varying and unrestricted con-
struence of the term context.

We have seen that Pratt specifically claims the quality of con-
text-dependency for Labov's work on natural narrative. But it is cur-
ious to claim that Labov's analysis of "the formal properties of his
data" is context-dependent, "anchored in the circumstances surrounding
the utterance," when, at the beginning of the chapter in which that
claim is made, Pratt quotes from a passage in which Labov himself is
at pains to minimize the element of context-dependency in the danger
of death narratives: "' they are not free [Labov is speaking ofthe
narratives elicited by his field workers] of the interactive effect of
the outside observer,'" having in fact a form "'typical of discourse
directed to someone outside of the immediate peer group of the speak-
er'"; nevertheless, "'because the experience and emotions involved here
form an important part of the speaker's biography, he seems to undergo

a partial reliving of that experience, and hg_i§'pg_longer free £2

 

monitor his own speech as he normally does in face-to—face inter-

 

views.'"13 Labov knows his data to have been elicited in face-to-face
interviews, but he must claim as strongly as possible, even to the
point of portraying his informants as automate in the throes of a
trance, the irrelevance of the fact to his analysis of its "formal
properties" if that analysis is to have any truly broad explanatory

power concerning the structure of natural narrative in general. And

45
it is precisely the formal properties of the data--the abstract six-
part scheme he identifies in it—-which is free of any influence from
"the circumstances of utterance"; hence the broad applicability of it
to narrative fiction which Pratt demonstrates. Thus it is difficult
to see in what sense Labov's work can be called context-dependent; in
any case, the aspect of his work Pratt makes use of is formal, abstract,
and unconcerned with any circumstance of utterance.

But there is an even more serious problem for Pratt in connection
with the reference to Jakobson's "context" in the passage cited above.
Jakobson does not offer a definition of the term in the essay "Linguis—
tics and Poetics," but in his usage it seems to have little to do with
"the circumstances of utterance" or "the nature of the speech situation
in which the utterance occurs." Rather, it is associated with the
realdworld bearing of the utterance, its subject or "'referent' in

another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature,‘ as Jakobson phrases it.14
What Pratt has in mind, a quasi-contractual engagement between speaker
and hearer, seems closer to Jakobson's "contact," defined by him as
"a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser
and the addressee, enabling them both to enter and stay in communica-
tion." Indeed, the illustrative examples of discourse dominated by
the contact function which Jakobson cites clearly show the sort of
violation of quasi-contractual norms Pratt is so interested in, whereas
his illustrative examples of context-dominated discourse show that this
function has nothing to do with the nature of the relationship presumed
to hold between the addresser and the addressee.

Yet again, it is anything but helpful to an understanding of the

term context for Pratt to assert, by way of summarizing her critique

46
of Ohmann's position on the essential fictivity of literature, that

"the real lesson speech act theory has to offer is that literature Lg

 

§_context, too, not the absence of one."15 It is unlikely that Pratt

 

means this assertion in anything like the sense most readers of liter-
ary criticism will associate with it, familiar as it is from Eliot's
essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; rather she is claiming
that a reader of literature assents to a particular set of expectations
which will mediate his relations with the author and which are speci—
fic to a class of utterances which includes literary discourse. The

" can only be understood

sense in which "literature is a context, too
here as a kind of interaction between a reader and a text. But in
fact the interaction is one-sided: only the reader acts in Pratt's
analysis, the author having finished acting before the work gets into
the reader's hands. MOreover, the identities of the author and the
message disappear in her scheme into an amalgam called a text. This
notion is especially clear in the section on "Definitiveness, pre-par-

' where it is not the author but a small army

ation, and pre—selection,'
of publishers, editors, critics, reviewers, librarians, professors,
and others who set the work before the reader.

This new sense of the disappearance of the subject follows from
the consequences of turn-taking rules, as described in the work of
Paul Grice, which Pratt ingeniously extrapolates from conversation into
performances in general and the reading of literature in particular.
The author's turn is over when the text is complete; from there on it
is all the reader's turn, and his compensation for being so long ex-

cluded from active turn-taking comes in exercising his right to judge.

fThis, ultimately, is the sense of context which emerges in her work,

47
as is clear from the following passage:

Even these rudimentary similarities between literature and
other speaker/Audience [the capital denotes a voluntary
audience] situations are enough to tell us that speaker
and Audience are present in the literary speech situation,
that their existence is presupposed by literary works, that
they have commitments to one another as they do everywhere
else, and that those commitments are presupposed by both
the creator and the receivers of the work. Far from being
autonomous, self-contained, selfdmotivating, context-free
objects which exist independently from the "pragmatic"
concerns of "everyday" discourse, literary works take
place in a context, and like any other uttgrance they can-
not be described apart from that context.1

Beyond question Pratt's work performs invaluable service in sensi-
tizing critics to the pragmatic sociological milieu in which literary
discourse is produced and consumed. On the other hand, I suspect many
will be uncomfortable with the notion of even so audience-canny a work

as The Tempest as a commodity of exchange, definitive, pre-pared, and

 

pre-selected for audience consumption. My own point of departure from
Pratt's analysis, however, is the treatment of context itself, which,
as I have tried to show, is uncomfortably ambiguous in her work. If

a truly context-sensitive (or indeed context-dependent) analysis is to
be put forward surely it must rest on a firmer and less ambivalent con-
ception of its primitive term.

In fact, the speech-act theory which is so useful to Pratt in
establishing the pragmatics of literary discourse cannot help but lead
her into this ambivalence. By distinguishing the various members of a
class of speech acts--for example commanding, pleading, and requesting,
all directives in Searle's terminology--on the basis of differing ap-
propriateness conditions (the first requires the addresser to be in
authority, the second the addressee, and the third either one or neither

if they are peers), Searle reduces the notion of context-dependency to

48

veritable context-determinacy. The appropriateness conditions incor-
porate a sociological hierarchy which is assumed to be static for any
speech situation, known to all interlocutors involved, and crucial to
the selection of speech acts from among the entire inventory. Viola—
tions of these conditions are not held to be unknown, but to be social-
ly marked: pleading with an inferior, such as a waiter, to use Pratt's
example, is interpreted as sarcasm. But this analysis is satisfactory
only when the social hierarchy it depends upon is guaranteed to be
static and well-defined, as in the case of the relationship between a
diner and a waiter. It fails to account for a great many very ordinary
speech situations in which hierarchy as such is unimportant (or unpro-
ductive). What parent has not tried both commanding, pleading, and
requesting to get his child to perform some onerous task like cleaning
his room? If a hierarch obtains here, surely it is the parent who is
in authority; yet we would not wish to claim that parents who plead
with their children are being sarcastic, or that parents who make re-
quests of their children are treating them as peers (much less as su-
periors), or indeed that parents' only appropriate form of directive
toward their children is the command. Searle's analysis works only at
the expense of a double reduction. He reduces context-dependency to
context-determinacy, as we have seen. And he reduces context itself
to a hierarchically defined social relationship. This, as I have
demonstrated above, appears to be substantially the sense of the term
in Pratt's work.

On the other hand, the participants in any speech situation know
that factors other than their putative hierarchical status bear direct-

ly upon the correct interpretation of the discourse. Why should we

49
make the counter-intuitive claim that only information about the per-
sonages who are party to a discourse (still less information about the
abstractions to which they are reduced in Searle's analysis) is of in-
terest to the theoreticians when it is clear that the speakers theme
selves make use of much more information? Consider a remark such as
"Nice day today, isn't it?" Every competent adult speaker of the lan-
guage knows that this has several interpretations which vary with the
circumstances in which it is uttered and have nothing much to do with
the nature of the relationship between the speaker and his audience.
The unmarked case, which will be chosen whenever the weather is reason-
ably pleasant for the time of year and the place, is to interpret this
as a conventional greeting. If the weather is decidedly disagreeable,
the bearer will assign the message the marked interpretation known as
irony. The message is still a greeting, of course; but ironical greet-
ings imply a camaraderie borne of common discomfort. This one might
be paraphrased as "We're all suffering through this howling blizzard
together." The speaker could have chosen a neutral greeting (Hello)
but instead made crucial use of his and his hearer's knowledge of
weather conditions at the time and place of the utterance to achieve
a different effect. Notice, too, that a hearer may reject the marked
interpretation, even in circumstances of foul weather, if that sort
of weather suits the conversants' purposes. For duck hunters meeting
in a cold, drizzly November pre-dawn, such a greeting implies not the
camaraderie of common misery but the pleasure of a promising day's
sport. Even such a trivial example as this makes clear the fact that
speakers and hearers make use of a good deal more knowledge about the

circumstances of utterance than simply their putative sociological

50

rank-~specifically, the circumstances of place and time.

The linguistic elements which refer to these circumstances of
person, time, and place have been termed an utterance's deictics.
They have been shown, by Charles J. Fillmore in particular, to be cru-
cially relevant to the linguistic description and explanation of sen-
tences in which they occur. What stands at present as the definitive
description of the phenomenon of deixis is a series of six lectures
delivered by Fillmore at the University of California at Santa Cruz
in the summer of 1971.17 Since this phenomenon has a central rele-
vance to the discussion of literary contextualism it is appropriate at
this point to summarize the salient points of Fillmore's presentation.

Fillmore begins by proposing the thought experiment that his
audience assume only the single fact that somebody used the sentence
"May we come in?" He declares that "Our task is to make explicit every-
thing that we know about the sentence as a linguistic object, and every-
thing that we can know, as speakers of English, about the situation, or
class of possible situations, in which it was uttered. We will be in-
terested, in short, in the grammatical form of the sentence, the mean-
ings and grammatical properties of its words, and in the assumptions
we find ourselves making about the speaker of the sentence and about
the setting in which it was uttered."18 He surmises the following will
be the case for all speakers of English:

[W]e will probably find ourselves imagining a situation
involving some kind of enclosure, call it E, and at least three
beings, call them A, B, and C. One of these, A, is a speaker
of English and is the utterer of our sentence; one of them, B,
is believed by A to be a speaker of English and is the addressee
of our sentence; the third, C, is a companion of A. . . .

We further assume, in picturing the situation in which

our sentence could have served as a permission requesting utter-
ance, that A believes that he and C are outside the enclosure E;

51

that A believes B, the addressee, to be inside E; that A is in-

terested in the possibility of his gaining admission to E, in C's

company; and that A believes that B has the authority-~or repre-

sents somebody who has the authority--to decide whether or not A

and C may enter E. We further understand that the uttering of

this sentence is an act which socially requires B to do something--

in particular, to say something--it being understood that what B

says as a response to the question will count as authorizing or

forbidding to move into E on the part of A and his companion C.

We know, too, what would count as an authorizing or forbidding

act on the part of B. For example, we would know whaigto make of

it if B, on hearing our sentence, were to say "Okay."

Most of these claims rest specifically on our ability to correctly
interpret the sentence's deictic signals. In particular, all of the
claims of the first paragraph quoted above depend upon the correct in-
terpretation of the sentence's person deixis. The pronoun "we" iden-
tifies the utterer of the sentence as one of the two participants of
any speech situation, the speaker, and further implies the existence
of a bearer (Fillmore's "B") to whom the sentence is addressed, and a
companion, "C", not a participant as such but implied by the plural
form of the pronoun. (As this example clearly shows, the term first
person plural is a misnomer: what "we" signifies is not generally a
choir of speakers but a single speaker and one or more companions,
possibly including the bearer as well. We will resolve this ambiguity
in a moment.)

Time-and-place deixis, as Fillmore had shown in a paper published
before this lecture was given figure importantly in the interpretation

' and account for many of the claims of the second

of the verb "come,'
paragraph.20 In general, the appropriateness paradigm for this verb,
in expressions of the form "X came to Y at T", where X is the moving
entity, Y is the destination, and T is the reference time (as distinct

from coding time, the time at which the utterance is spoken) is as

2
follows:

52

1) The speaker is at Y at coding time

2) The addressee is at Y at coding time

3) The speaker is at Y at reference time (T)

4) The addressee is at Y at reference time (T)

In the case of "May we come in?", the pronoun "we" is X, the moving en-
tity; whatever enclosure we imagine as being in construction with "in"
is Y, the destination; and T, the reference time, is lacking. Because
T is lacking, appropriateness conditions 3 and 4 can be ruled out; it
must then be the case either that the speaker is at Y at coding time
or that the addressee is at Y at coding time. As I mentioned just a-
bove, the English pronoun "we" is ambiguous with respect to its clu-
sivity value: it certainly includes the speaker but it may or may not
include the addressee as well. Thus two answers are possible to the
question "Did we make a mistake?": "Yes we did" treats "we" as inclu-
sive of the addressee, and "Yes you did" treats "we" as exclusive of
the addressee. But since X, the moving entity ("we" in our sentence)
by definition is not at Y, the destination, we can rule out appropri—
ateness condition 1 above, leaving only the condition that the addres-
see be at Y at coding time for the sentence to be appropriate. Hence
the addressee cannot be a member of the group seeking to move to Y;
"we" must have its exclusive value.

Fillmore's analysis of this seemingly simple utterance greatly ex-
pands the scope of the linguist's task. Important consequences follow
from the very fact of deictic anchorage: constructions with "come,"
for example, are potentially four ways ambiguous, those with"we" are
potentially two ways so, and these ambiguities can be accounted for in
general and resolved in particular instances only by making reference

to our knowledge of the properties of the three deictic coordinates of

53
person, place, and time. This knowledge is a part of the linguistic
competence of every speaker, which the linguist is obliged to describe
and explain. Fillmore's own agenda for the linguist is lengthy but
worth repeating for the scope of its vision:

(1) The linguistic description of a language must characterize
for each lexical item in the language

(a) the grammatical constructions in which it can occur

(b) the grammatical processes to which it is subject in each
relevant context

(c) the grammatical processes which its presence in a con-
struction determines, and

(d) information about speech act conditions, conversation
rules, and semantic interpretation which must be associ-
ated in an idiosyncratic way with the lexical item in
question;

(2) it must provide the apparatus which characterizes

(a) the grammatical structures of sentences on the "deep" or
most abstract level, and

(b) the grammatical processes by which abstract linguistic
structures are processed and become surface sentences;

(3) it must contain a component for calculating the complete se-
mantic and pragmatic description of a sentence given its grams
matical structure and information associated with these lexi-
cal items;

(4) it must be able to draw on a theory of illocutionary acts, in
terms of which the calculations of (3) are empowered to pro—
vide a full account of the illocutionary act potential of
each sentence;

(5) it must be able to draw on a theory of discourse which relates
the use of sentences in social and conversational situations,
and

(6) it must be able to draw on a theory of "natural logic" by
means of which such judgments as the success of an argument
or the appropriateness of elements in conversations can be
deduced.

What is striking about this list is the extent to which it exceeds the
traditional conception of the linguist's business, confined largely to
the first three items, and implicates pragmatic, social, and real-
world considerations in the determinations he must make. But, as cri-
tics, we can leave the linguist to his chores and return to our own,
which, I think, also will need revision and expansion.

If we now ask how the conception of context aids an understanding

54
of literature, we will arrive at an answer that is at once broader in
scope and more refined in application than Pratt was able to provide.
Recall that her notion of literature as a context rested on the concep-
tion of a conversation between writer and reader, each of whom takes
a single turn. The writer, for his part, claims the floor by means of
a conventional assertion of tellability, orients his reader as to the
particulars of character and setting, proceeds through his story by
narrating complicating details, concludes, summarizes, and signals the
end of his turn. The reader is compensated for his patient attention
by the inherent interest of the story, if the writer has done his job
well, and by the right to form judgments in any case. But it should
be apparent that as a model of the "literary speech situation" this is
appropriate only for narrative literature. The drama, by contrast, in—

volves the audience so completely in the exchanges of the dramatis per-

 

gggggf-in the latters' conversational turn-taking, if you will--that it
seems absurd to conceive of a play as an utterance, a turn. If the
playwright has done his job well, it is not his speech we seem to hear
but his characters'.

This is perhaps the place to mention a remark of Fillmore's to the
effect that playwrights and theorists of conversational interaction
take as their model an ideal conversation, quite distinct from normal
conversation, as he illustrates by means of an analogy to a game of
catch.23 The players are each equipped with a supply of balls, repre-
senting topics, and the only rule is one ball in the air at a time.

In the ideal version of the game, a single ball, selected by one of
the players, is tossed back-and forth until it is either deliberately

allowed to fall or retired by its original owner; in the normal

55
version, though, each player who catches a ball thrown by another of
the participants tends to replace it with one of his own, which is in
turn replaced by whoever catches it by one of h1§_own, and so on.
Pratt's model corresponds to a version of the game with a single ball
(very large, I suppose), a single throw (very high), and a single catch
(very skillful). It strains the ordinary conception of conversational
turn-taking to the limit by reducing it to the limit.

What is missing, then, from this view of context is a sensitivity
to the interaction between the presumptive, internal situation of ut-
terance the work displays and the actual, pragmatic, external one in
which it is audited, a sensitivity that is grounded in a full recogni-
tion of the crucial role played, in both cases, by the deictic phenom-
ena mentioned above in interpreting and evaluating the discourse. Put
another way, Pratt's analysis of literary texts enters and remains at
levels 4 and 5 of Fillmore's agenda. It is not that she is obliged to
begin at the head of the list, but that in centering her analysis here
she sacrifices the interpretive and explanatory values that derive
from a study of deictic phenomena, linking as they do levels 1 through
3 with level 6, and limiting herself instead only to the explanatory
values derivable from the study of usage conventions and their viola-
tions. This gives her study of this interaction, which she calls "Lit-
erary Cooperation and Implicature," a distinctly low-mimetic bias, I
suppose because what studies of the conventions at issue exist have
been made on this level, although I won't try to substantiate the point.
Rather, what concerns me here is the inadequacy of conceiving of the
literary work as a nesting of turn-taking conventions within the one

great turn-taking, as an examination of lyric poetry in particular will

 

56
reveal.

For in the lyric we feel ourselves to be at the farthest remove
from the "natural speech situation," from the conventions of conversa—
tional turn-taking, whether normal or in some way idealized, indeed,
from ordinary conceptions of speech at all. Prosody itself calls at-
tention to this fact, and the prodigality of sense we call polysemy
further underscores it. Even Wordsworth's sober theoretical protes-
tations to the contrary, so at variance with his own best practice,
succeed in the end at persuading us this is so. Yet, having insisted
on the point, I want to recant a bit in the remaining pages of this
chapter and recover a balanced view of the lyric as an utterance with
a context.

In seeking to treat discourse systematically, sociolinguists such
as Labov, speech-act theoreticians such as Searle, critics such as
Pratt, and linguists such as Fillmore all take conversational speech
as the fundamental stratum of analysis; all forms of discourse--gro-
cery lists, letters, newspaper reports, literary texts--are held to be
derivable, ultimately, from the primitives of ordinary, natural—lan-
guage, face—to-face exchanges. A given discourse may or may not dis-
play deictic anchorage, and when it is present it may or may not be
extensive. The relevance, or topicality, of a contribution to the dis-
course (or of the entire discourse, if it is perceived as a unit con-
tribution by a single participant—-a natural narrative, for example)
is always at issue: for non-deictically anchored discourse relevance
Inust reside in its real-world bearing (as in the case of a doctor's
prescription, a key to the genera of the order Coleoptera, The Anatomy

51§_Criticism, etc.) or in the psychological criterion of tellability,

 

57

which seems to involve some mysterious human penchant for story-telling
(as in the case of narratives in general), or a perhaps even more mys-
terious human penchant for the sounds of our own language which we
might call listenability (as in the case of lyric poetry). On the oth-
er hand, to the extent that a given segment of discourse (or unit dis-
course) is deictically anchored, its relevance is guaranteed by that
very anchorage in the speech situation itself: it has an empirical
relevance to that discourse of which its deixis asserts it is a part.

Now it seems to me that it is very often the case with lyric poet-
ry, and especially with the Middle English lyrics, that it constantly
asserts its deictic anchorage in this way: a strikingly large number
of these lyrics reproduce the deictic elements of a conversation by
their use, especially, of the speaker- and hearer-marking pronouns (I,
you/thou), by their characteristic pattern of alternating speakers, by
the present tense, and by other means to be taken up in detail in the
body of this study. Ironically, though, the more a discourse asserts
its deictic anchorage and eschews a real-world relevance, the more am-
biguously we perceive its context. Imagine finding the message "Meet
me here tomorrow at noon" in a bottle adrift on the high seas (the ex-
ample is Fillmore's, and it nicely points up the irony of the term
"deictic anchorage" as well as the irony of relevance). But this, too,
is very much a part of the way we respond to lyrics, as though they
were pregnant messages found floating adrift; Mill's remark that poetry
is not heard but overheard makes a similar point. In terms of the vo-
cabulary of deixis, we could say that the lyric is deictically under-
determined: the signals designating the personages, the place, and

‘the time of discourse tend often to be present, but they have no

58
unambiguous or unmistakable, tangible real-world reflexes as they do
in natural conversation. The process by which a reader supplies a set
of real-world reflexes for the imaginative constructs of literature
has been termed recuperation by the structuralists, and an excellent
summary of their observations can be found in Jonathon Culler's S5529:

24 .
turalist Poetics. Deictic recuperation, however, seems to have been

 

overlooked, though it now appears to be crucial to an understanding of

the lyric's aesthetics.

 

Hence the lyric, by comparison with narrative and drama, makes an
imperious claim to relevance. By contrast, a narrative, as Labov has
shown, begins with a ritual assertion of its tellability (hence evident-
ly our fascination with the various guises of the teller in fiction);
or a drama begins with a ritual darkening of the theatre and opening
of the stage to the audience's view, thus asserting that its relevance
lies in its "watchability." But the beginning of a lyric is marked on-
ly by the incantatory quality of its sound, the pulse of prosody sensed
from the opening syllable, asserting that this discourse is listenable.
Its wellsprings are deep in sound itself. A narrative cannot choose
but attempt a schedule of events; its audience knows the pattern as
well as its narrator does, and holds him responsible for it. But a
lyric makes its own pattern in sound; its audience does not so much
hold its creator responsible as hold its peace, hold its breath. Its
judgment upon the finished work is not so much determined by evaluating
how worthwhile it may have been to suspend a turn in conversation while
it took place as by how its conception of the possibilities of discourse
itself may have quickened in its embrace. Relevance, in a sense, is be—

side the point; the lyric masters discursive relevance with sonic

 

59
irrelevance.

Any conception of the literary context of the lyric, then, must
include both this sense of relevance in listenability that derives
from the notion of the lyric as a speech, a unit of discourse, and the
sense of deictic involvement in a speaking, a virtual, if not an actual,
realization of a face-to—face encounter. The model of the conversation
is not merely a heuristic device where the lyric is concerned--the lyr-
ic, and especially the Middle English lyric, is conversation, as its
deictic anchorage asserts. But because its real-world context is in-
determinate, it cannot subordinate those signals to the place-holding
function they have in natural conversation; thus it is that deictic an—
chorage carries more weight in the lyric than in natural conversation
and implies a context which, merely functional there, acquires a new
significance.

What follows is a study of the particular contribution an under-
standing of deictic context makes to our reading of the Middle English
lyrics. On the t0pic of the relevance of listenability I will have a
little to say in the chapter on discourse deixis. There is general a-
greement among critics that the order of skill and degree of variety
of versification of these lyrics as a body is relatively low; perhaps
that estimation would be revised upward if we better understood the
criterion of listenability as it was conceived by the people by and for
whom the lyrics were composed. But that is a project I will only
glance at in passing. My central purpose is rather to assess the ex-
tent and effect of deictic contextualism in the lyrics by studying the
roles played by person deixis, place and time deixis, discourse deixis,

and the deictically embedded verbs "come" and "go", after which I will

60
have something to say about non—deictically anchored lyrics. Perhaps,
in addition to making a contribution to the study of Middle English

lyrics, such a project will expand the conception of literary context

as well.

61
Notes

1Mary Louise Pratt, Toward §_Speech Act Theory g§_Literary Dis-
course (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977).

 

 

2Though she appears not to distinguish between the two, I do not
believe it makes any difference to the critique itself, which rests
on the centrality to each of a shared, ultimately Saussurian concep-
tion of language.

3Pratt, p. 8.

4Ibid.

 

SPratt, p. 9.

6

Pratt, p. 14.

7Pratt, p. 15.

8William Labov, Language $2 the Inner City: Studies 12_the Black
English Vernacular, University of Pennsylvania Series in Conduct and

Communication, No. 3 (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1972).

 

 

9Pratt, pp. 369; 44; 45.
10Pratt, p. 73.
11Pratt, pp. 73-74.

12"It is frequently the case that of two units in contrast . . .
one will be positive or marked the other being neutral or unmarked.
. . . When this situation holds, it is usually the case that the
unmarked form is more general in sense or has a wider distribution
than the marked form." John Lyons, Introduction £2 Theoretical Lin-
guistics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 79.

 

 

13Pratt, pp. 40-41.

1"Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Language and Style (Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: The MIT Press, 1960), p. 353.

 

15Pratt, p. 99.

16Pratt, p. 115.

17The six lectures delivered by Charles J. Fillmore at the Univer-
sity of California at Santa Clara are entitled "May We Come In‘7,"
"Space," "Time," "Deixis 1," "Coming and Going," and "Deixis II." They
have been reproduced in mimeograph form.

18Fillmore, "May We Come In?," p. 3.

 

 

62

19Fillmore, "May We Come In7," p. 4

20Charles J. Fillmore, "Deictic Categories in the Semantics of
'Come'," Foundations g£_Language, 2 (1966), 219-27.

 

21Fillmore, "May We Come In7," p. 11.

22Fillmore, "May we Come In?," p. 16.

23Fillmore, "Deixis II," p. 4.

24Jonathon Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguis-

tics, and the Study 2: Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1975).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter III: Individuality and the Context of Utterance

Certainly one of the most striking features of Middle English
lyrics is the frequent recurrence of the first person singular pronoun,

as though a great many of those mainly anonymous lyricists wanted to

 

speak to us directly, despite their anonymity. But it is important
not to beg the question of the identity of the speaking voice: we
know that the authors of dramas, narratives, and poems have from the
beginning been adept at creating voices to speak. The metaphor of the
persona is one way of describing the relationship between an author's
own veridical speaking voice and the one that speaks in his poems
(most particularly, of course, what the voice has to say), and though
the term is an old one, the concept appears to be relatively new: in
the sense of a public role or character it does not appear in the ES!

English Dictionary. Still, if we have learned to distinguish carefully

 

between poet and persona, so as not to commit the kind of biographical
relativism labelled intentional fallacy by Wimsatt and Beardsley, yet
we can never quite get the poet out of our minds altogether. He must
have existed, after all; and once we have conceived of him as a flesh-
and-blood individual we inevitably assume the germaneness of the de-
tails of his life to the interpretation of his activities. That way
lies historical criticism.
The study of deictic phenomena offers another approach to the

plroblem of locating the work within a context. In this chapter I will

63

64
survey the issues raised by an examination of person-deixis in the lyr-
ics, in particular the problem of identification of the speech-act par-
ticipants. This would seem to be the more significant when one rememr
bers the extent to which Middle English lyrics exploit one or another
of a number of stock, quasi-dramatic speech situations: a sinner ad-
dresses Christ; Christ addresses man; Christ and Mary at the Annuncia-
tion; the sinner addresses Mary; the sinner addresses other sinners; a
secular lover addresses his beloved; or the voice in the poem simply
addresses the reader. Some of these settings, to be sure, are histor-
ical, in the sense that they are attested in the Bible, while others
are invented; still others are a kind of historical invention, as when
an Old Testament text is conflated with a New Testament situation in
the Q vos Omnes group. What they have in common, though, is their ex-
ploitation of a nuclear speaker-hearer speech situation.

By way of introduction to the questions I want to raise here, con—
sider the following short lyric from the thirteenth century MS Digby 86
(Brown XIII no. 50).1

Swete ihesu, king of blisse,

Min herte loue, min herte lisse,
pou art swete mid I-wisse--

W0 is him bat be shal misse.
Swete ihesu, min herte liyt

bou art dai wip—outen ni3t

bou 3eve me strengpe and eke migt
For-to louien p a1 riyt.

Swete ihesu, mi soule bote,

In min herte pou sette a rote

Of bi loue bat is so swote,

And wite hit pat hit springe mote.

What is particularly striking here is the iteration of person-de-

ixis, which establishes the identities of the two participants of a

65

speech event, the speaker and the hearer. The vocative "Swete ihesu,"
with which each stanza begins, and the second person pronoun thou/pi,
which occurs six times in the poem's twelve lines, repeatedly desig—
nate the bearer in a speech event, while the first person pronoun mi/
min/me, which also occurs six times, designates the speaker. In this
way the poem actualizes the three critical elements by which we recog-
nize a speech—event: speaker, hearer, and message (the speaker's
words).

It happens, in this case, that we know something about the iden—
tity of one of the participants in this speech event, the hearer: we
know his name, ihesu. Because the speaker three times addresses him
with the epithet "swete," and with the honorific "king of blisse," and
because of the nature of the speaker's message (to which we will turn
in a moment), we are undoubtedly justified in associating this ihesu
with the personage of the same name who figures so extensively in the
New Testament, in other well-known texts, in the folk tradition, in
daily liturgical practice of the Christian church, and in other ways
historically attested from the period. In short, there is a real-world
ihesu whom speakers unquestionably addressed and still address times
without number, and this lyric represents such an addressing. The
point may seem simple-minded, but it is important to remember that
names, the so-called proper nouns, do not necessarily have: unique
real—world referents. To assume, as we do in this case, a unique ref-
erent for the name ihesu is in effect to restrict the scope of a var-
iable, hence to restrict the field of contextual associations permis-
sible with it. To see that this is so, compare the effect of the poem

substituting any disyllabic name for ihesu--William, for example, or

 

 

66
Sally.
The message the text represents is remarkable for its internal
focus. With the exception of the allusion in line 4 to "him bat be
shal misse" (a faceless "him" consigned to anonymity and, perhaps, to

spiritual oblivion as well by his very exclusion from the I—Thou con-

 

text that the poem invokes), every detail of the message points toward ‘n
one of the participants in a pattern fundamentally of simple alterna-

tion. In the first stanza, for example, the bearer, ihesu, is addres-

 

sed twice, first by his name (itself ornamented by the epithet "swete,'
which can also function as a name) and then by the title "king of
blisse." In the second line, he is addressed twice more by means of
the quasi—appositives in the possessive constructions "min herte loue"
and "min herte lisse." The only strictly deictic element of the first
two lines is the pronoun "min," designating the speaker. The name,
the title and the appositives associated with the bearer are nondeic—
tic ways of referring to him, and they convey the speaker's sense of
deference in addressing this hearer. Not until the third line does
the poet employ the bearer-deictic pronoun "bou." I functions as the
subject of the poem's first clause, a simple assertion of the validity
of the epithet "swete" which begins each stanza. The last line of the
stanza contains a reference to a third party who is a non-participant

' a point rein-

in this speech event as indicated by the pronoun "him,'
forced lexically, as I have suggested, by the proposition it contains,
that 'he shall miss thee.‘ The pronouns of the second stanza are all
deictics and refer to speaker, hearer, hearer, speaker, and hearer in

that order; and in the last stanza, the pattern is simply speaker,

aspeaker, hearer, hearer. I do not suppose anything in particular of

 

67

significance is to be derived from these patterns, except their possi-
ble relationship to the phenomenon of shifting, which I will take up
in detail later on.

Let us turn now from the form of the message to its content. We
have already noticed, in the first stanza, that the speaker adopts an
extremely deferential mode of address toward this particular hearer;
in fact, not until the fourth line of the stanza does he venture a pro-
position not associated with his perception of their own relationship:
"W0 is him bat be shal misse." If the formulaic expression "Woe is X"
may be paraphrased by some such expression as 'May X suffer woe,‘ or
'Let X suffer woe,'--in short by an optative or subjunctive sense--
then it will be apparent that the speaker's first concern, after iden-
tifying himself and his hearer, is to exclude from the context of what
he has to say everyone who, unlike himself, is not "in touch with" the
hearer he is addressing. This exclusivity, of course, gives the poem
an intensely personal character; but more than this, it serves as the
preamble to an assertion of the participants' self-sufficiency--at
least of the hearer's, whose "strengbe and eke mi t" the speaker hopes
to tap. But the speaker is far from being motivated only by a crass
desire for self-sufficiency; rather, he asks for strength and might
"for-to louien [Jesus] al rigt." The third stanza repeats the request
in the poem's only consequential metaphor: "In min herte bou sette a
rote Of bi loue bat is so swote, And wite hit bat hit springe mote."
The metaphor underscores thematically the self-sufficiency and inner-
determinedness of the message reflected in its deictics. The figure
of the tender root that springs from the ground by its own power, with

proper nourishment, aptly represents the speaker's desire to husband

 

68

the relationship of love that grows between him and the hearer--which,
indeed, binds him to his hearer in a relationship which by itself en-
dows him with special significance--and at the same time asserts its
independence from any outside agency or circumstance. The fact that
it echoes as well a number of Biblical vegetative images associated
with Christ--the root of Jesse, the tree of life, the green wood of
Luke 26:33--is further evidence of the connection.

So far we have examined the message and the bearer, and made some

 

observations about the latter's identity. What can we say about the
identity of the speaker? Unlike the bearer he is unnamed; he is devoid
as well of any nondeictic indication of his identity, such as the hon-
orific title or appositive phrase associated with the hearer. In fact,
although he is the speaker, he never once refers to himself by the nom—
inative pronoun "I"--on1y the oblique mi/min/me forms occur here, and
those without exception in construction with the various nouns and pro-
nouns referring to the bearer: "min herte lisse," "bou jeue me

' etc. It is as though the speaker cannot

strengbe," "mi soule bote,’
conceive of his identity separate from that of his hearer, yet the
poem's use of the person deictic pronouns points to a speech event
which in itself confers upon its participants at least the separate
and independent statuses of speaker and bearer, and upon what is said
at least the status of a message. Hence, although the poem offers
enough information so that we can confidently associate a realdworld
reflex with the hearer represented in it, it specifically withholds
any information whatsoever which might make it possible to associate

:1 real-world reflex with the speaker. Who is speaking is not merely

£1 moot question; it is one the poem prevents our answering by its

69

choice of the contextual details it includes.

These considerations raise several points having to do with the
nature of historical criticism. One version of the historical thesis
holds that, in principle, the more we know about the author of a poem,
the more we know about the poem. The notion of the persona, as has
been mentioned above, mediates between the author and the voice speak-
ing in the poem, and if they are distanced, yet there is a method to
the distance; hence the more we know about the voice the more we know
about the poem. This line of reasoning depends upon the following
three assumptions: 1) This is a poem; 2) Someone produced it; 3) That
someone bears some relationship to the "I" in the poem. My objection
to the first assumption is that, although it is a moot point, it has
the effect of pre-validating the whole argument, begging the question
by assuming at the outset that a particular relation of intentionality
holds between the work and the real world. The second assumption
shifts attention away from the text and onto the author, comprehends
the relationship between them as purely causal (the poet is conceived
as the efficient cause of the poem), and betrays a predisposition to
account for any and all details of the text cataphorically. The third
assumption is necessary, of course, in order to provide a textual lo-
cus for the arguments derived from the second. Such a process of rea-
soning eventually and inevitably reduces each text to the status of a
psycho— or socio—historical document, interesting rather for the light
it sheds on its author and his times than for the intrinsic value of
the speech event it represents.

In the previous chapter I referred to a discussion of Fillmore's

about the various game models which would be appropriate analogues for

70
the various derivatives of conversational speech acts. He rightly
points out that actual conversation differs from the idealized conver-
sation of the theorists and playwrights and mentions several other
specialized versions of the game ("The Platonic Dialogue," "Meet the

2 In order to discuss the lyrics, we need to become familiar

Press").
with two variations of conversational speech acts, one discussed by
Fillmore and one not. The first is the familiar idealized conversation

model; the second is a foreshortened variation of it which I will call

 

the logomorphic model.

The idealized conversation model comprehends two categories of
participant, speaker and hearer. The former is always a single indi—
vidual and is associated with the various forms of the first person
pronoun; the latter may be a single individual or a group of them, re-
ferred to by the forms of the second person pronoun.3 One participant
begins by making a speech; its topic is considered to be binding upon
the group, and all subsequent contributions must, in some way obvious
to the participants, be felt to be connected with the topic in hand.
The phenomenon is known as relevance by topicality. A phenomenon
known as shifting occurs whenever a speaker abandons the floor and an-
other speaker takes it up: the new speaker, of course, refers to him-
self by means of the first-person deictic pronoun forms, and to the
others by means of the second—person forms. Thus "I" can designate
any of an indefinite number of individuals as they, by turns, become
speakers. Put another way, it can have any number of real-world re-
flexes all of whom have in common the role of speaker. Only reference
to the particular occasion of utterance can determine which of the

various participants of a conversation is meant by a deictic pronoun;

 

71

his real-world identity is hidden by the phenomenon of shifting and is
recuperable (if at all) only by inference from the details of the
messages. Eventually in the course of an idealized conversation the
group comes to regard the topic as sufficiently dealt with, at which
point the topic may be changed or the conversation ended. The only re-
quirement seems to be that more than one contribution be made--a single
contribution violates our notion of a conversation, idealized or other-
wise.

In the conversational speech act I refer to as logomorphic, on
the other hand, the concept of holding the floor does not appear to be
relevant, for none of the participants designated by the first contri-
bution as hearers makes, in his turn, a contribution of his own. Rath-
er, the concept of speaking itself becomes paramount. The original
speaker remains the only speaker, and his hearer(s) only hearer(s).
Yet there can be no question that both participants' existences are
recognized: the person-deictic pronouns have exactly the same func-
tion in this model as in all the others. Only reference to the occa-
sion of utterance will supply incontrovertible evidence for the assign-
ment of real-world reflexes for the pronouns. Hence the alternation
of individuals who are in turn designated by the deictic pronouns
(shifting) does not occur. In its place, something akin to it tends
often to occur: the speaker's alternate reference to himself and to
his hearer. Similarly, the criterion of relevance by topicality can-
not be applied to contributions subsequent to the first one, since
there are none. In its place the single contribution displays an in-
ternal development--the topic is explored not through the varying

points of view of the various participants, but through the progress

72

of thought of a single participant.
Two variations on each of these models are possible, according

to whether speaker, hearer, both, or neither is actualized in the text
by means of person-deictic pronouns. Thus the four possibilities are

l) +speaker +hearer

2) -speaker -hearer

3) +speaker -hearer

4) -speaker +hearer
The first of these, the most common one, corresponds to the situation
in which a text actualizes both speaker and hearer (either in an ideal-
ized conversation or in a logomorphic one). The second corresponds to
the case in which neither speaker nor heater is actualized and is char-
acteristic of third person narratives (which are not comprehended under
any conversational model). The third case, in which a speaker desig-
nates himself as such but does not designate a hearer, corresponds to
the soliloquy, especially useful in drama where the actual context of
utterance (i.e. the presentation of a play before an audience) supplies
appropriate hearers although the implied context of utterance does not.
The last case, in which only the bearer is designated deictically,
seems very rare if not non-existent. Short passages of this form could
be cited, of course, but it seems to be axiomatic that if there is an
audience, then there must be a speaker who will eventually identify
himself as such. The values for -speaker and -hearer in this paradigm
correspond todour intuitive interpretations of them, so that we can
safely say that by convention "-speaker" is interpreted as 'the author'
and "-hearer" is interpreted as 'the audience' (reader or listener).
.An.interesting ambiguity arises in the case of lyrics marked +hearer,

for this, too, can be interpreted conventionally to include the

73

reading or listening audience; thus the second-person deictic pronoun
forms may designate a hearer or hearers both in the actual context of
utterance (as a poem) and in the implied context of utterance (within
the poem). I will deal with the phenomenon of hearer ambiguity in
more detail later on.

Lyrics which employ the model of the idealized conversation, with
at least two speakers, lend themselves to the discussion of a number
of disputational subjects; typically the speakers articulate separate
points of view which may be represented as being more or less in oppo-
sition. A stock variant of the form, much employed by the secular
Middle English lyricists, casts the speakers as would-be lovers and
produces the love dgbggg the twenty-fourth lyric in MS Harley 2253,
"Dg_clerico g£_puella," is a fine example of the type (Brook 1956:62).4
The clerk, first to speak, announces the topic in the arresting if con—
ventional oxymoron "my deb y loue, my lyf ich hate, for a leuedy shene,"
and concludes his first speech by posing the lady a direct question:
"Whet helpeb be, my suete lemmon, 1y lyf bus forte gaste?" She re-
sponds, charmingly, with an attack §g_hominem and an ironic refusal
to debate the issue: "Do wey, bou clerc, bou art a fol, wib be bydde
y noht chyde." But of course she does dispute his suit, pointing out
the danger in his being surprised in her "boure" and citing him the
proverbial wisdom that it is "bettere on fote gon ben wycked hors to
ryde." This provides the clerk both his next contribution and a means
to draw another contribution from her--he asks her another question,
"weylawei! Whi seist bou so?" and follows it up with the command
"pou lete me lyue ant be bi luef ant bou my suete lemman." She re-

sponds by referring again to the risk of a liaison, reminding the clerk

74
that he is being watched night and day by her kinfolk, who wouldn't

hesitate to kill him. The next series of transitions, which brings

the little drama to a conclusion, is skillful indeed. Her last remarks,
the clerk declares, have made him suddenly sorrowful; yet he recalls
the time when they kissed fifty times at a window, and such "feir bi-
hests makeb mony mon al is serewes mythe." But, for her part, she
replies, "Mi serewe bou makest newe," for she had "louede a clerk a1

' something she apparently just now remembers. He seizes

par amours,‘
this opening to summarize his case:

'Whil y wes a clerc in scole, wel muchel y coube of lore;

ych haue boled for by loue woundes fele sore,

fer from hom ant eke from men vnder be wode-gore.

Suete ledy, bou rewe of me; nou may y no more!’
Swayed by his gentle importunings, she concedes: "bou semest wel to
ben a clerc, for bou spekest so stille; shalt bou neuer for mi loue
woundes bole grylle." Unlike the other lyrics on the stock Dg_clerico
gg puella theme, this one makes the clerk's identity as a clerk cru-
cially significant to the outcome, and even goes some distance toward
giving him the "stille" Speech she finds attractive in a clerk. This
kind of verisimilitude in the representation of speech is characteris-
tic of the general level of compositional skill evident in the Harley
lyrics. Yet the idealized conversation provides not merely the form
of this lyric, but its theme as well, for it is ultimately an argument
for the power of deft conversation to win friends and influence people.

While this lyric develops a secular version of this thesis, an-

other in the series develops a religious analogue of it, and represents

as well an important variation on the idealized conversation form. The

latter is an English setting of the Latin sequence Stabat iuxta Christi

75

crucem in which Christ and Mary converse at the cross (Brook 56-57).
Actually, neither speaker is identified by name (only Adam and Simeon
are mentioned by name in the text). The textual details, however,
point unmistakeably to these real-world identifications. What is sig-
nificant is that each speaker addresses the other by the term denoting
their relationship, mother and son, and as mother and son they are en—
gaged in a debate over the propriety of the mother's grief at her son's
impending death. Their perspectives, of course, differ:

'Moder, nou y may be seye,

betere is bat ich one deye

ben al monkunde to helle go.'

'Sone, y se bi bodi byswngen,

fet ant honden bourhout stongen;

no wonder bah me be wo!‘
The mother sees only her dying son, while his vision embraces the en-
tire salvation history of mankind. This difference in point of view
is reflected in the speech-act dynamics of the lyric, for Mary's come
ments return again and again to the details of the situation of utter-
ance, if we may call it that--the wounds she sees on her son's body,
the "harde tre" itself, the pain of her grief--while he leads her to-
ward the discovery of a significance they have which encompasses all
time and all human circumstance. This he does by noting that she now;
feels the sorrow of all women who bear children--'nou bou wost of moder
fare', an illusion to the tradition that her childbearing had been
without pain-—to which she responds by claiming a special right to in-
tercede with him on behalf of all women 'bat to me grede.‘ Now, for
the first time, her vision turns outward from the conversational migg

gp_scene to encompass persons not present and a time not the immediate

present. Having accomplished his purpose, both in the narrow sense of

76
the education of his mother and in the wider sense connected with sal-
vation history, the son says his farewell, the mother says hers, and
their dialogue ceases. At this point, a new voice enters and addresses
first the mother--"Leuedy, for bat ilke blisse, bysech bi sone of sun—
nes lisse"--and then the son--"Louers, for bat ilke blod bat bou shed-
dest on be rod, bou bryng vs into heuene lyht." This speaker is deic-

' which we can interpret as an anaphoric

tically identified only as "vs,'
reference to the "monkynde" of lines 8, 15, and 27. This "monkynde,"
as a collective personage in the poem, can participate in the salvific
promise the poem makes only by participating as well in the dialogue

it represents. Thus the three parties come into contact through the
medium of speech: son and mother converse with each other directly .
while mankind, for his part, addresses each of them in turn and has

the poem's promise that the mother will speak for him to the son as
well.

The poem offers parallel metaphors: the dynamic interrelationship
of son, mother, and mankind in the text--that is as it is strictly de-
fined by the deictic elements of the text, a relationship which compre-
hends both the son's comforting of his mother by giving significance
to his (and her) suffering and her parallel desire to comfort mankind--
has its counterpart in the larger world comprehended by the message of
the text, which the believer reads as the promise of salvation——that
which gives significance to his suffering. The son's promise to his
mother of happiness to come, unfulfillable within the present-bound
speech event reported in the first 54 lines, receives its fulfillment

only in the speech event which follows it and which links it deictical-

ly to "vs" in the last two stanzas. This commentary, provided by an

77

anonymous spokesman for us mankind, points up the significance of the
preceding exchange between mother and son by asserting that the son's
promise to his mother is to his intentions toward mankind as his ful-
fillment of the promise is to his fulfillment of his intentions. Mary,
who takes upon herself the role of mediatrix in the course of their ex-
change, is the middle term in this logical predication as well.
Carleton Brown asserts confidently that "the ultimate source for
this dialogue between the Blessed Virgin and her Son is without doubt
a Latin prose narrative of the Passion represented as spoken by the
Virgin to St. Anselm . . . or to St. Bernard," and indeed, in the case
of the former possibility at least, the textual details agree fairly

well.5 In Chapter XII of Dialogue Beatae Mariae g£_Anselmi dg_Passi-

 

 

one Domini the Virgin reports that, for the third time, "Tunc iterum

gladius Simeonis animam pertransit" upon hearing the crowd's insults

 

and Christ's mild reply; St. Anselm asks her what she did then, and
she answers "Stabam juxta crucem tam plena moerore, quod consolationem
ferre non poteram, et mecom stabant sorores meae, et maria Magdalena.
Et cum filius meus videsset me et Joannem discipulum suum quem dilige-
bat dixit: Mulier, ecce filius tuus (Joan. XIX, 25,26). 0 quam miser-
ablis licentia! Deinde dixit discipulo Ecce mater tua (ibid., 27)."6
Here at least are the details of the sword prophesied by Simeon, Mary's
inconsolable weeping, the emphasis on their relationship as mother and
son, and the "stabam juxta crucem" clause paraphrased in the opening
line of the English lyric. More than this, however, the fact that
these details occur in the context of a dialogue between the Blessed
Virgin and her son has its parallel in the lyric; and even the fact

that it is a framed dialogue, one that is reported in the context of

78

another (that between the Blessed Virgin and St. Anselm), has its coun-
terpart in the lyric's structure in the new voice that enters in the
tenth stanza.

On the other hand, G. L. Brook declares the lyric to be an "Eng-

lish version of the Sequence Stabat iuxta Christi crucem."7 This Latin

 

poem, which occurs only in the York Missal, is attributed to Jacapone
da Todi and runs as follows.8

Stabat iuxta Christi crucem,
videns pati veram lucem,
mater regis omnium.

Vidit caput coronatum
spinis, latus perforatum,
vidit mori filium.

Vidit corpus flagellari,
manus, pedes perforari,
vinctum a crudelibus.
Vidit caput inclinatum,
totum corpus cruentatum
pastoris pro ovibus.

Vidit potum felle mixtum,
natum suum.crucifixum,
gubernantem omnia,

Christum pati haec flagella
vidit mater et puella

vidit et opprobria.

Vidit virgo haec dicentum,
natum suum innocentum,
'ecce mater filius.‘

Pati vidit virgo natum
dicentum 'est consummatum',
et sic transit gladius.

In dolore tunc fuisti,

virgo pia, cum vidisti

mori tuum filium.

Dolor ingens, dolor ille,
dicunt sancti plusquam mille,
excellit martyrium.

Virgo clemens, virgo pia,
spes reorum, vitae via,
virgo plena gratia:

Iube natum ac implora,

79

servis tuis sine mora
nobis dare gaudia.

This text, too, contains the reference to Simeon's sword, Mary's ex-
cessive dolor ("dicunt sancti plusquam mille"), emphasis on the mother-
son relationship, and the opening "stabat" clause. It differs from
the St. Anselm text in that it does not reproduce as much Calvary-scene
dialogue (only two lines) and does not itself appear to be cast as a
dialogue. There is evidence, however, that the sequences were per-
formed antiphonally, by two half-choirs; hence they must have created
quite a distinct impression of a dialogue in music. If the first
three lines of each stanza were performed by male voices and the lat-
ter three by female voices, the voices would be mirrored in the alter-
nation of Christ's and Mary's speeches in the English lyric; in any
case, it exactly reproduces the sequence's metrical and stanzaic form.
There is little to be gained by choosing one of these two works
as "the source" of the English lyric; what seems important to me to
recognize is the fact that each of the thrgg of them, whatever their
relationship of influence upon one another may he, makes crucial use
of the model of an idealized conversation for its form, and, in the
case of the lyric, for thematic material as well. Its central thesis--
the efficacy of the word's intercession--works itself out in the course
of the dialogue it represents. That it is able to do this is owing
largely to the lyricist's most truly creative stroke: his transposi-
tion of the Latin imperfects into English present tenses. Certainly
much of the lyric's sense of immediacy derives from its representation
of the events as taking place at coding time, rather than before it

(as the Latin pieces do); but more than this, the present-tense

80
setting makes possible the depth of thematic impact the lyric has.
What it says is true not merely at the time of the events it documents
but on every occasion of its utterance.

A number of other lyrics are constructed on the model of the ide-
alized conversation, notably the 13th-century debate between the Night-
ingale and the Thrush and the ballad-like "Bargain of Judas" (Brown
XIII:52, 25); these will be discussed in the following chapter on time-
and-place deixis, for their emphasis is upon the context of action rath-
er than upon the context of personality we are discussing here. On the
other hand, a great many lyrics constructed on the logomorphic model
of conversation exploit the context of personality, and I will turn now
to a discussion of some of these.

The logomorphic model of conversation, as I stated earlier, pro-
vides for both participants but allows only one of them to speak. It
is a model of conversation in which one of the conversants is silent;
nevertheless, his influence is felt, as will be noticed, in the ways
the speaker tailors his contribution and monitors its tellability spe-
cifically for the benefit of his silent interlocutor. Because the
hearer is silent, his real-world identity is an open variable. This
allows the lyricists to incorporate subtle (and sometimes not so sub-
tle) "identity riddles"-—sometimes the contribution's tellability rests
on an appropriate answer to the question of who is speaking, sometimes
to the question of who is listening, and sometimes to both questions.

I will refer to these groups as speaker-derivative, hearer-derivative,
and participant-derivative lyrics, and discuss them in that order.

In many cases of speaker-derivative lyrics, it is Christ who

speaks. Occasionally he is identified by name, as in this lyric from

81
MS Advocates Lib. 18.7.21 (Brown XIV:63):

I am iesu, bat cum to fith

With-outen seld & spere,

Elles wer bi det i-dith

31f mi fithting ne were.

Siben i am comen & haue be broth

A blisful bote of bale,

Vndo bin herte, tel me bi bouth,

bi sennes grete an smale.
The speaker here is Christ the Knight, a Christological motif familiar
from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. The poem does not dwell upon
the irony of the fact that he has come to fight "with-outen seld &
spere" but subtly transmutes this commonplace to work a different
purpose: his healing word is his weapon. For the bearer to fight on
his own behalf were his death, but Christ fights in his stead. Since
he has come and brought with him such a "blisful bote" out of bale,
Christ argues, the hearer's appropriate response would be to undo his
heart and tell his thought and his sins. The reason, then, that he
needs neither shield nor spear is that the power of his word is suffi—
cient to release his hearer from sin and death. But the invitation to
"tel me bi bouth" is open-ended--the hearer will respond or not, as he
chooses in the silence at poem's end.

More often with these lyrics, the speaker is not identified by
name but can nevertheless be associated with a real-world reflex
through the circumstantial details of the text. This short lyric from
Advocates MS. 19.1.11 is a fine example (Brown XV: 111):

I haue laborede sore and suffered dey th,
and now I Rest and draw my breyght;

but I schall come and call Ryght sone
heuene and erght and hell to dome;

and thane schall know both devyll and mane,

What I was and what I ame.

Here speaker deixis merges with--becomes--the very theme of the work.

82
Spare though it is, the imagery moves from the banal, animal experience
of work and death through the humane arts of speech and judgement to
come to rest in the question of the significance of existence itself.
This ascending triplet is echoed, in the fourth line, by the parallel
descending triplet "heuene and erght and hell," which provides the key
to the epistemological riddle of the last two lines--for "what I was
and what I ame," the unknown to be solved, is the third term of the
poem's third triplet, again and finally ascending.

Occasionally it is not Christ but Mary whom we take to be speak-
ing. Carleton Brown titles one of the lyrics from the Grimestone Come
monplace Book "The Blessed Virgin's Appeal to the Jews" (IV: 60):

wy haue 5e no reuthe on my child?

Haue reuthe on me ful of murning,

Taket doun on rode my derworbi child,

Or prek me on rode with my derling.

More pine ne may me ben don

ban laten me liuen in sorwe & schame;

Als loue me bindet to my sone,

so lat vs dey en boben i—same.
Texts such as this and the one just considered clearly depend upon the
reader's (or hearer's) association of a few key details with a partic-
ularly strong and familiar context—-the Biblical narrative--as soon as
he recognizes them. These details amount to a set of indexical common-
places: the ruthlessness of the hearers the speaker is addressing
("Wy haue }e no reuthe on my child?")--marking them in turn as the Jews
assembled at Ca1vary--the road on which the son is suspended, the mourn-
ing and pain the speaker expresses, all of these point to a single, un-
ambiguous identification of the speaker. After all, the sentiments ex-

pressed here could be those of any mother who has had the misfortune

to see her son put to death; nor was this manner of execution

83

practised only in a single case. Yet no 14th-century reader would
have mistaken this speaker for Everywoman. It must have been only too
common to witness the death of a child of one's own, but in only one
other case that I am aware of, the magnificent "Pearl," does this ex-
perience become the center of a poetic expression. It is as though
Mary's loss, still felt with startling immediacy, so overshadows human
losses as to pre-empt all expressions of this kind.

A very large body of logomorphic-model lyrics derives its interest
not from the question of who is speaking but from the question of who
is being spoken to. These are the hearer-derivative lyrics. They may
be divided into two groups: those in which the bearer is identifiable
with a particular real-world reflex--Christ--by a process similar to
the one just outlined, and those in which no such identification is
possible.

As a compact example of a lyric which addresses Christ, Brown
prints this piece from the 14th century (XIV: 5):

Louerd, bu clepedest me

an ich nagt ne ansuared be
Bute wordes scloe and sclepie:
'bole yet! bole a litel!'

Bute 'yiet' and 'yiet' was endelis,
and 'bole a litel' a long wey is.

" there is no

Here, as in the case of "Stand well, Mother, under rode,
unambiguous signal in the text by which we assign the referant "Christ"
to the deictic pronoun bu. The title "louerd" with which the poem be-
gins might apply to anyone in a position of authority; the QED cites
numerous secular examples from the period (s.v. lord), including in-

stances of vocative constructions quite similar to this one. Nor can

we assume that a distinction between thou and you such as obtains in

84

early modern English, and the current English of a few speakers, oper-
ates here--second person pronoun usage in Middle English seems to have
been in a state of transition between the ordinary employment of bu,
bin, etc. in Old English and the restricted employment of thou in Mod-
ern English. "You" as a form competing with "thou" seems to have been
the form which was at first limited (applied only to persons of super-
ior station) and only gradually superceded thou in ordinary usage.

That all such evidence is inconclusive will scarely surprise anyone
accustomed to reading poetry of whatever period. What is striking a-
bout the piece, on the other hand, is the nearness with which it approx-
imates an immediate speech event. The deictics bu and me establish
hearer and speaker immediately; the verb, "clepedest," 'called,' rein-
forces this lexically. Notice, though, that there are two speech e-
vents here: the lord's call and the speaker's response, reported in
the text, and the text itself as the poetic representation of a present
instance of one. The first of these stands prior to the present one,
signalled by the past tense "clepedest" and its complement "ansuared."
The temporal separation of the two instances of discourse raises the
interpretive question what significance is to be attached to the dif-
ference between the messages of the past and present discourse.

The speaker admits that in the previous instance he all but en-
tirely refused to participate in the lord's offer of discourse: "ich
nagt ne ansuared be / Bute wordes scloe and sclepie." The placement
of the negatives, the enjambment, the deprecatory "bute," and the
lazy indifference conveyed by the adjectives "scloe" and "sclepie" all
contribute to the impression of the barest minimum of a response--

scarcely more than no response at all. Hence the speaker's ironic

85
disassociation from his message of the past is accomplished in the mes-
sage of the present. The speaker's message at that time, 'Wait a lit-
tle,‘ was a promise of future performance, but now, with an irony re-
flected in the tension created by the juxtapostion of contraries, he
evaluates his performance at the same barest minimum: "'bole a litel'
a long wey is." The present tense of the poem's last word brings back
the present discourse, and with it the contrast of the past--or rather,
the non-present, which contrasts deictically with the present, and com-
prehends future time as well. The message of the present speech event,
in fact, suggests a nexus with an eternally unfolding non-present in
the terms "a long wey" and "endelis." In terms of speech-act dynamics
the speaker's first response to the lord's call employed the strategy
of minimizing his commitment to his hearer; the promissory "bole a
litel" suggests future performance, but in fact betrays a present-cen-
teredness that refuses to comprehend a future, let alone an eternity.
The message of present discourse, on the other hand, does comprehend
such things, as can be seen in the last two lines. But deictic utter-
ances of any sort are validated only by present circumstances; as Fill-
more puts it, "it is not the sentence in isolation--the proposition--
which is necessarily true, but every utterance of it."10 Hence the
message of the present speech event, which entails the notion that the
speaker is now ready to contemplate an eternal non-present, can only
be validated by present performance. Now two signals in the poem in-
dicate that this occasion of utterance will be different from the pre-
vious one: first, the irony we have discussed, which distances the
speaker from his earlier self; and second, the very empirical fact of

his now spontaneously addressing the lord, in a sincere if belated

86

answer to his call, unlike his earlier slow and sleepy response.

I began the discussion of this piece with the contention that its
interest lies in processing the message simultaneously for its inter-
pretive content and for clues within it about the identity of its os-
tensible hearer. While it is evident that there is no absolutely un-
ambiguous way to determine the hearer's identity, it is reasonable to
assume that the identity of speaker and hearer, as well as the refer—
ant of the message, must be given the richest interpretation possible
consistent with the data. Jonathon Culler, in discussing the inter-
pretive convention by which we read a poem as a unity, has pointed out
that "the intent at totality of the interpretive process may be seen
as the literary version of the Gestaltist law of Pragnanz: that the
richest organization compatible with the data is to be preferred."11
He goes on to suggest that a reader must possess "at least rudimentary

notions of what would count as unity,"

mentioning such arrangements as
"the binary opposition, the dialectical resolution of a binary opposi-
tion, the displacement of an unresolved opposition by a third term,
the four-term homology, the series united by a common denominator, and
the series with a transcendent or summarizing final term." I think it
is at least equally plausible to suggest that besides these quasi-math-
ematical conceptions a reader--or listener--posseses a conception of
unity grounded in the fundamental speaker—hearer-message triad of or-
dinary speech, familiar to him from his earliest years; and if that is
indeed the case, then the Law of Pragnanz provides a principled way of
accounting for our interpretation of the hearer's identity in the lyr-

ic we have been discussing.

But the hearer's identity as Christ is seldom at issue in the

87

Middle English lyrics. It is far more often the case that the speaker
addresses Him by name, unambiguously and forthrightly, as in the follow-
ing lyric attributed to Friar William Herebert (Brown XIV:22).

bou kyng of woele and blisse,
louerd iesu crist,

bou uaderes sone of heuene,
bat neuer ende bist,

bou, uor to sauue monkunne
bat bou haddest whrout,

A Moeke maydes wombe

bou ne shonedest nouht;

bou bat ouercome

be bitter dethes stunchg,

bou openedest hoeuene—ryche

to ryth byleues brunchg;

bou sist in godes ryth bond

in by uaderes blisse;

bou shalt comen to demen ous,

woe leueth al to wysse;

be boenne woe byddeth help one

wham bou hauest y-wrouth,

Whom wyb by doerewourbe blod

on rode hauest y—bouth.

be boenne woe bysecheth,

help one byn oune hyne,

Whom wyth by derewourbe blod

hast bouth vrom helle pyne. Amen.
Loosely anaphoric in structure, the poem divides into groups of four
stanzas and two stanzas. The first group of stanzas, each of which
begins with a nominative or appositive bou, repeated in the third line
(in one case the fourth), identifies the hearer both by nam --"louerd
iesu crist"--and by some aspect of his relationship to the speaker,
different with each stanza. The first stanza asserts that, like any
man, he is a "uaderes sone"; and the second complements the first by

a reference to his mother. In the third stanza, the speaker notes

what has already been the consequence of this hearer's activities

88

among men, at least for the 'throng of true believers': by overcoming
death he has opened the kingdom of heaven for them. The fourth stanza
expresses the further consequences of the speaker's relationship to
this hearer, for he will 'come to judge us' all. The last two stanzas
retain the stanza-initial pronominal structure of the first four but
shift from the nominal to the objective form be by inverting the nor-
mal subject-verb-object word order: "be boenne woe byddeth help ous"
and "be boenne woe bysecheth." The effect is to reinforce syntactical-
ly the sense of the message itself, which conveys the speaker's sense
of complete subordination to his hearer, whom he may rightly, then,
beg for help. (It is worth noting in passing that poems of vocative
address are characteristic of Friar Herebert's compositional style.

Of the fourteen lyrics attributed to him in Brown XIV, eleven are ad-
dressed directly to a bearer in this way.)

Of course, many hearers besides Christ may be addressed in the
lyrics of the period. Friar Herebert, for example, has a lyric ad-,
dressed to Herod, one addressed to the Holy Ghost, and four addressed
to Mary. On one view, propounded by Rosemary Woolf, the large number
of Marian hymns in Middle English, particularly prevalent from the
15th century, is to be attributed to historical causes, notably the
rise of the cult of the Virgin in England. Another possible explana-
tion lies in the facility with which writers were able to adopt the
Marian personality to a conversationally derived poetic practice.
Mary's unique position as mankind's special interventrix has already
been pointed out in the discussion of "Stond well, Modor, vnder rode."
The strikingly dramatic scene of the meeting of mother and son at Cal—

vary begs for dialogue, a Biblical vacuum both Patristic writers such

 

89

as St. Anselm and medieval poets sought to fill. But the Gospels con-
tain another striking sequence involving Mary and an immortal interloc-
utor for which St. Luke preserves the dialogue; and this exchange be-
tween Mary and the Archangel Gabriel became not merely the model for
but the substance of many Middle English lyrics.

Although the Biblical text in Luke's Gospel preserves the Annun-
ciation scene as a dialogue, the lyrics which derive from it are logo-
morphic, representing either the "Salve, Maria" of Gabriel or the "Ecce
ancilla domini" of Mary. As an elaborate but typical example of the
former motif, written in the emerging aureate style of the 15th century,
here is a stanza from a lyric of seven stanzas printed in Brown XV (69):

Haile! Precellent lady, bothe quene & empresse,

The chosen spowse of god his promyse to fulfyll,

Pray for vs, pore wretches bat lyve here in distres,

O flowre of virginite, whiche neuer thoghtist yll;

Thy son will performe what so euer is thy will.

Loke! for whome thow prayest, releassed is his trespace--

Wherfore, haile! glorious lady, mary full of grace.
Here the motif of Mary's power of intervention for the benefit of man-
kind is first construed as liberally as possible--"Thy son will per-
forme what so euer is thy will"--then forthrightly (some might say
crassly) invoked, as though the speaker were stabbing his finger at a
document: "Loke! for whome thow prayest, releassed is his trespace."
The attitude this conveys is mechanical, if not in fact spiritually
debased, in comparison with the humble devotion born of "ryth beleue"
that characterizes earlier expressions of this same motif; but it is
significant that the speech event context itself, with its ability to
allow the speaker to place himself in immediate contact with his hear-

er, continues to provide the model for poetic form.

The stanza quoted, the poem's fourth, begins like the others with

90

a variation of Gabriel's salutation "Ave gratia plena," which begins
the first stanza. His greeting was undoubtedly the inspiration for a
number of Latin hymns of praise beginning with a variation of that
formula, and many of these, too, have their English paraphrases and ex-
pansions. Here, for example, is the first stanza of another elaborate
15th century lyric addressed to Mary (Brown XV:26):

Salue Hayl! oure patron & lady of erthe,

Regina qwhene of heuen & emprys of helle,
Mater Modor of a1 blis bu art, be ferth,
Misericordie Of mercy & grace be seconde welle.
Vita lyfe come of be, as be sownde of a bell
Dulcedo Swetnes, bu art both moder & mayde,

Et spes'fifE Oure hope with be bat we may dwelle
Salue Hayl! ful of grace as gabriel sayd.

Quite apart from whatever appeal any such prayer might have for the
faithful, this lyric presents a graphic illustration of the art of em-
bellishment. The first element in each of the English lines succinct-
ly translates the Latin; to it is then added some rhetorical figure,
such as the apostrophe of the first line, the antithetical isocolon of
the second, the simile of the fifth, the paradox of the sixth, or some
amplifying detail from the wealth of Marian devotional material, which
seems to have suggested the titles of fourth well of bliss and second
of mercy conferred in the third and fourth lines. Increasingly with
the lyrics of the 15th century, ornamentation itself becomes topical
and poetry becomes verbal display.

In addition to such hymns in praise of divine personages there
are of course many in praise of very earthly ones. Occasionally, as
in this enticingly incomplete 14th century piece, printed by Robbins,
12

they preserve the beloved's name to great effect.

With right all my herte now I you grete,
With hondert syes, my dere!

91

Swete God, give us grace sone to mete,

And sone to speken ifere.

Annes, Annes, Annes, Annes, Annes!

Annes, be now stedfaste on allewys,

And thinke on me, my swete Annes.

My faire Annes, my sothe Annes,

I love youre . . .
This logomorphic message is in lieu of a true exchange in which the
speaker and his hearer can "speken ifere"; in the meantime the incan-
tatory repetition of the beloved's name suggests by onomatopoeia the
very sighs it induces in the speaker, just as the poem itself bears a
sonic resemblance only to the conversation he would be having with her,
even to suggesting its interminability.

Another subcategory of lyrics composed on this model addresses not
a human or divine interlocutor but an inanimate or abstract one person—
ified. Chaucer's witty complaint to his purse is expertly cast in this
1

form. 3

To yow, my purse, and to noon other wight

Complayne I, for ye be my lady dere!

I am so sory, now that ye been 1yght;

For certes, but ye make me hevy chere,

Me were as leef be layd upon my bere;

For which unto your mercy thus I crye:

Beth hevy ageyn, or elles mot I dye!
The deftly manipulated topicality of the speaker's message contributes
greatly to the fun here. On one level, very carefully specified by
the person-deictic pronouns "I" and "yow," Chaucer is addressing his
silent and comfortless purse. The relevance of the message lies in
their metaphorically inverted relationship: now that the purse is
"lyght" Chaucer's cheer is but "hevy." On another level, of course,
this speech is not directed at one of the author's personal effects at

all, but at the reader, who will understand the topicality of the mes-

sage in more universal terms as a playfully ironic commentary on the

92

straightness of poverty. All of this is sustained through two more
stanzas to the same effect. To these Chaucer then appends this envoy:

O conquerour of Brutes Albyon,

Which that by lyne and free eleccion

Been verray kyng, this song to yow I sende;

And ye, that mowen alle oure harmes amende,

Have mynde upon my supplicacion!
With the change in hearer from the inanimate purse Egm_overhearing read-
er to the very animate and potentially provident Henry IV comes a sub-
tle shift in topicality indeed: if he "that mowen alle oure harmes
amende" has ears to hear and smiles upon the speaker's suit the rele-
vance of this message will be measured in its perlocutionary force.

In respect of this ulteriorization of relevance Chaucer's lyric
is strikingly like the Marian supplication discussed a moment ago
(Brown XV:69) with its confident assertion that "for whome thow pray-
est, releassed is his trespace." It is no accident that the purse is
addressed as the speaker's "lady dere," for by attributing to it a
feminine personality Chaucer manages to parody not merely the courtly
tradition of the lover's complaint to his sovereign and sustaining lady
but the Christian tradition of the plaint of the sinner to his benign
and assuaging lady as well. The point, I think, is reinforced by the

' a line

punning image in the line "For I am shave as nye as any frere,‘
which manages to suggest both the destitution and the devotion of the
speaker, each equally undercut with ironic playfulness.

By no means all of the lyrics addressed to an artificial hearer
are as entertaining or as skillfully composed as this one, but they
share with it the interest of a dual relevance arising from the dual

conception of the bearer to whom they are addressed. Conjuring formu-

las offer particularly striking illustrations of the phenomenon, as in

93
the following example (Robbins:65):

Medicine pro morbo caduco g£_lg_fevre

.13 nomine Patris gg Filii_g£,§piritus Sancti, Amen.
What manere of evil thou be,

In Goddes name I coungere thee.

I coungere thee with the holy crosse

That Jesus was done on with fors.

I conure thee with nailes three

That Jesus was nailed upon the tree.

I coungere thee with the precious blode

That Jesus shewed upon the rode.

I coungere thee with woundes five

That Jesus suffred be his live.

I coungere thee with that holy spere

That Longeus to Jesus hert can bere.

I coungere thee nevertheless

With all the vertues of the Masse,

And all the holy prayers of Saint Dorathy.

.13 nomine Patris SE Filii_§£,§piritus Sancti, Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Latin inscription informs the reader in what context he will find
the poem useful; until and unless he finds himself in such a context,
the poem's force for him is limited to whatever devotional force the
pious images call up. But of course the poem is not addressed to a
reader--or even a human hearer--but to "what manere of evil" the speak-
er finds himself confronted with in a patient suffering from epilepsy
or fever. Its topicality within this context must lie in the presump-
tive relevance of the message to that mysterious and malignant hearer;
hence the attempt to nullify evil with good by reciting a list of the
cruel sufferings Jesus turned into the supreme benefit.14 0n the other
hand, its relevance within the context of a speech event overheard or
read by a human auditor lies entirely in the possibility of his having
to employ it himself on a similar occasion; it is the perlocutionary
force of the piece that interests him primarily, and he will judge its
efficacy by whether or not it "works" in each single instance of its

use.

94
Perlocutionary force of a somewhat different sort is at issue in

the following brief lyric printed by Robbins (1955:155):

Go, hert, hurt with adversitee,

And let my lady thy wondes see;

And sey hir this, as I say thee:

Farwell my joy, and welcom peine,

Till I see my lady againe.
The personification of the heart as the hearer in the first line is
matched by the further hearer—personifications of "joy" and "peine" in

the fourth, which the "hert" is to address as surrogate hearers under

its commission as surrogate speaker in delivering a message to the "la-

dy, who in fact is the hearer the original speaker (he who speaks the
poem) would like to "see againe" in the first place. With this embed—
ding of abstracted participants and abstracted speech events it is hard-
ly surprising that the topicality of the message rests upon an abstrac-
tion as well: "Farwell my joy, and welcom peine" is to be the speaker's
lot. If, however, a particular individual-—the lady herself--happens
to be among the incidental hearers of this message (for the "hert" is
the specific hearer to whom it is addressed), then it may have the de-
sirable perlocutionary force of bringing speaker and lady together a-
gain. It seems to be one of the conventions of courtship that the fic-
tion of a speech event is as pertinent as the fact of one.

It is not always the case that lyrics constructed on the logomorph—
ic model of conversation require this dual analysis of the topicality
of the message. Far more often than not, in fact, the topicality of
the message as far as the reader is concerned is baldly (and some read-
ers think excessively) apparent. These are lyrics on explicitly moral

themes addressed to the reader himself rather than to a hearer we con-

ceive of as internal to the speech event represented by the lyric. Put

 

95

another way, the deictic signals in these lyrics mark them as speech

events in themselves, not as derived representations of speech events;
the reader himself becomes part of the immediate speech event, for he
is the hearer whom the speaker addresses. Person deixis in the lyrics
of this group always marks the presence of either a speaker or a hear-

er, but we will need to specify the conditions under which the latter

II.

signals are to be interpreted as referring to the reader.
One of the most marked features of this group of lyrics is the
3.}
frequent occurrence of the quasi-deictic lexical item "mon" or "man" ‘
used vocatively, or its compound "mankind" used as an antecedent for
the first person plural pronoun: "Wrecche mon, wy artou proud, bat
art of herth I-maked?" (Brown XIV:133); "Do bi salomones rede, Man,
and so bu selth wel do" (Brown XIV:10); "for quike and for deade and
al mankinde, and bat ws here god don, in heuene mot bal it finde"
(Brown XIII:67); many examples could be given. These lexical items
seem invariably to be associated with the moral themes characteristic
of this group, as will become clear from a closer examination of the
three lyrics from which these examples are taken.
The first of the three has at least the merit of brevity.

Wrecche mon, wy artou proud,

bat art of herth I-maked?

hydyr ne browtestou no schroud,

bot pore bou come & naked.

Wen bi soule is faren out,

bi body with erthe y—raked,

bat body bat was so ronk and loud,

0f alle men is i-hated.
The thesis of this piece is as bluntly pointed as the means used to

convey it, the simple shock value of the last two lines, which derives

from the incongruity between the final state of man's body and the

96
pride he exhibits in it before his death. The implication is that the

departure of the soul shows the body for what it really is, corrupt
and repulsive; hence, by extension, more attention should be paid to
the needs of the soul and less to those of the body before they go
their separate ways. This, of course, is a commonplace of Christian
morality, and commonplaces are by definition always relevant even if,
as in this case, they make the hearer uncomfortable.

Discomfiture in the reader (or heater) seems often to be an effect
aimed at in these lyrics; this is certainly the case with Brown XIII:10.
Here is the first stanza:

Man mei longe him liues wene,

ac ofte him liyet be wreinch;

fair weder ofte him went to rene,

an ferliche maket is blench.

bar—vore, man, bu be bibench,—-

al sel valui be grene.

wele-wey! nis king ne Quene

bat ne sel drinke of deth-is drench.

Man, er bu felle of bi bench,

pu sinne aquench.
Without precisely contradicting man's expectation of long life the poem
nevertheless casts considerable doubt on his chances for it by flatly
contradicting his other pleasant expectations: the fair weather that
turns to rain, the sunshine that suddenly disappears, the youthful
green that fellows. None will be spared eventual death, not king nor
queen.

The second stanza advances the argument by asserting that neither
bodily strength "ne iweping ne bene, mede, liste, ne leches dreinch"
will prevail against death's "wiber-clench." All his props are knock-

ed ewey; man stands naked and alone, prepared for the advice of the

third stanza to "Do bi salomones rede, Man, and so bu selth wel do."

97

The poem might effectively (from our point of view) have ended here,
but its speaker seems to sense the particular vulnerability of his
hearer at this point and presses his advantage with unanswerable ques-
tions and uncomfortable images in the third stanza:

Man fwi neltu be bi-benchen?

Man fwi neltu be bisen?

of felthe bu ert isowe,

weirmes mete bu selt ben.

her nauest tu blisse days bre,

al bi lif bu drist in wowe;

wele-wey! deth be sal dun browen

bar bu wenest heye ste,

In wo sel bi wele enden,

in wop bi gle.
The speaker has now thoroughly prepared his hearer for the message of
the fourth stanza. The world and fortune are, he asserts, "buth bine
iuo"; they beguile the hearer "for to do be wo." "bar-fore," he says,
"let lust ouer—gon, man, and eft it sel be liken." Thus he turns the
very shortness of man's earthly life to his advantage, for it alone
stands between the bearer and a better one.

It could scarcely be maintained, then, that this lyric is a reflec-
tion on the commonplace thesis of the shortness of man's life; rather
it is an invitation to--even an imposition on—-a hearer not merely to
engage in such a reflection but to act upon it. This lyric, like oth—
ers we have examined, is carefully calculated to obtain a perlocution-
ary force. But whereas in the case of Chaucer's complaint to his
purse, for example, that hoped—for turn of events (if it were to take
place) would be a by-product, so to speak, of the lyric, induced by
the wit it aims at in the first place, in this case the hoped-for turn

of events is aimed at directly and stated forthrightly. It is the dif—

ference between proceeding by indirection and proceeding directly. The

 

 

98

shock value of the controverted expectations and the grisly images is
necessary in order to offset the bearer-reader's sovereign capability,
in any direct confrontation, of ending the discourse at any point sim-
ply by walking away or closing the book. Hence, though such images
have generally been regarded as owing to a gratuitous stylistic predi-
lection for the gruesome, borne of a gratuitously gruesome age, we can
see that in fact they are strategically employed elements of the speech
events these lyrics represent.

The third example shows that such moralizing speakers do not al-
ways hold themselves aloof from those to whom they are speaking; they
are quite capable of recognizing their own need for support as well,
as is shown by the inclusive Kg of Brown XIII:67:

Bidde huue with milde steuene,

til vre fader be king of heuene

In be mununge of cristis pine,

For be lauerd of bis hus an al lele hine,

for alle cristinfolk that is in gode lif,

that god schilde ham to-dei fro sinne and fro sithe,
for alle tho men that are in sinne bunden

that ihesu crist hem leyse for is hali wndes,

for quike and for deade and a1 mankinde,

and bet ws here god don, in heuene mot bai it finde,
and for alle bet on herbe vs fedin and fostre,

saie we nu alle be hali pater noster.

Ure fedir bat hart in heuene

halged be bi name, with giftis seuene
Samin cume bi kingdom,

bi wille in herbe els in heuene be don,
vre bred bat lastes ai

gyue it hus bis hilke dai,

and vre mis-dedis bu orgyue hus,

els we forgyue baim bat misdon hus,

and leod us inetol na fandinge,

bot frels us fra alle iuele binge. amen

Inclusiveness, in fact, is the keynote of this little piece, from
the first person plural pronoun of the opening and closing lines to the

very spirit of the Paternoster the speaker recites. One can't help but

99

notice, too, the gracious references to the earthly lord upon whom,
evidently, the speaker depends for a measure of generosity: the "lauerd
of bis hus," among whose "lele hine" the speaker hopes the lord will
count yours truly, a lord who no doubt is intended to recognize himself
again in the reference to "alle bet on herbe vs fedin and fostre."
Carleton Brown notes this point, and suggests that the poem "was de-
signed for members of a mendicant order on a soliciting expedition."15
Whether this is so or not, the immediacy of the speech event context

is unmistakable. As in the case of the lyrics just discussed, the func-
tion of the first twelve lines here is to prepare the bearer to perform
some pious or morally desirable action. That perlocutionary thrust, in
this case, would produce a choral recitation of the Paternoster as a
minimal reward for the speaker's efforts on the hearers' behalf; and
food, shelter, perhaps a monetary donation if the hearers truly have
ears to hear.

As these examples show clearly, when a speaker employs the term
"man" vocatively he intends his hearer to hear directly, not to over-
hear. The relevance of his message when addressed to this most gener—
alized of hearers derives from what he conceives as the most generally
pertinent of all topics, Christian morality. But these are not the
only cases, nor the only topics, in which a speaker may address a hear-
er-reader directly. The difficulty lies in determining which is intend-
ed: the hearer—reader himself, for whom the poem is an immediate speech
event, or a heerer conceived of as internal to the fictionalized speech
event the poem represents. A comparative example should make the prob-
lem clear.

Here is the first stanza from Chaucer's epistolary poem addressed

i

100

to Sir Philip de la Veche, with the bearer-deictic pronouns underlined.16

Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse,

Suffyce unto thy good, though it be smal;

For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse,

Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal;

Savour no more than thee bihove shal;

Reule wel thyself, that other folk canst rede;

And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.
The interpretation of the second-person deictics here is withheld
(through two more stanzas) until the Envoy, which begins "Therfore,
thou Veche," thus unmistakably and unambiguously supplying a real-
world referant--Veche—-for the pronouns in question, by cataphoric co-
reference. A much simpler instance of the same phenomenon is the open-
ing line of a lyric printed by Robbins (1952:6): "Is tell yw my mynd,
anes tayliur, dame." In these cases the bearer in the first instance
is a character internal to the fiction of the lyric; the lyric repre-
sents a speech event as taking place between the speaker and that hear-
er.

0n the other hand, there is no internal referant for the deictic

"thou" in these lines from Robbins (1952:33):

Summe men sayon bat y am blac.

yt ya a colour for my prow;

ber y loue ber ya no lac,

y may not be so wyte as bou.
This is the single instance of the second person pronoun in the entire
poem, which runs to 24 lines, yet its force seems more than merely rhe-
torical: it has the effect of creating an immediate flush of self-con-
sciousness in the hearer-reader, so that he concedes the speaker's
point without ergument--a clever polemical strategy totally in harmony

with the off-hand tone of the piece.

Or again, how do we interpret the person-deictics of this gnomic

101
piece (Robbins 1952:15)?

19h _a_m _g Irlaunde,
.EEE.2£ the holy londe
‘pf irlande.

Gode sire, pray ich be,
for of saynte cherite,
come ant daunce wyt me
In irlaunde.

 

If we are to understand this as an invitation to ourselves, the bearer-
readers, we need a metaphorical interpretation for the speaker's re-
quest, for we cannot literally comply with it; on the other hand, if
we give the request more literal force, we can see no one within the
fiction of the speech event represented here whom the speaker may be
addressing. Either interpretation involves ambiguity, and in both
cases the ambiguity results directly from the ambiguity of reference
of hearer deictics.

Paradoxically enough, the resolution of the ambiguity of hearer
deixis, by analyzing the poem as an immediate speech event addressed
to the bearer-reader, ambiguates in turn the poem's speaker deixis; if
the bearer-reader is satisfied that he is being addressed directly, he
is naturally less interested in the question "Why em.£ being addressed?"

than in the question "Why is this speaker addressing me?" So, in a

 

sense, with these bearer—determinate lyrics addressed to the hearer-
reader we come full circle and find ourselves once again searching for
the topicality of the message vis-a-vis the speaker. Professor Robbins
has done just this, no doubt unconsciously, in titling the two pieces
just cited "In Praise of Brunettes" and "The Irish Dancer." In each
case he has worked backward from topicality to a nonce identification
of the speaker, and has thereby provided an object lesson in the desir-

ability for an editor not to project himself upon his texts by

102

extending them in a direction he thinks they should have taken. As
Mary Louise Pratt has convincingly shown, we read titles as part of
the works they head up.

My purpose in this chapter has been to display something of the
scope with which the Middle English lyricists explored the possibili-
ties they found inherent in the speech event models they incorporated
in their poems. In particular, I have tried to show that the central
interest, for a very large body of these lyrics, lies in our analysis
of the identities of the speech act participants, speaker and hearer,
and the topicality or relevance of the message within that context--
the context of utterance. But the identities of the speaker and hear-
er are not the only deictic dimensions of these lyrics: utterances
are anchored with respect to time and place as well as person. In the
next chapter we will examine some lyrics whose central interest arises
from an exploitation of topicality in the context of time and place--

the context of action.

103
Notes

1Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics pf the Thirteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932); Religious Lyrics pf Eh; Elf:
teenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939); and G. V.
Smithers, eds., Religious Lyrics pf_the Fourteenth Century, 2nd ed.,
corrected (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). These are herein-
after cited as Brown XII, Brown XV, and Brown XIV respectively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2Fillmore, "Deixis II," p. 4.

3The designation first person plural for "we" and "us" and "our"
is a misnomer since it refers ordinarily not to a chorus of speakers
but to a single speaker and his companion or companions. Any case of
true choral speaking must have been prearranged among the speakers (it
would be highly unlikely that two or more people spontaneously produ-
ced the same utterance, one with reference to themselves as a group),
hence is hardly comparable to the spontaneous contributions character—
istic of conversation in any form.

l'G. L. Brook, ed., The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics
pf_M.S. Harley 2253 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956).

 

 

 

5Brown XII, p. 204.

6Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina.
(Paris, 1852), Tomus 159, col. 284.

 

7Brook, p. 84.

8The text is from G. Wackernagel, Des Deutsche Kirchenlied: Von
der altesten Zeit bis pp Anfang des XVII. Jehrhunderts (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964), rpt. of Leipzig ed. of 1864,
vol. 1, p. 162.

 

 

 

9

Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle
Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series XXXVI (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 150.

10
225.

 

Fillmore, "Deictic Categories in the Semantics of 'Come'," p.

11Cu11et, p. 174.

12Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Secular Lyrics gf_the Fourteenth
ppd Fifteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1955), p. 146.

13F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works pf Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed.
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1961), p. 539.

14There may be a kind of homeopathic relevance to epileptic
seizures or virulent fever in the particular sufferings described

 

 

 

 

104

here as well, such as the forcible spreading of Jesus's limbs on the
cross. On the other hand, the imagery of binding and constriction,
particularly notable in the first eight lines, may suggest the nature
of the treatment of the patient, which presumably would accompany the
conjuration. If this be the case, the following lines vividly suggest
the procedure of bloodletting, familiar in medical practice down vir-
tually to the present century. The reference to "Seint Dorathy" may
be to Dorothea of Marienwerden (1347-1394) who, according to Abbe
Engelbert, was "favoured with ecstasies and visions" and lived confined
in a six by nine foot cell where she died "racked with sufferings and
eusterities." Ihg_Lives pf_the Saints, trans. Christopher and Anne
Fremantle (New York: Collier Books, 1964), p. 456.

 

15Brown XIII, p. 218.

16Robinson, p. 536.

Chapter IV: Here and Now: Time and Place and the Context of Conflict

The presentation of dramatic conflict in literature is always
rooted in time and place. This is as true of a modern stage play as
it is of the earliest Greek dramas. So embedded in the practice of
playwrighting is this deictic anchorage that a printed indication of
the time and place of the action (the "setting") is as regular and uni-
versal a feature of the printed material accompanying the dialogue it-

self as the list of the dramatis personae. Even dramatic action never

 

meant for the stage--the Homeric epics, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,

 

Milton's Samson Agonistes--invariably locates itself in time and space.
Conceptions of time and place and the linguistic means by which
we distinguish among and identify them divide sharply into two groups:
those which derive immediately and directly from the act of speaking
and those which do not. The former group constitute the deictic sig-
nals of time and place and include all the ways by which we indicate
the relationship between a message and the moment and location in
which it is uttered. Time deixis comprises adverbials such as ppy,
Eggp, and gppp, the verb tenses, and various pariphrastic constructions

such as this mornigg; place deixis comprises such adverbials as here

 

and £hgrg_and pariphrastic constructions such as Ephpyurigh_. These
phenomena have been catalogued and described exhaustively by Charles
J. Fillmore1 and we need not be concerned with their details here.

What will concern us in this chapter is their relationship to Middle

105

106
English lyric practice, and in particular their relationship there to
the fundamentally dramatic presentation of conflict which grows invar-
iably out of a particular sense of time and place.
The incipiently dramatic qualities of much medieval poetry have
been pointed out by several perceptive writers recently. In his Egggi

gg_poétique medievale Paul Zumthor makes the point quite explicitly.

 

For him, "Le caractere général le plus pertinent peut-atre de la poésie
médiévale est son aspect dramatique; Tout au long du moyen age les
textes semblent avoir été, sauf exceptions, destinés d fonctionner dans
des conditions théatrales: a titre de communication entre un chanteur
ou récitant ou lecteur, et un auditoire. Le texte a, littérelement,

un 'r31e a jouer' sur une scene."2 While it is true that these remarks
reflect predominantly upon the relationship between the speaker of the
text and his audience in an oral cultural setting ("type de culture a
dominante orale"), that is to say that they are directed towards the
kinds of considerations raised in the previous chapter on person deix-
is, Zumthor goes on to point out the dramatic relevance of a sense of
time and place as well: "Un texte se fait dans le temps," he says,

and the various medieval poetic codes incorporate procedures which
"permettant de produire des equivalents de la sensation spatiale" as
well. The examples he cites do so in a very literal way. The litur-
gical trope ("jeu liturgique"), the chanson de geste, the romance and
the drama proper ("jeu dramatique") all very likely were performed in
just the kinds of places in which their internal action takes place,
yielding a fruitful spatial mimesis: "Espace externe, auquel corres-
pond un espace interne, engendre par le rayon visuel ou sonore qui,

se deplacant dens l'oeuvre, ne cesse de la reveler sous des angles

107

differents, successifs et rarement mis en perspective."3

Alongside Zumthor's rather metaphysical speculations on the esthe—
tics of performance in an oral culture we may place Peter Dronke's

careful and concrete remarks on the same head in The Medieval Lyric.

 

Devoting his entire introductory chapter to the topic of "Performers
and Performance," Dronke repeatedly shows an interest in interpreting
the entire range of early medieval European lyric poetry within the
context of face-to-face performance. Attuned as he is to the dramatic
qualities that mark the encounter between performer and audience, it
is hardly surprising that Dronke's response to much of the best mater-
ial from the period evinces the stir and excitement of the best thea-
trical experience. Speaking of the 13th century "Bargain of Judas,"
for example, he says that "seldom in medieval poetry has such dramatic
compression been achieved in lyrical form. . . . It is one of the most
'modern' of medieval poems: with its swiftly changing tableaux, its
terse, explosive use of dialogue, its sharp moments of tension and cli—
max, one could well call it the first masterpiece of expressionism."4
If the phrasing here smacks a bit of a review of e broadway opening,
it unmistakeably points up the inherently dramatic quality of a lyric
which tersely limns a sequence of events against the backdrop of a few
sharply etched scenes. Nor is "The Bargain of Judas" especially un—
usual in this respect, except perhaps in its excellence; a considerable
number of Middle English lyrics make use of fundamentally the same stra-
tegy of time and place deixis to exploit a dramatic topic.

Yet another sense of the near connection of time- and place-an-
chored lyrics to patently dramatic literature is conveyed by Rosemary

'Woolf. References to a connection between a lyric and one of the

108

mystery or morality plays may be found throughout her book; but
whether or not such a connection exists for any particular lyric it
is in general true, she says, that "most of them are very immediate,
and give the effect of being a key speech detached from a whole drama-
tic scene in which the reader actually takes part." In fact, the rea-
son that quite a number of the lyrics were eventually incorporated into
the mystery plays, she maintains, is "not because the plays were lyri—
cal, but because the lyrics were dramatic."S

Dramatic they were--and are--indeed, and that in the fundamental
sense of embodying conflict. But it is specifically the relationship
between the conflict or tension expressed or implied in the poem, which
constitutes the topicality of the message, and the time- and place-deic-
tic anchorage of the message which interests us here. From this point
of view, a small number of deictically defined themes emerges, around
which we can organize a large body of poems from the entire period: a
group centered on the conception of "this world"; another on the tran-
sitoriness of time; a third on conditional or hypothetical conceptions
of time; and a fourth involving complex inter-mixtures of these themes.
A fifth group, with which we will begin, makes use for the most part
of non—deictic conceptions of time and place in providing a setting
for the dramatic material in the message. Because their anchorage is
non-deictically specified they more clearly satisfy our conception of
dramatic setting, and for that reason make a convenient introduction
to the discussion.

The non-deictically anchored lyrics themselves may be subdivided
into two groups: those in which a narrator identifies the time and

place of a sequence of events, which he then narrates; and those which

109
are best described as occasional pieces, if we may extend that concep-
tion to include not merely dedicatory and commemorative verses, but

' and other

also charms, epitaphs, book plates, "stations of the cross,‘
lyrics whose primary significance derives from their connection with a
particular time or place.

Peter Dronke, as noted above, has praised "The Bargain of Judas"
(Brown XIII:25) for its achievement of "dramatic compression" in lyr-
ic form; his subtle explication of the various characters' motivations,
particularly Judas's, shows insight into the poet's power of invention
beyond the bare details of the Gospel narratives. But it may be possi-
ble to add to these insights by calling attention to the interplay be-
tween non-deictic and deictic anchorage within the poem. It begins,
as Labov contends all narratives do, by swiftly identifying the time,
place, and protagonists of the narrative:

Hit wes up-on a scereborsday bat vre louerd aros,

ful milde were be wordes he spec to iudas:

'Iudas bou most to iurselem oure mete for-to bugge'
The place name Jerusalem unambiguously identifies a geographical loca-
tion without reference to the location of the speaker who is, at the
time it is uttered, quoting the words of one of the characters in the
narrative he is relating; hence, like all place names, it is a non-de—
ictic way of referring to a location. Similarly, the time at which
these events are said to take place, upon a Sheer Thursday (a term re—
placed in modern usage by Holy or Maundy Thursday) non-deictically i-
dentifies the time of the narrative by placing it at a particular
point within the cycle of the liturgical calendar. Of course, the

poet's anachronistic naivete constitutes part of the immediacy of dra-

matic impact Dronke speaks of: the events the poet relates took place

110
not merely on g_Holy Thursday but on The Holy Thursday. This was the
Holy Thursday that, after the event, defined the term "Holy Thursday."

To be more accurate, though, the poet calls it scereborsday, which the

 

OED derives from a Norse root meaning 'bright, clean, or pure,‘ hence
'cleansed or free from sin or guilt' (s.v. skere). The application to
this particular day in the liturgical calendar apparently dervies from
practices arising in later Church history, either the tradition of con—
fessing on this day or the custom of cleaning the altars on this day;
however, Dronke's insights into Judas's guilt-born motivation-~reflec-
ted in precisely those details the poet superimposes upon the Gospel
account--suggest a particularly appropriate connection between the
poem's central theme and its setting at this time.

Dronke has also called attention to the lyric's "swiftly changing

tableaux,"

a term that is felicitously exact from the point of view of
deictic interpretation. For once the general setting is established
all changes of locale are managed by references that are deictic to
the characters themselves, and this internal deixis creates the effect
of immediately significant configurations-—tableeux. Judas's meeting
with his sister "fer i be brode strete" is the first of these. Ragnar
Rommetveit (1968) points out that this kind of ellipsis--the particu-
lar street intended, known to both speaker and hearer, need not be
specified--is characteristic of deictically anchored utterances.

The rock upon which Judas sleeps with his sister is another instance.
The next tableaux is invoked with the line "fforet hym [Judas] com

be riche ieu bat heiste pilatus."

Fillmore has devoted considerable attention to the deictic impli—

cations inherent in the verb 'come,‘ of which much more later; for

111

the present it will be enough to note that the verb implies the simul-
taneous presence in the same place of the two substantives in construc-
tion with it, i.e. Judas and Pilate. The sense of place the verb in-
vokes is thus entirely deictic: ground zero of the narrative, for the
moment, is wherever Judas is, no more. Six lines further in the narra-
tive another 'come' invokes another tableaux: "In him com ur lord gon
as is postles setten at mete." No transition between the two is neces-
sary, for the verb itself implies a new focal point for the action.
Within this tableaux the climactic exchange takes place:

'Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete?

ic am aboust ant isold to—day for oure mete.‘

Vp stod him iudas, 'lord am i bet frec?

i nas neuer o be stude.ber me be euel spec.‘
For Dronke, this last line is "the very thing that Christ knows to be

false," hence it gives away Judas's guilty conscience in a non sequi-

tur; but the non sequitur has a specifically deictic coloring. "I was

 

never in a place where evil was spoken of yOu" is neither precisely a
lie nor precisely irrelevant in the context of Christ's words; but it
is an equivocation about the places Judas hp§_been in today.

Whether or not the text as it stands is complete is a moot ques-
tion, but Dronke's remark about its "subdued close" underscores its
completeness as an esthetic experience. Once again, though, we notice
that this effect can be attributed to elements of the lyric's deictic
anchorage. For just as it begins by noting the time of the events it
chronicles, the poem closes with a time-specific prediction about the
significance of those events: 'Stille bou be, peter, Wel i be icnowe;
bou wolt fur-sake me brien ar be coc him crowe.' The cock—crow_Jesus

refers to is more than a mere figure for a certain time of day--he

112
means the very moment when next a cock crows. Hence the expression is
as deictically anchored as its paraphrase 'tomorrow morning' would have
been in the same context. Dronke is correct in reading a significance
in the silence that follows the lyric's last line--"The two deserters
are left standing, with no more to say"--an interpretive insight we
can credit to the fact of the lyric's grounding in the time deixis gov-
erning immediate speech events. Only with the illusion of spontaneous
speech fresh upon us does the silence seem related to the words that
just precede it.
The next three poems I would like to discuss have in common the
motif of the springtime opening, but I would like to call attention
to yet another trait of theirs, and a more interesting one. The texts
are "The Thrush and the Nightingale" (Brown XIII:52), "Now Springs the
Spray" (Brown XIII:62), and "Spring" (Brook:ll). These, of course, do
not exhaust the Middle English lyrics with springtime openings--rather,
they are three of the best and clearest examples of a generalization
about such lyrics which would not be too difficult to extend to the
others as well. And that is that these springtime openings always in—
troduce, curiously enough, a message in which conflict or tension or
contention predominates.
All is, at first, the birdsong and the blossoms of the lQEEfi

amoenus. "The Thrush and the Nightingale begins:

Somer is comen wib loue to toune,

Wib blostme, and wib brides roune

be note of hasel springeb,

be dewes darkneb in be dale.

For longing of be niyttegale,

bis foweles murie singeb.

The Harley lyric "Spring" shows the virtuoso's touch with a commonplace:

113

Lenten ys come wib loue to toune,

wib blosmen ant wib briddes roune,

bat a1 bis blisse bryngeb.

Dayese es in bis dales,

notes suete of nyhtegales,

vch foul song singeb.

be brestelcoc him breteb 00;

away is huere wynter wo

when woderoue springeb.

bis foules singeb ferly fele,

ant wlyteb on huere wynne wele,

bat a1 be wode ryngeb.
But much briefer--only a single line——is the note of bliss in "Now
Springs the Spray," before the undertow of tension asserts itself:

Nou sprinkes the sprai,

al for loue icche am so seeke

that slepen i ne mei.

The tension comes, though, to the others as well; it is only a
question of time. It begins in the second stanza of "The Thrush and
the Nightingale," keynoted by the strife which opens and closes the
stanza:

Hic herde a strif bitweies two--

bet on of wele, bat ober of wo.
Bitwene two I-fere,

bet on hereb wimmen bat hoe beb hende,

bat ober hem wole wib mi te shende.
bet strif 3e mowen I-here.

There follows a debate between the two birds in idealized conversation
form. The thrush maintains that women are "fikele and fals to fonde,"
that they "wercheb wo in euchan londe," while the nightingale is "on

bi nome bat wol shilden [women] from shome." At length the nightin-
gale carries the day by citing the instance of Mary, who "ne weste of
sunne ne of shame," as refutation of the thrush's claim that among a
hundred women there aren't five who can remain chaste or refrain from
*working general woe or bringing shame upon men. Mary's superior virtue

defeats the thrush's cynical misogyny; he departs not merely the field

114 Q

but the country, saying "icham ouercome boru hire bat bar bat holi
sone."

Not quite so neatly does the tension of the Harley lyric resolve
itself. The Arnoldian note of sadness makes itself heard suddenly at
the end of the second stanza:

Mody meneb, so dob mo;

ichot ycham on of bo,

for loue bat likes ille.
Unlike the speaker of "The Thrush and the Nightingale" this speaker
does not merely report a strife he overhears--the turmoil here is with-
in his own soul, reflected in the contrast between his dark ruminations
and the general gaity of the season. Even worms, he reflects, use the
darkness of their surroundings to woo, but as for him,

3ef me shal wonte wille of on

bis wunne weole y wole forgon

ant wyht in wode be fleme.
Flight, evidently, is in his future, too; but it is the flight of es-
capism, not of honest defeat.

"Now Springs the Spray" belongs to a popular sub-group of these
non-deictically anchored lyrics in which a narrator encounters another
speaker or speakers, either in a dream or while out riding for recrea-
tion. If he encounters a pair of speakers, it is their dialogue, which
he recounts, which embodies the conflict or tension ("The Thrush and
the Nightingale" has such a form); if he encounters a single speaker,

" their conversation expresses

as in the case of "Now Springs the Spray,
the conflict. The three line burden establishes the time of the events
by a deictic circumlocution for springtime, "Nou sprinkes the sprai,"

and manages to suggest the theme of conflict too in the oxymoronic

love-agony topos "al for loue icche am so seeke/ that slepen i ne mai."

1'

 

115
These lines precede the first stanza, and then follow it and each of
the other two, so that they frame the whole and underscore the note of
tension.

Just as tension arises from incongruity in the refrain, it is fur-
ther developed by incongruity in the first stanza. The narrator, out
for a ride "0 mi pleyinge," encounters a little maid who suddenly sings
"'the clot him clingge! wai es him i louue-longinge sel libben ai'".
In the second stanza the narrator's response to these words generates
a new kind of incongruity in his ironic characterizations of the maid
and her song.

Son icche herde that mirie note,
bider i drogh;

i fonde hire in an herber swot
under a bogh

with ioie inogh.

son i asked, 'thou mirie mai

hwi sinkes-tou ai
Nou sprinkes the sprai,‘ &c. (emphasis added)

 

Her answer, given in the third stanza, raises incongruity to a thematic
level--it is, she says, the very source of her present state of discon-
solation, for "'mi lemman me haues bi-hot of louue trewe; he chaunges
a newe.'"

In the case of each of these three poems, the motif of conflict
or tension is directly linked to the poem's setting in time. They are
all springtime lyrics which contrast a message of unresolved conflict
with the spirit of the time; hence the incongruity of the setting with
the theme serves further to underscore the theme itself. This is not
always the case with these quasi—narrative lyrics, of course, but dra-
1natic conflict is central to them all.

The 14th century Vernon MS., the texts of which are reprinted in

116

Brown XIV, includes four lyrics which employ the motif of a chance en-
counter to motivate the narration of a dramatic theme (nos. 95, 96,
105, and 107). It is characteristic of these lyrics, however, to
bring the conflict to a resolution. In "Mercy Passes All Things," for
example, the theme is presented through a kind of beast-parable. Here
(as in the other lyrics in the Vernon series) it is place deixis, rath-
er than time deixis, which provides the significant frame for the e—
vents of the narrative:

Bi west, vnder a wylde wode-syde,

In a launde ber I was lente,

Wlanke deor on grounde gunne glyde,

And lyouns Raumping uppon bente,

Beores, wolues wib Moubes wyde,

be smale Beestes bei a1 to-rente.
The west may signify specifically the uncivilized Welsh hinterland (as
a 14th-century Englishman might have conceived it), hence, by extension,
any region where the rule of morality or law is subordinate to the rule

of force, or the kind of permanent spiritual coordinate illustrated in

the stage plan for The Castle p£_Perserverance, where it represents

 

 

"Mundus' scaffold," as opposed to the east, "Deus' scaffold"; in any
case the event the narrator witnesses there provides him an occasion
to reflect upon his parlous times, and at length bears out his theme.
What he witnesses is the capture of a small bird by a merlin, which
bears the victim off into a tree, evidently to devour it. But the
small bird, though it cannot talk, seems to the narrator to express
the thesis that "merci passeb alle binge." So strongly does the scene
cause him to reflect on this thesis that the narrator imagines that
"Rihtwyse god"--God himself--presents the argument, in the course of

‘which a number of contemporary social issues are alluded to: simony,

117
in particular, is mentioned among the generally vicious practices'Of
the day (11. 133-42), and the nobility and clergy are especially cri-
ticized for their ignoble behavior (11. 157-66). The night passes
(suggesting the affiliation of this lyric with more explicit dream
visions), and in the morning the merlin releases the small bird; wheth-
er urged to do so by "gentrie" or not the narrator cannot say. He con-
cludes with the pious prayer that at our ending we might be able to
repeat the refrain, saying then by our own experience, "'Now Merci
passeb alle binge.'"

"Merci God and graunt Merci" (no. 107) is quite similar in theme
and penitential tone to the lyric just discussed, and begins with the
same detail of a western setting: "As I wandrede her bi weste Faste
vnder a Forest syde," In this case the narrator encounters a penitent
man grieving for his offenses and begging for mercy in the refrain.

The sight of this man, both hands held on high as he "goes to rest"
under a bough, inspires the narrator to an examination of conscience
and quasi-confession loosely structured on the commonplaces of the five
wits, the ten commandments, and the seven deadly sins. Resolution of
the conflict in this case is reflected in the narrator's certainty of
absolution: his experience, he believes, has been a salutary one,

For [God] woldest not bet I weore lost.

be Fader hab giuen me a miht,

be sone a science and a siht,

And wit wo welde me worschupely,

be Holigost vr grace hab diht.

Several lyrics of this form are squarely within the dreamrvision
tradition, particularly those arising in the fifteenth century in

which the narrator encounters a "maide" and her infant child-~clearly

Mary and Jesus, and sometimes identified as such in the lyric.7 As is

118
the case with all the lyrics we have been examining in this section,
the narrator establishes the time or place of the incident he narrates
within the first few lines; but in these lyrics the anchorage is deic-
tic, not non-deictic. Brown XV:2, "Here I Sit Alone, Alas! Alone," for
example, begins with the refrain "Alone, alone, alone, alone, alone;/

Here I sitt alone, alas! alone.‘ and continues in the first stanza

As I walked me this endurs day

to be grene wode for to play

& all heuyness to put away

my-self alone.
The adverbials "here" of the refrain and "the other day" of the first
stanza are true deictics: they derive their particular significance
from the circumstances of the situation in which they are uttered.
The "green wood" is an instance of the kind of elliptical place refer—
ence possible within a deictically anchored utterance, comparable to
the detail of the "brode street" discussed above in connection with
"The Bargain of Judas." Of course, the "green wood" has imagistic

value as well: it can be interpreted either as shorthand for the 19:

cus amoenus or as the index of what Frye calls the "green world," a

 

place where protagonists profit from instructive experience. In any
case, the narrator tells us indirectly what is most important about
these details. His estrangement from society, caused by the "heuyness"
he feels, contrasts with the heavy cheer of the little society he
chances upon, so much more significant than his own. Though the maid-
en-mother tries to console him, the child weeps: "'Moder, me thynkith
it is rygt ill that men me sekyth for to spill.'" Her response closes
the piece on an inconclusive though generally positive note:

'Sone,' she sayd, 'let it be In bi thought,
for mannys gilt is not with-sought;

119

for bu art he bat hath all wrought,
& I bi moder alone.‘

A clearer instance of the dream-vision affiliation of these maiden

and son encounter lyrics is afforded by Brown XV:4, which begins:

bis endres nyght Arbout mydnyght

As I me lay for to sclepe,

I herd a may syng lullay

for poweret so sco wepe.
Similarly, the refrain of Brown XV:5, "She Sang, Dear Son, Lullay,"
places it in the dream-vision tradition:

Thys yonder nygth y sawe A sygte,

A sterre As bry th As ony deye

& euer Armonge A maydene songe,

'by by, lully, lullaye.’
And again, Brown XV:72 opens with a vision at night:

As I lay vp-on a nyth

My bowth was on a berd so brith

That men clepyn marye ful of myth

Redemptoris mater.
All of these speak of the vision they relate as having taken place just
prior to the poetic speech event itself, in true deictic fashion, a
formal device which goes far toward accounting for the immediacy of
these lyrics often spoken of in the literature on them. But they are
exceptional in this regard among the lyrics whose general form is the
narration of an incident or an exchange of dialogue which develops an
inherently dramatic situation. Most of these, as we have seen, locate
the dramatic situation in non-deictic time or space in order to gain a
setting, in the conventional sense in which that term is applied to dra-
ma; the incident of Christ's coming, evidently, is felt to have a signi-
ficance which transcends the particularities of time and place—-it is

relevant to every time and place--hence it deserves the unconventional,

deictic setting of the last four examples discussed.

 

120
Very good evidence that these encounter lyrics were perceived as

a sub-genre with its own distinctive formal features survives in a sec-
ular burlesque of the form from Porkington MS 10, printing in Robbins
(no. 119) as "The Hunted Here." It begins:

Bi a forrest as I gen fare,

Walkyng a1 myselven a-lone,

I herd a mornyng of an haare,

Rouffully schew mad here mone.
The details of the forest setting, the solitary narrator, and the over-
bearing of a complaint have been faithfully reproduced, but the substi-
tution of the here for a human speaker (or for the non-game birds that
figure human sentiments) gives the spirit of the piece away. The here's
complaint is full of the highest drama:

Dare-worth god, how shal I leve

And leyd my lyve is lond?

ffrov dale to doune I am I-dreve;

I not where I may syte or stand!

Evidently the extent of the mourner's protestations had come to be

felt as a sore point: the redundancy of "how shal I leve and leyd my
lyfe in lond," as well perhaps as its excessive alliteration, seem to

echo the ornate diction of:‘

I met a mayde at be citeys ende,
snobbynge & sygnge sche wes ny schente,

Sche tuggyd & tere with gret turment;

sche brake hure skynne bobe body & brest,

etc. (Brown XV:6)
This continues in the same ponderous fashion through ten more 12-line
stanzas; the author of "The Hunted Here," for his part, produced 19
quatrains.

A large body of lyrics has survived whose unique relevance to a

particular time and place entitles their editors to classify them as

121
occasional pieces; if we add to these those lyrics which have a partic—
ular connection with a general kind of time or place, or class of times
or places, we have a very large group indeed. But since the nature of
the connection between the deictic material and the topicality of the
message is easy to see in each case, a few examples will be sufficient
to illustrate what is interesting about this group.

Most of these lyrics, by their very nature, are secular, but a
small number (Brown XIV prints three) were evidently intended to be
linked with the observation of the Hours of the Cross. Brown XIV:30,
for example, is divided into eight groups of from two to four stanzas,
each group linked to one of the canonical hours by means of a refer-
ence to the events of the corresponding hour on the day of the cruci—
fixion (though that notion is anachronistic).

The section labeled "Mid-day" (sext), for example, begins "At mid-
dai, idesu, wit mild mode, bou spred bi bodi on be rode." It was evi—
dently part of the point of the observation of the Hours of the Cross
to mentally re-enact, as it were, the sequence of events at Calvary.
This practice seems to have died out, supplanted perhaps by the obser-
vation of the Way of the Cross, also called the Stations of the Cross,
in which "the soul of the onlooker is moved to sorrowful contempla-
tion" at each of "14 chosen representations of the sufferings of Christ
on His way to Calvary."8 The deictic orientation of this practice is
clearly spatial rather than temporal, for the penitent moves from sta-
tion to station, contemplating at each stop the event represented
there. Moreover, the practice seems to have originated as a "pious
imitation of the pilgrims who traveled to the Holy Land to visit the

places hallowed by Christ's sufferings" so that in point of historical

 

122
fact the way of the Cross is an imitation of a pilgrimage, itself an
imitation of the Via Dolorosa.

The canonical hours, to return to the lyric in hand, like any cy-
clically recurring demarcation of time, are non—deictic temporal refer-
ences, since they are defined, at least approximately, by reference to
a naturally occurring sequence of events and have nothing to do with
the moment of utterance of a speech event. The poem can be seen, then,
as a way of making sacred the moments of the day by linking the stages
of its routine cycle to the events of salvation history in successive
meditative moments, as though the immediacy of the meditative speech
event confers its deixis upon the routine of the quotidian cycle and
restores every moment to the moment of grace.

More typical of the occasional lyrics are the Boar's Head Carols,
of which Robbins:55 is a good example:

Caput apri Refero
Resonens laudes domino.

The boris bed In hondes I brynge,
with garlondes gay & byrdes syngynge!
I pray you all helpe me to synge,
Qui estis in conviuio.

The boris hede, I vnderstond,

ys cheff seruyce in all this londe,
wher-so-ever it may be fonde,
seriutur cum sinapio.

The boris hede, I dare well say,
anon after the XIIth day,
he taketh his leve & goth e-way--
Exiuit tunc de patria.
It is not difficult to imagine this song's being sung to accompany the

actual bearing in of the piece dg_résistence on festive occasions in

 

the great manors, the learned among the company eagerly anticipating

the humor of the Latin tag at the end of each stanza. No doubt the

123
twelve day Christmas celebration was most often the occasion of its
singing, but it may equally well have accompanied other extended cele-
brations.

Another verse appropriate to a particular kind of occasion is the
following traveller's charm, Robbins:64:

Here I ame and fourthe I mouste,

& in Iesus Criste is all my trust.

no wicked thing do me no dare,

nother here nor Elles where.

the father with me; the sonne with me;

the holly gosste, & the trienete,

be by-twyxte my gostely Enime & me.

In the name of the father, & the sonne,

And the holly goste, Amen.

Amen.

Solitary travel was by all accounts hazardous in the Middle Ages, and
remained so for centuries afterward (my own grandfather felt it neces-
sary to carry a handgun when traveling by horse on business in the re-
moter parts of Alabama around 1900). The tremulous determination of
"Here I ame and fourthe I mouste" is particularly appealing; anchorage,
as it were, is what the speaker most craves but must forego.

Though versified weather prognostications have little poetic value,
their expression of a body of belief in the predictive value of events
occurring on particular days of the year gives them a peculiar interest
in the context of a discussion of time and place deixis. If a man
knows this St. Paul's day prognostication, for example, he knows much
about what lies before him (Robbinsz7l):

Giff sanct Paullis day be fair and cleir,
Than sal be-tyd ane happie yeir.

Gif it chances to snew or rene,

Than sel be deir all kynde of grayne.

and giff be wind be hie on loft,

Than weir sell vex be kingdome oft.

and gif be cloudis mak darke be skye,
Boith nowte and foull that yeir sell dye.

124
Saint Paul's day is not a deictically defined point in time, but one
that is fixed by the Church's calendar as June 29. The prognostica-
tion "works," however, by projecting elements of the weather which can
only be determined by immediate experience onto the future by simple
homeopathy. It seeks to give greater than immediate significance to
transitory but immediately experienced events, hence to orient (and
thus control) weather in the same way that deixis orients and controls
time and space.
That, too, is the lesson of this tombstone inscription, Robbins:

126:

All ye that passe be thys holy place,

Both spirituall & temporall of euery degre,

Remembyr your-selfe well duryng tyme & space:
I was as ye are nowe; and as 1, ye shalbe.

The entire significance of this verse lies in its exploitation of de-
ictic anchorage: through the medium of written language the speaker's
here and now is conjoined with the hearer's here and now. The differ-
ence in their states, the poem asserts, is as easily effaced as the
difference in their deictic anchorages. Nevertheless, the poem is ap-
propriate only for particular kinds of places--grave-sites. Hence its
fundamental affiliation with place is non-deictic.

Four great time and place-deictic themes do run through the Mid-
dle English lyrics, however, and with this discussion of non-deictic—
ally anchored lyrics as a background we can turn now to a discussion
of the "This World," "Ubi Sunt,‘ "When . . . Then," and Complex groups
of deictically anchored lyrics.

The deictic motif of "this world" is always invoked as an index

of the fleeting attractions of man's earthly existence, in contrast to

125

the existence he will enjoy--or endure--forever in the hereafter. Thus
it is associated exclusively with religious or moral themes from the
earliest times. The well-known thirteenth century lyric "Worldes blis
ne last no throwe" (Brown XIII:46) is an early, and evidently widely
circulated (for it survives in at least three manuscripts), expression
of the theme. The first stanza encapsulates the point, which is rath-
er repeated than developed in the subsequent five (or six, depending
upon the MS).

Worldes blis ne last no browe,

hit wit ant wend a—wey a-non;

be lengur bat hich hit i-knowe

be lasse hic finde pris ber-on,

for al hit is imeynd wyd kare,

mid sorewe ant wid uuel fare,

ant at be laste pouere ant bare

hit let mon, wen hit ginnet gon.

a1 be blisse bis here ant bere

bi-louketh at hende wop ant Mon.
Many specifically deictic elements link this lyric with the here and
now of an immediate speech event: "a1 shal gon bat her mon howet"

(l. 11); "be mon bat her no god ne sowet" (l. 13); "a1 be blisse of

bisse line" (1. 21); "bu shalt al bileuen here" (1. 25). These, in

 

combination with the direct address to the listener cannot fail to
create the illusion of an immediate speech event, one whose topicality
lies in the very contrast between two different perceptions of the

same surrounding circumstances. "You are licking honey from a thorn,"
the poet admonishes his hearer, "if you see your love in the bliss of
this world, for it full of bitterness" (11. 35-37); "therefore," he
advises, "bethink yourself well, and cleanse yourself of your misdeeds"
(11. 65-66). The moral is a commonplace familiar to every reader of

Middle English literature, but the use of the deictic elements in its

126
expression lends it an immediacy of impact it otherwise would not have.

A compact form and a reference to proverbial lore add interest to
this employment of the theme from the MS. Harley 2253 group (Brooke:
11).

Wynter wakeneb a1 my care,

nou bis leues waxeb bare;

ofte y sike ant mourne sare

when hit comeb in my boht

of bis worldes ioie hou hit geb al to noht.

Nou hit is ant nou hit nys,

also hit ner nere ywys.

bat moni mon seib sob hit ys:

al gob bote Codes wille,

alle we shule deye bah vs like ylle.

Al bat grein me graueb grene,

nou hit faleweb a1 bydene;

Iesu, help bat hit be sene,

ant shild vs from helle,

for y not whider y shal ne hou longe her duelle.
The composer of this lyric knows he is exploiting a commonplace; in
fact, he believes it adds authority to his own observations to point
out their relationship to proverbial wisdom: "bat moni mon seib sob
hit ys: a1 gob bote Godes wille," etc.

For Zumthor, such citation of proverbial wisdom is part of the
mechanism by which the poet asserts the historicity of his work, that
is its place within the collective cultural whole, which in turn guar-
antees it its veracity: "Par ces perpetuels retours [i.e. l'introduc-
tion de dictons ou d'expressions proverbiales aux articulations du
texte], par cette litterature dans la littereture, sera plus manifes—
tement comblée, sanctionnee, justifiée, l'attente d'une collectivité
pour laquelle 1e pOEme, en vertu d'une opposition radicele avec ce qui

9
n'est pas lui, est toujours vrai." But we need not invoke a cultural

collectivity, with mysterious collective yearnings needing to be

127
accounted for, to understand the basis for this practice. Its origin
in the deictic dynamics of immediate speech events is clear: what is

proverbial, what is spoken by many men, is ipso facto not to be held

 

strictly to the present speaker's account. He need not demonstrate its
veracity since it is not original with him. Like any proposition, this
one will be true if every instance of it is true, hence the very fre-
quency of its repetition argues that, were it unsound, that would pre-
viously have been discovered.

The winter setting of the poem is, of course, non-deictic. As
the season of death for the vegetative world when, the poet asserts
(somewhat anti-naturalistically) all grain is buried unripe, winter be-
comes a metaphor for human life suddenly cut off; it is not so much a
fixed date as a relative terminus §g_gpgm, aptly figuring the poet's
state of mind as he muses on the questions of whither he shall go and
how long remain here.

Another of the Harley lyrics, Brook:lO, cites authority of a very
different kind in support of essentially the same thesis. The first
four stanzas closely paraphrase the parable of the laborers in the vine-
yard from the twentieth chapter of Matthew's Gospel; then in the fifth
stanza the poet applies the lesson to his own time and place:

bis world me wurcheb wo;
rooles ase be roo, .
y sike for vnsete,
ant mourne ase men dob mo
for doute of foule fo,
hou y my sunne may bete.
Brook notes the change here from the narrative of the first four

stanzas to the "style of the penitential lyric" but does not feel that

argues corruption of the text. "The poet remembers," he says, "that

128

he, as well as the labourers in the vineyard, is in danger of losing
God's love."10 Evidently he has in mind the poem's last six lines,
which run:

bis mon bat Matheu 3ef

a peny bet was so bref,

bis frely folk vnfete,

yet he ,yrnden more,

ant saide he come wel yore,

ant gonne is loue forlete.

But clearly this lesson is not something the poet suddenly "re-
members," for he has already told us that he is restless as a roe deer
and sighs after what he knows is evil: this world is too much with
him. He yearns for more, like the man in the parable, and must learn
to reconcile himself to the terms of the "agreement" God has made with
man. However, his formulation of that agreement, paraphrasing verse
16 of Matthew's chapter, departs more radically from the language of
the source than anything else in the poem. In the Vulgate Matthew's
text runs "Sic erunt novissimi primi, et primi novissimi. Multi enim
sunt vocati, pauci vero electi," but in the lyric this becomes:

3ef y may betere beode

to mi latere leode,

to leue nam y nout lees;

to alle bet eyer hider eode
to do to-day my neode
ichulle be wrabbelees.

What is particularly striking here is the transposition of the
gnomic and timeless epigrams of the original into an utterance rooted
deictically in time and place: "To all that come here to do my bidding
today, I will be wrathless." This poem expresses a sense of the ten-
tion between the state of sin and the immediacy of the moral imperative

better than any, perhaps, until the age of Donne.

Later treatments of the theme, particularly in the fifteenth

129

century, tend to exhibit the self-consciousness that results from over-
ingenious attempts to freshen what is no longer felt freshly. "This
lyfe, I see, is but a cheyre feyre," observes one of the fifteenth
century practitioners of the theme (Brown XV:149), reflecting further
that "All thyngis passene and so most I algate," Mixing his metaphors
he adds:

To-day I sat full ryall in a cheyere,

Tyll sotell deth knokyd at my gate,

And on-avysed he seyd to me, chek—mate!
The poem is evidently intended to be understood as a valedictory of
the departing soul to the body, now laid out "wormys to fede," but not
only has the freshness of the poet's conception faded, but the certain-
ty of his technique as well--the lines "When I haue ended all myn ad-
uersite, Graunte me in paradise to haue a mancyon" hardly accord with
the notion that time is already up and the game over. Nevertheless,
we still see the outlines of a dramatic conception deictically anchored
in the conception of "this world."

If the strategy of the "This World" group of lyrics is to empha-
size the transitory nature of man's existence by deprecating the pass-
ing attractions of this middle earth, another group of lyrics exploits
essentially the same moralistic resource by commenting directly on the
passing of time itself. This group, which I will call the "Ubi Sunt"
group after the best-known formulation of a group of inter-related
ideas, exploits the moral implications of change brought about by the
passage of time, as the "This World" group exploits similar implica-
tions brought about by change of place.

Not that the temporal and spatial dimensions of change are wholly

distinguishable, except for the sake of discussion. The deictic

130

overlapping which in fact often occurs is well illustrated by what is
perhaps the best known expression of the ubi sunt topos in Middle Eng-
lish, Brown XIII:48. Its opening line exactly translates the Latin
"Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt7", to which it then adds the vivid de—
tails which insure its interest as poetry:

Uuere beb bey biforen vs were,

Houndes ladden and hauekes beren

And haddeb feld and wode?

be riche leuedies in hoere bour,

bat wereden gold in hoere tressour

Wib hoere briytte rode;

Eten and drounken and maden hem glad;

Hoere lif was a1 wib gamen I-lad,

Men keneleden hem biforen,

bey beren hem wel swibe heye--

And in a twincling of on eye

Hoere soules weren forloren.

The rhetorical question has some existential force for its point
when its deictic anchorage is considered. If there were people before
us, the speaker asks, where are they now? Their absence from the phys-
ical space of the speech event argues, in effect, their nonexistence,
yet the vivid detail with which the speaker describes them--the men a-
field with their hounds and hawks, the ladies with gold in their tres-
ses--confers on them an undeniable reality. Their existence is present
only in the then-ness of the past tenses of the verbs of this passage,
relentlessly consigning their moments in the sun to a time anterior
to the present speaker's. His primal place and time are his own here
and now, to which they belong only by virtue of his memory's power to
summon them up.

The poet's interest in these men and women lies in the facttthat

he can exploit the difference between their former and present states

to drive home a moral: "Hoere paradis hy nomen here, And nou bey lien

131
in helle I-fere, be fuir hit brennes heuere." The shift in verb
tense between the clauses telling what they took while here and where
they now lie signals a permanent shift for the duration of the poem;
the six stanzas which follow this shift contain present tense verbs
only, as the speaker addresses his listener directly in the kind of
immediate speech event discussed in the previous chapter: "Dregy here,
man, benne if bou wilt a litel pine bat me be bit." Having served
their purpose, the bygone men and women are forgotten. The poet has
answered his own rhetorical question with finality and it ceases to in-
terest him any further. The task in hand commands his entire attention.
Similar instances of the close linking of place and time deixis

can be found in the productive motif of "three sorrowful things"
(Brown XIII:11A and B, 12A and B). These closely related lyrics ex-
press their point with a succinct and epigrammatic force, merely stat-
ing, not solving, a problem for the reader.

bru tidigge us sumet iche dei--

ful wel leue me his may:

On, We sulle honne;

bath ober, we nite wanne;

be bridde his of muchel kare,--

we nite fwider we sulle fare.
The fact of our going hence is a problem in the meaning of place deix-
is; the fact that we cannot know when our going will take place is a
problem in the meaning of time deixis; and the fact that our destina—
tion is unknown argues that we are in for a general and sweeping reori-
entation, whatever the event.

Sometimes, as in the case of the following lyric, the poet finds

a metaphor in a non-deictic conception of time for the disquieted state

of his speaker's mind--or soul.

132

Mirie it is while sumer ilast

pi? fugheles song,

oc nu necheh'yindes blast

and peder strong.

Ej! ej! phat bis nicht is long,

and ich yid yel michel wrong

soregh and murne and fast.
The fast-approaching season of storms brings with it the same lesson
for this reflective speaker as the speakers of the preceding poems in
this group have conveyed: the sovereign factuality of this time and
place, than which nothing seems more real, more fixed, is delusory.
Change is at the heart of man's existence, a simple fact the moral di-
mensions of which the lyricists constantly exploited.

Even such a seemingly irremediable wrong as the first, the proto—

typical sin, acquires a positive value in the light of the events of

salvation history, giving rise to the topos of the felix culpa, the

 

fortunate fall that leads ultimately to Christ's rising. This simple
fifteenth century lyric celebrates this paradox (Brown XV:83).

Adam lay I-bowndyn, bowndyn in a bond,

fowre bowsand wynter bowt he not to long;

And al was for an appil, an appil bet he tok,

As clerkis fyndyn writyn in here book.

Ne hadde be appil take ben, be appil taken ben,

ne hadde neuer our lady a ben heuene qwen;

Blyssid be be tyme bat appil take was,

ber—fore we mown syngyn 'deo gracias!‘

Two dispensations are contrasted here: the Adam-dispensation of

a time gone by, marked by the past tenses of "lay," "thought," and

" and the speaker's dispensation, which includes us as reader-

"was,
hearers as well in the "we" of the last line, marked by the present
tense of the poem's last line. The shift from past tense to present

corresponds to the Christian's conception of the shift from the Old

Law to the New, under which salvation is possible: "Therefore we may

133

sing 'deo gracias!‘"

Another group of lyrics explores time as a continuum along which
events have a significance owing to their relative relationship to
each other, especially the relationship of implied simultaneity con-
veyed by the grammatical relative construction When . . . Then. One
such lyric uses this deictic motif as a framework upon which to hang
a simple series of anaphoric clauses, intended evidently to accumulate
a certain shock value by their repetition of the grislier details of
human death (Brown XIII:71):

Wanne mine eyhnen misten,
and mine heren sissen,
and mi nose koldet,

and mi tunge ffoldet,

and mi rude slaket,

And mine lippes blaken,
and mi mub grennet,

and mi spotel rennet,

and min her riset,

and mine herte griset,
and mine honden biuien,
and mine ffet stiuien,

al to late, al to late,
wanne be bere ys ate gate.

Form and thesis both are encapsulated by the two-line proverbial tag
"When the bier is at the gate then it's much too late to worry." The
second stanza tells us what to expect when these things come to pass.
benne y schel fflutte
ffrom bedde te fflore,
ffrom fflore to here,
ffrom here to bere,
ffrom bere to putte,
and te putt ffor-dut.
benne lyd min hus vppe min nose,
off a1 bis world ne gyffe ihic a pese.
Another group of closely related lyrics uses this same When . . .

Then frame, with notably pointed details describing suffering in the

when-portion, as an invitation to pious meditation rather than a

134

justification for the contemptus mundi attitude of the lyric just dis-

 

cussed. These include Brown XII:35A and B, 36, and 37. Perhaps the
best of these is 35B, which runs:

Quanne hic se on rode
ihesu mi lemman,

An be-siden him stonden
marie an Iohan,

And his rig i-suongen,
and his side i-stungen,
for be luue of man,
Wel ou hic to wepen
and sinnes for-leten,
yif hic of luue ken,
yif hic of luue ken,
yif hic of luue kan.

Here again the tendency toward anaphoric structure is marked in
the lines describing the scene the speaker envisions (though he is prob-
ably speaking of viewing an actual iconographic representation of the
Calvary scene) and the thrice-spoken last line. It seems quite charac-
teristic of this When . . . Then frame to employ anaphoric structure:
one of the best—known instances of the phenomenon is found in the first

18 lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

 

As the reference to Chaucer might suggest, by no means all the oc-
currences of this When . . . Then frame in Middle English poetic prac-
tice are in conjunction with a religious theme. An amusingly vituper-
ative misogynist lyric has been printed by Robbins (114), beginning:

When netilles in wynter bere Rosis rede,

& thornys bere figges naturally,

& bromes bere appylles in euery mede,

& lorelles bere cheris in be croppis so hie,
& okys bere dates so plentvosly,

and lakes geve hony in bar superfluens--
Than put in a woman your trust & confidens.

Three similar stanzas follow specifying impossible feats by fish, birds,

and animals, the last concluding "When shrewd wyffes to ber husbondes

135
do non offens--Than put in a woman your trust & confidence." Here a-
gain, anaphora is very much a part of the point, for while any of the
specified events is sufficiently impossible (just as any of the death
details of Brown XIII:71 is sufficiently distasteful) the accumulation
of a number of them gives the impression of a certain thoroughness and
a depth of conviction of the author's part.

Although the poems we have been discussing exploit only a single
deictic motif each, there is no reason why we should expect every poem
to be limited to a single motif, and in fact a number of them are not
so limited. Deictic conceptions of time and space are, as we have al-
ready noted, felt to be closely related; hence the motifs of This
World, Ubi Sunt, and When . . . Then, as well as other time and place-
deictic conceptions, can be incorporated in varying combinations to
produce poems of much greater deictic complexity than those we have
been considering.

One of these is the celebrated Love Rune of Friar Thomas de Hales
(Brown XIII:43). Although the historical circumstances of its compo-
sition are not well known, scarcely exceeding the information conveyed
in the MS that it was composed by "frater Thomas de hales de ordine
fratrum Minorum, ad instanciam cuiusdam puelle deo dicate," it is dif-
ficult to imagine what further information could add to our apprecia-
tion of the work. It is immediate speech in poetic forme-which is to
say that although on the one hand it is clearly rooted in unique and
particular personalities and events, on the other its significance
rather begins than ends there.

Our concern here is with time-deixis and place-deixis, but a word

or two about the poem's person-deixis would be appropriate as well.

136
The poem begins by addressing the reader--the unnamed reader, not the
young woman mentioned in the Latin preface, as is clear from the third-
person references in the opening lines: "A mayde cristes me bit yorne
bat ich hire wurche a luue-ron." The first stanza maintains this
third-person reference to her, for its purpose is to account explicitly
for the occasion of the poem's composition, its topicality or relevance.
With the second stanza, the speaker turns to face the young woman her-
self; the reader now becomes the third perty, for it is clear that he
is not included among the speaker's immediate hearers when he says
"Mayde, her bu myht biholde bis worldes luue nys bute o res." This is
the voice posture of the remainder of the poem, another 24 stanzas.
Hence the poem has the extremely intimate quality of a face-to—face
discussion of a private matter; but because the matter is universally
relevant, and because the form in which it is composed allows it a pub-
lic audience, it gains immeasurably in interest.

The speaker's strategy is to persuade the young woman that she
faces a choice between two alternatives: she may dedicate herself to
Christ, as he urges her to do, or she may choose an earthly lover.

Near the end to the poem, the speaker faces her clearly with this
choice and its consequences:

Ne dob he, mayde, on vuele dede,

bat may cheose of two bet on,

& he wile wib-ute neode

take bet wurse, be betere let gon?
Nor is the choice one that can be made once for all, the speaker knows.
He recognizes that there will be times when she will regret her deci-

sion. On those occasions, he urges her, she should re—read his advice:

Hwenne bu sittest in longynge,
drauh be forb bis ilke wryt;

137

Mid swete stephne bu hit singe,
& do al so hit be byt.

This kind of recursion of immediate speech upon itself forms the main
topic of the next chapter, so I will not elaborate upon it here. But
note that it is part of a When . . . Then motif, linked to the occasion
of the poem's composition as well:

Hwen bu me dost in bine rede

for be to cheose a leofmon,

Ich wile don as bu me bede,

be beste bat ich fynde con.

The primary deictic motifs derive directly from the speaker's stra-

tegy of presenting a choice. As we have seen, the This World and Ubi

Sunt formulaes are generally employed to invoke the contemptus mundi

 

attitude, an attitude which has the effect of lessening the attractions
of earthly life and preparing the penitent's mind to accept more read-
ily the promised attractions of the hereafter. We find both of these
deictic motifs developed very fully in the poem.
This World is the first of them to be developed, appearing as soon

as the speaker addresses the young woman directly:

Mayde, her bu myht biholde

bis worldes luue nys bute o res

And is by-set so fele volde,

vikel & frakel & wok and les.
And to this he immediately appends the ubi sunt formula:

beos beines bat her weren bolde

beob eglyden so wyndes bles,

Vnder molde hi liggeb colde

& faleweb so dob medewe gres.
Time and again in the first eleven stanzas the speaker returns to these
motifs: "bus is bes world, as bu mayht seo, Al so be schadewe bat glyt
away;" "he dob as be blynde bat in bis world his luue dob;" "Hwer is

paris & heleyne bet weren so bryht & feyre on bleo;' etc.

138
Other deictic motifs are intertwined with these. The speaker sug-
gests that in this morally topsy-turvy world deictic coordinates them-
selves are untrustworthy:

bis world fareb hwilynde--
hwenne on cumeb an-ober gob;
bet was bi-fore nv is bihynde,
bat er was leof nv hit is lob.

And again:

Monnes luue nys buten o stunde:
nv he luueb nv he is sad,

Nu he cumeb, nv wile he funde,
nv he is wrob, nv he is gled.
His luue is her & ek a-lunde,
nv he luueb sum bet he er bed;
Nis ne neuer treowe i-funde--
bet him tristeb he is amed.

John Edwin Wells has called attention to the fact that a poem in
the Vernon series, Brown XIV:1ll, bears a close resemblance to the Love
Rune on several points, notably the general sequence of ideas, some ver-
bal parallels, and some identical rime words.11 But much the same can
be said, and perhaps more forcefully so, of another of the Vernon se-
ries poems, which Brown entitles "Think on Yesterday" (Brown XIV:101).

For example, the third stanza of this poem contains not only the
deictic motifs we have been examining but also verbal and notional ech-
oes surrounding the idea of human fickleness and untrustworthiness in
general:

Whose wolde benke vppon bis

Mihte fynde a good enchesun whi

To preue bis world, al-wei I-wis
Hit nis but fantum and feiri.

bis erbly one, bis worldly blis

Is but a fikel fantasy,

For nou hit is and nou hit nis,

ber may no mon ber-inne affy;

Hit chaungeb so ofte & so sodeynly,

To-day is her, to-morwe a—way--
A siker groun ho wol him gy,

139
I rede he benke on guster-day.

Thomas of Itales likens this world to "be schadewe bat glyt away";
in the Vernon series poem the speaker devotes an entire stanza to a
description of children chasing their shadows cast on a wall by candle-
light, from which he derives the moral that

be schadewe cacchen bei ne miht,
For no lynes bat bei coube lay.

bis schadewe I may likne a-riht

To bis world and uster-day.

Thomas disparages worldly riches, pointing out that they make the

rich man's heart "smerte & ake:' and

If he dret bat me him stele

benne dob him pyne nyhtes wake;

Him wexeb bouhtes monye & fele,

hw he hit may witen wib-vten sake.
The author of the Vernon series poem argues that " if bi nei ebor be
Manes," then "bou wolt drede bi nei ebores brete, And neuer a day bi
dore to pas Wib-oute siker defense and grete." The neighborly menace,
he suggests, is actually death, the best defense against which is
"clene lyf, parfyt and trye;" seen in this light, death is not a thief,
as some men say, but "studefast, trewe, and lele, And warneb vche mon
of his greef, bet he wol 0 day wib him dele."

As for the matter of rimedwords in common to the two poems, these
are not lacking either. Within the same stanza in each of the two
poems can be found lyhte, mihte, nyht(e); stele, hele; bour, flour;
I-seo, beo. Seven other words are rimes common to both poems.

Several other poems in the Vernon series exploit a complex of de-
ictic motifs, notably Brown XIV:106 and 108; the former has the refrain

"bis world fareb as a Fantasy" and the latter opens with a reference to

"bis wrecched world" (it has the refrain "bat treube is best"). These

140
works are certainly connected in spirit at least with many others in
the Vernon series, including "Think on Yesterday"; hence some degree
of influence from the Love Rune might be imputed to these as well.
Carleton Brown has commented that "'The Love Ron' is one of the few
English poems of the thirteenth century which was still remembered and

' and these ech-

oes of it in the Vernon series may be exactly what he had in mind.12

imitated as late as the end of the fourteenth century,‘

To summarize the discussion to this point, I have been claiming
first that a handful of deictically defined motifs, sometimes alone
and sometimes in combination, form the conceptual centers of a large
number of Middle English lyrics, so that we are justified in regarding
these motifs collectively as a productive convention of the poetic prac-
tice of the era. The simple recurrence of these motifs in poems from
each of the three centuries of the period constitutes primary evidence
for this claim; and the fact that the motifs can be shown to have been
imitated in the fourteenth and parodied in the fifteenth centuries sug-
gests strongly that the lyricists themselves were conscious of these
motifs as fundamental elements of their poetics.

I have also claimed that these deictic conventions account in large
part for the dramatic qualities many critics have attributed to the
lyrics, though with the exception of Peter Dronke such critics have
been content to make that characterization generally, rather than to
associate it with specific lyrics. Rosemary Woolfe, to be sure, makes
an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of the literary
history of the period by identifying those lyrics or passages from them
which later were incorporated into the mystery plays; but the sense in

which a lyric can be called dramatic by virtue of its being a

141
self-contained presentation of conflict through dialogue is missing
from her work.

Anchorage in time and place is requisite for drama, and that re-
quirement may be satisfied non-deictically as well as deictically.
What can we say now about the differences between the two approaches?
With the non-deictically anchored group the evocation of a particular
time and place is exactly analogous to the notion of the setting of a
drama proper. It constitutes the backdrop against which the conflict
is represented. Generally, as we have seen, this backdrop has a posi-
tive or negative iconic value: it either reinforces or contrasts with

the dramatic thesis. Hence the April opening 1p loco amoeno of the

 

thrush-nightingale debate contrasts in its portrait of harmonious se-
renity with the thesis of disputation and prefigures the return to her-
mony of the poem's resolution; on the other hand, the wild western wood-
land setting of the Vernon series lyrics with the refrain "Mercy passes
all things" is entirely appropriate to the initiating action of the
drama, the seizure of a small bird by a raptor, to be released at

length in confirmation of the piece's eleemosynary thesis.

As for the deictically anchored lyrics, it is apparent that time
and place for them are an integral part of the drama itself--the speak-
ers of these lyrics continually warn us against the false and transi-
tory values of the here and now. This conception is possible only by
contrast with a radically different conception of time and place, one
supplied by Christian cosmology. This middle earth, for the men of the
middle ages, is a temporal as well as spatial way station. Hence these

lyrics are suffused with the theme of contemptus mundi and recur again

 

and again to the question of trust.

142

But it is the contrast between two world conceptions that makes
drama possible, and anchorage in time and place provides the stasis a-
gainst which such contrast can be developed. Deictic anchorage, as op-
posed to non-deictic, provides a set of locative, temporal, and person-
al coordinates which are wholly relative, thus elevating the individual
and his circumstances immediately into dramatic relevance. Discourse
itself provides the centering moment, but the doctrine of the Church
teaches that its values are false--thus the tension reflected in these
deictically anchored lyrics.

Although this strain of profound skepticism is often taken to be
an index of medieval thought, we can find alongside it a more optimis-
tic strain, keyed to a different kind of deictic motif from those we
have examined thus far. Lyrics exploiting this group of deictic themes,
associated with the verbs 'come' and 'go,' form the subject of the re-
mainder of this chapter.

Charles Fillmore has devoted two papers to a description of the
deictic properties of 'come' and 'go,' properties which he believes
must be understood if "The ways in which speakers of English understand
expressions containing the verb COME [are to] be made intelligible."13
This is on the face of it a sweeping claim, one that implicates deixis
directly in the semantic processing of a verb whose incidence of occur-
rence must be quite high. The claim is particularly interesting in the
context of the present discussion when one realizes how frequently the
verb 'come' and its companion 'go' appear in the Middle English lyrics.

In fact, the verb 'come' appears in what is generally taken to be
the oldest surviving Middle English song (at least the oldest for which

musical notation survives), the famous Cuckoo Song (Brown XIII:6):

143

Svmer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweb sed and bloweb med
and springb be wde nu.
Sing cuccu!

Awe bleteb after lomb,
lhoub after calue cu,
Bulluc sterteb, bucke uerteb.
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu,

Wel singes bu cuccu.
ne swik bu neuer nu!

Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu.

Sing cuccu, Sing cuccu nu!

What can Fillmore's analysis of the verb 'come' tell us of inter-

est about this lyric? First he notes that all three deictic categories,

person, place, and time, are implicated in its semantic processing.

Specifically, when a speaker or
course, which is the case here,

ward the location of either the

ing time or reference time."

reference time is a function of

addressee figures directly in the dis-
"'come' . . . indicate[s] motion to-
speaker or the addressee at either cod-

The distinction between coding time and

the tense center of the discourse: cod-

ing time refers to the functionally coeval moment during which the mes-

sage is produced and processed, while reference time refers to any oth-

er time which may be specified (by an adverbial phrase or clause). In

this case, the tense center of the discourse is coding time--the motion

indicated by the verb is taking place at the moment of the speech event

itself. The location in question is evidently that of both speaker and

addressee, for there is no indication that the two are separate, as

would be the case if the first two lines read "Summer is a-comin' in to

your abode, cuckoo." Hence we can point to two affiliations conveyed

by the verb: the speaker and his addressee, a cuckoo, are affiliated

144

in the same speech event; and a third entity, "summer," is affiliated
with the two of them by virtue of its approach. The speaker and ad-
dressee are, in fact, in Fillmore's terminology the gng of summer's
movement, since the verb "come" in general indicates motion toward a
goal, in contradistinction to "go," which indicates motion away from
a source. No teleological motivation on the part of summer is neces-
sarily implied by this, but it is worth recognizing that the speaker's
choice of verbs construes himself and his addressee as the particular
and specific endpoint of summer's motion; hence they are more than mere
bystanders at summer's near approach. For the moment, at least, the
cyclicelity of the seasons has been converted into a directionality,
a vector.

Now we can bring to bear another observation of Fillmore's, that
"we can think of a communication act as metaphorically an instance of

'15 It

motion--the travelling of a message from one person to another.‘
has for its source the speaker and for its goal the addressee, and we
can speak of the moment of the speaker's formulation of the message as
its encoding time and the moment of the addressee's reception of it as
decoding time. With these analogies in mind we can understand the prag-
matic dimensions of the poem.

The speaker's message to his addressee the cuckoo is the command
to sing; what the cuckoo sings is its own name, so that in a sense it
announces merely its own existence, it sings itself into existence.
Like the bleating ewe, the lowing cow, the leaping bull, and the fart-
ing buck, the cuckoo's behavior is a spontaneous response to the ap-

proech of summer; but unlike the others', the cuckoo's pseudo-linguis-

tic behavior approximates human linguistic behavior with its capacity

145

to create and control. His song, perfect in its simplicity, asserts
nothing but his own immediate existence, hence the speaker exhorts him
never to cease singing it, never to cease putting it in motion, just
as he would have the approach of summer be unceasing: "wel singes bu
cuccu. ne swik bu neuer nu!"

The speaker cannot sing himself into existence onomatopoetically,
as the cuckoo does, but he can imitate this recursiveness by repetition
of his song itself; and this is the meaning of the two-part burden,
with its syncopation of three syllables on four, intertwining the con-
trolling command to sing with the self-creative message of the song

pd.infinitum:

Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu!
Sing cuccu, Sing cuccu nu!

The text indicates that these lines are to be sung simultaneously, by
two voices, as long as the song is to last ("quociens opus est"), the
first voice resting at the end of the line ("faciens pausacionem in
fine") and the second resting in the middle (after the first phrase),
not at the end, and immediately beginning again after the second phrase
("pausans in media & non in fine. Set immediate repetens principium").
This song is full of movement--it is in the imagery of the cavort-
ing animals, in the syncopated rhythm of its performance, in the very
sense of the verb 'come' that controls it from the opening line, and
as I have suggested in the pragmatic gesture that motivates it. I
think that sense of movement, spontaneous yet under control, accounts
for the differently felt dramatic qualities of this lyric as compared
with the others we have been considering in this chapter. I suggested

earlier that drama proceeds from the stasis of anchorage, whether

146
deictic or nondeictic; but clearly the peculiar quality of these verbs
of motion is to convey not a steady state but a Gestalt of states, a
bridging of states, the controlled spanning of an interval. Hence it
is not the tension of drama but its release that is the hallmark of
these lyrics.

In the following lyric, the repetition of 'come' is striking, and
the movement it implies balances the austerely anaphoric structure of
the piece, one of the most remarkable in the entire corpus of Middle
English lyrics (Brown XIV:3c).
sayh hym wib ffles a1 bi-sprad He cam.vram Est.
sayh hym.wib blod a1 by-ssed He cam vrem West.

sayh bet manye he wib hym brouyte He cam vrem souf.
sayh bet be world of hym ne rou te He cam vrem north.

HHHH

H

come vrem be wedlok as a svete spouse, bet habbe my
wif wib me in-nome.

I come vrem vigt a staleworbe knyyt, bet myne vo habbe
ouercome.

I come vrem be chepyng as a Riche chapman, bet mankynde
habbe ibougt.

I Come vrem an vncoube londe as a sely pylegrym, bet
ferr habbe i-sougt.

What iconographic value the four compass points may have here is
difficult to say, but we can identify a line by line linkage of the
imagery between the two stanzas. Thus the imagery of the flesh in the
first line is echoed in the imagery of wedlock of the fifth; that of
blood in the second in the warfare of the sixth; that of the company
of followers in the third in the redeemed race of mankind of the sev-
enth; and that of estrangement in the fourth in the foreign journeying
of the eighth. It is of course the imagery here which allows Carleton
Brown to entitle the piece "How Christ shall Come", a matter of person-

deictic interpretation of the kind discussed in the previous chapter.

The parallels do in any case strengthen the presumption that the I of

147

the second stanza is the same individual referred to as he in the first;
hence, though the poem has two speakers, their messages are structural-
ly and imagistically congruent.

This congruence extends as well to the message of the coming: par-
adoxically, what look like four openings are one and the same. That,
I think, is what is implied in the tense shift from the first stanza
to the second. From the human perspective, in the first stanza, the
many aspects of Christ's coming strike us as so many separate comings,
as from the four points of the compass (collectively symbolic of an in—
finite diversity of direction). The past tense marks these events as
anterior to the present discourSe; that is, we can say that they are
events--plural—-because the past tense allows any number of events an-
terior to the present moment. But from the divine perspective of the
second stanza, it is one coming, to be spoken of only in an eternal .Vu
preSent‘tense.

We meet with this idea of unity in repetition in conjunction with
the verb 'come' in another lyric, one of the most celebrated and high-
ly praised from the entire period (Brown XV:81):

I syng of a myden bat is makeles,
kyng of all kynges to here sone che ches.

he cam also stylle ber his moder was
as dew in aprylle, bat fallyt on be gres.

he cam also stylle to his moderes bowr
as dew in aprille, bat fallyt on be flour.

he cam also stylle ber his moder lay
as dew in aprille, bat fallyt on be spray.

moder & mayden was neuer non but che--
wel may swych.a lady godes moder be.

The thrice-repeated coming figures the triune God whose earthly

148
appearance the poem celebrates; once again, what is mysterious to the
human mind is expressed in the past tense, so that by accumulation
what is (in doctrinal fact) a unity can be approximately comprehended.
The speaker's choice of his subject--"I syng of a maiden that is match-
less"--is as sublime as the choice she makes in choosing the king of
all kings as her son; but the subject is shrouded in paradox and is
literally inexpressible. Hence the succession of metaphors by which
he tries to make the movement of speech suggest the ineffable entry
of divinity into the realm of human experience. In the end, he can
only offer up the paradox whole, as a thing which speaks for itself.
The other deictic verb of motion, 'go,' figures prominently in
the following brief lyric from the fourteenth century, Brown XIV:71,
which makes strategic use of it in the midst of numerous deictic themes:
Gold & e1 bis werdis wyn
Is nouth but cristis rode;
I wolde ben clad in cristis skyn,
bat ran so longe on blode,
& gon t'is herte & taken myn In--
bar is a fulsum.fode.
ban 3ef i litel of kith or kyn,
For ber is alle gode. Amen.

Here the speaker not only expresses his contemptus mundi, his dispar-

 

agement of the values of "this world," but proposes in a bold metaphor
how he would retreat from it. His conception is that escape lies not
in the other world of the hereafter but in a profound penetration into
the heart of the sacred, where all the sustenance, all the society, he
needs will be found. The movement he envisions ippp the sacred heart
inverts the perverted values of this life, which flow outward from the
heart, as Jesus explains in Matt. 15:18-20: "Quae autem procedunt de

ore, de corde exeunt, et ea coinquinant hominem: de corde enim exeunt

149
cogitationes melee, homicidia, adulteria, fornicationes, furta, false
testimonia, blasphemiae: haec sunt quae coninquinant hominen." The
conjunction in the lyric of the images of the bloody skin and the ful—
some feast further argue this chapter of Matthew as its imagistic and
thematic source, for the verse just cited continues "Non lotis autem
manibus manducare, non coinquinant hominem" and the remainder of the
chapter relates the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and the
fishes.

The perversion of values is not always a religious theme, nor is
it always treated earnestly, as the following secular lyric from Rob—
bins (174) shows. Here the source and goal—deictic values of the two
verbs of motion have been deliberately reversed, at least insofar as
their conventional cultural association with the speech events of greet-
ings and farewells are concerned.

Welcome be 3e when 7e goo,

And fare-wel when 3e come!

So faire as 3e ber be noo mo,

As brith as bery brovne.

I love ,ow verryly at my too,
Nonne so moch in a1 bis toune.

I am right glad when 3e wil goo,
and sory when 3e wil come!

The movement here is from nonsense in the first two lines through
ambivalent sense in the middle four to the clear sense of the last two.
The sense of the last two, of course, is prepared for by the others.
The speaker is inverting the love lyric convention, on a very low level,
to produce a lyric of denunciation (but with festive, not calamitous,
import to him). 'Welcome' and 'farewell' have virtually no semantic

content; their functions are simply to mark arrivals and departures.

Hence the associations of 'welcome' with a departure and 'farewell'

150
with an arrival are nonsensical. The comparative constructions of the
middle of the stanza have a meaning, but it is ambivalent. This pro-
gression, if it can be called such, from nonsense to ambivalent sense
prepares the way for the clear if unconventional sense of the last two
lines.
The sense of the entire second stanza is equally explicit as that

of the last two lines of the first.

And when e be ovth fare,

I pray for yow sertayn,

bat neuer man, horsse, ne mare,

brynge yow to town a-geyn,

To prayse youre bewte I ne dare,

ffor drede that men wille seyn.

ffere—welle! no more for you I care,

but pray yow of my songs have no desdayn!
This last 'farewell' has its conventional value again and prefaces the
final jibe, an extra measure of spite delivered extra—metrically. In—
terestingly as long as the two verbs of motion function, to borrow
Derrida's phrase, under the erasure of the first two lines, all the in-
herently dramatic qualities of tension and conflict associated with the

lyric's deictic anchorage come into play; but when normal values reas-

sert themselves, the conflict is banished in the movement of resolving

action.

151

Notes

1See especially "Space" and "Time," lectures delivered at the
University of California at Santa Clara, 1971.

2Essai dg_poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 37.

 

3Zumthor, p. 38.
4
p. 69.

The Medieval Lyric (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977),

 

5Woolf, p. 19.

6Ragnar Rommetveit, Words, Meanings, and MesSages: Theory and
Experiments ip_Psycholinguistics (New York: Academic Press, 1968).

 

 

 

 

7There is also one instance from the fourteenth century, Brown
XIV:56.

8B[onaventure Anthony] Brown, "Way of the Cross," New Catholic
Encyclopedia, 1967. What was in earlier practice a considerable vari-
ation in the number and nature of the stations coalesced around the
end of the middle ages into these fourteen: (l) Christ is condemned
to death by Pilate; (2) Jesus is made to carry the cross; (3) Jesus
falls the first time; (4) Jesus meets his blessed Mother; (5) the
cross is laid on Simon of Cyrene; (6) Veronica wipes the face of Jesus;
(7) Jesus falls the second time; (8) Jesus speaks to the women of
Jerusalem; (9) Jesus falls the third time; (10) Jesus is stripped of
His garments and receives gall to drink; (11) Jesus is nailed to the
cross; (12) Jesus dies on the cross; (13) Jesus is taken down from the
cross; (14) Jesus is laid in the sepulcher.

9Zumthor, p. 35.

 

 

10Brook, p. 80.

11John Edwin Wells, "'A Luue Ron' and '0f Clene Maydenhod',"
Modern Language Review, 9 (1914), p. 236—37. The "Clene Maydenhod"
is not printed by Brown. It may be found in F. J. Furnivall, ed.,
The Minor Poems pf the Vernon MS, Part II, EETS No. 117 (London: 1901),
p. 464-68.

12

 

 

Brown XIII, p. 198.

13Fillmore, "Deictic Categories in the Semantics of 'Come'," p.
219. The other paper alluded to is the Santa Clara lecture "Coming
and Going."

14Fillmore, "Coming and Going," p. 12.

15Fillmore, "Coming and Going," p. 4.

Chapter V: The Context of Performance

In the last chapter I had occasion to refer to the particular
attention Peter Dronke pays to the performative aspects not merely of
medieval English lyric poetry but of the lyric practice of the entire
western European cultural continuum in the middle ages. This focus
of his on performers and performance, and the consequent sensitivity
to the functional dimensions of verbal art to which it leads, give
his work a particular relevance to the topic of discussion in the pres-
ent chapter: the mechanisms by which the Middle English lyricists show
their interest in, concern for, and relationship to the linguistic
medium in which they are working.

We have seen already that the linguistic phenomena referred to
collectively as deictics specify the primary coordinates of person,
place, and time that are unique to and constitutive of an individual
speech event. Beyond its capacity to refer to these three primary
coordinates, however, the resources of language include the means to
refer to the discourse itself, the present instance of it, and thus
to foreground its function, just as person deixis particularizes an
individual conversant and identifies him as, for example, the speaker.

This phenomenon of discourse deixis is much less well defined
than person, place, or time deixis. On the one hand, as Fillmore
points out, it concerns itself with such relatively uninteresting lex-

ical items as 'the former' and 'the latter'.1 These devices merely

152

153

allow a speaker to sort and identify items in a list according to the
order in which he first mentioned them. On the other hand, in the
context of a discussion of literary discourse, discourse deixis merges
with the phenomenon of self-referentielity to include all of the means
by which language is present to itself as language. And it is within
a specifically functional perspective, such as Dronke's, that the
subject comes into contextual focus.

The pragmatic bias of The Medieval Lyric is evident from the

 

outset. For Dronke the term "song" is fully interchangeable with the

term "lyric,"

an identification he anchors in the historical practice
of western Europe from the first century of the Christian era onward.
He points out that alongside the lute— and flute-accompanied songs of

the upper classes stands "

a rich tradition of popular songs associated
with many aspects of the everyday life of the people," a tradition
which "lived on in the early Middle Ages."2 Songs are performed poetry;

a performer has a repertoire; and the repertoire of the medieval scop,

gleomon, spilman, jongleur, or menestral, Dronke finds, was purely

 

 

functional: "Medieval song has three main functions: formal commemora—
tion, entertainment, and cult."3 These functions obtain whether the
audience is clerical or laic, courtly or common, so that "the songs
performed for a clerical and a noble audience shade off almost imper—
ceptibly into the songs performed for a popular one, and popular songs
themselves continually absorb the influence of more sophisticated ert-
songs."4
This complex interpenetration of what the critic would prefer

were neatly distinct traditions is well known to students of Middle

English. Certainly it is characteristic of the lyrics. Nevertheless

7n

36') ,

 

 

154
Dronke's simple yet comprehensive division of the lyrics into the
three functional categories of entertainment, commemoration, and cult
does provide a way of classifying the lyrics for analytical purposes
without artificially distancing one strain of the poetic practice from
another. At the same time, it will help us focus on the deictic dimen-
sions of this discourse by revealing the varying stances of the perform-
er to his material: now thoughful, now flip; now vain, now self-effac-
ing; now transparent, now opaque.

This is not to say that it is always easy to assign a given lyric
exclusively to one or another or the functional categories. But this
should hardly be surprising, or troublesome either. Attempts to ana-
lyze discourse functionally have always recognized the capacity of lan-
guage to serve two or more purposes simultaneously: Jakobson's semin-
al essay on "Linguistics and Poetics" is a classic case in point. What
is important, rather, is that functionality itself be recognized, for
from this follows the significance of self-referential discourse.

Hence the separation of the discourse-deictic lyrics into lyrics of en—
tertainment, lyrics of commemoration, and lyrics of cult is pragmatic
and provisional. My intent is doing so is to identify the primary
thrust of each piece, not to exhaust its functional potentialities nor
to specify their exact admixture.

Since entertainment as such is not aimed for in the discourse of
religion, lyrics which aim frankly to entertain are to be found almost
exclusively among the secular collections, most of which have been
printed by Robbins. The first lyric printed in his collection of "Pop-
ular Songs" (Robbins:l) is a marvelous example of the type, a perfect

minstrel's curtain-raiser, adaptable to almost any company. It begins

155

by reminding the company of their obligation of hospitality toward
the unknown newcomer, challenging them slyly at the same time to match
him at his own game:

Is per any good man here

bat will make me any chere?

& if her were, I wold cum nere

to wit what he wold say.

A, will ye be wild?

by mary myld

I trow ye will syng gay.
One would think the question was rather whether 22 could make them "any
chere," for that is the minstrel's profession, but the speaker persists
in his challenge in the second stanza, linking it now with the protocol
of the tourney:

Be gladly, masters, euerychon!

I am cum myself alone

to appose you on by on.

let se who dare say nay--

No doubt, by this point, a good minstrel will have sized up his
audience carefully, in order to be sure of his man for the next move,
for it is at this point that his clever design begins to become clear.
Turning to one of the company, he asks:

Sir, what say ye?

Syng on, lett vs see.

Now will it be

Thys or another day?
Naturally the challenged man, surprised at suddenly being called upon
to become performer just when he thought most to be audience, will
have no response; and the little joke at his expense--the minstrel
vamping on his lute, perhaps, while the victim splutters helplessly—-

doubtless brings a hearty laugh from his companions, who don't know

yet their turns are coming. One of them, perhaps, is roaring more

156

lustily than the others--he is the minstrel's next mark: "Loo, this
is he pat will do be dede!" Suddenly conscious that he has been sin-
gled out, the man attempts to curb his laughter, but the minstrel knows
how to turn this to advantage too:

he tempereth his mowth, perfore take hede.

Syng softe, I say, lests yowr nase blede,

ffor hurt yowrself ye may!

But by god pat me bowght,

your brest is so towght,

tyll ye haue will cowght

ye may not per-with away.
For the rest, all the minstrel needs are three easily recognized types,
likely to be found in any group--a thin man, a fat man, and a shy type,
standing in the rear. Each of these, in turn becomes the butt of the
minstrel's jokes. Challenging the thin man, who perhaps manages some
feeble response, the minstrel declares he sings "nober good tenowre,
treble, ne mene"; but as though his very thinness bespoke a certain
lack of vitality, the minstrel dismisses him with:

I hold you excused

ye shall be refused,

ffor ye haue not be vsed

to no good sport nor play.

The joke works will whether it happens to be true of the individ-
ual or not, for if true the audience will credit the minstrel with a
perspicacity he doesn't have and laugh §£_their companion; if false,
and the man is in fact lively, the jibe will be taken as ironic recog-
nition of the fact and the company will laugh with their companion.
The jest at the expense of the fat man is much broader:

Sir, what say ye with your ffat face?

Me thynkith ye shuld bere a very good bace

To a pot of good ale or Ipocras,

truly as I you say!

hold vp your hede,
ye loke lyke lede;

157

ye wast myche bred
euermore from day to day.

And now, seemingly by chance, the minstrel's gaze lights on some
self-conscious fellow who has drifted to the rear in hopes of avoiding
just the attention he now receives:

Now will ye see wher he stondith behynde7
Iwis, broper, ye be vnkynd.

stond forth, & wast with me som wynd,

for ye haue ben called a synger ay.

Nay, be not ashamed;

ye shall not be blamed,

ffor ye haue ben ffamed

the worst in the Contrey!

So, everyone in the company has now had a 1augh--a reasonably harms
less one--at his own friends' expense; and the minstrel has accomplished
two things at least. For the first, he has entertained the company.
This, after all, is what he is paid to do--but it is the way he has
done it that marks him as the professional. The professional knows he
can't make a living by extemporizing, and only a professional can pull
an item from the repertoire and make it work everywhere, every time.

For the second, by "apposing" the group members one by one, he for the
moment sets each of them, not himself, apart from the group, so that by
the end of his song he addresses a group member familiarly as "brother,"
speaks of his activity among them as a trifling matter, a wasting of
wind, and insinuates that he as well as they is familiar with the es-
teem in which a man is held in the country about. In short, the enter-
tainer has ingratiated himself with his audience; whatever material he
chooses to perform afterward can hardly fail to be well received.

As for the specifically discourseadeictic elements of this lyric,

we need only notice how often the subject of this song reverts to the

singing of songs: all five of the minstrel's victims are faced down

158
on the point of their skill in singing. To use a linguistic metaphor,
the minstrel's skill lies in fitting a discourse token onto a real
world context of utterance in such a way that it appears to be a dis-
course type. When this is well done, the audience of any repertory
discourse--any discourse known to have been composed for repeated per-
formance before various audiences--has the sense that the speech act
of which it is a part is unique and spontaneous. This tends to freight
the context with real-world significance, producing in the audience
genuine mirth or Aristotelian catharsis via what Coleridge felicitous-
ly termed the willing suspension of its disbelief.

But even this quality of "live and unrehearsed" spontaneity can
be carefully written into the performer's material, as this next lyr-
ic demonstrates.

It isn't always the case that the minstrel makes the company the
butt of his jokes. The following lyric (Robbins:4) shows that he can
turn his art upon itself and satirize his own ability to sing. Here a-
gain, the performative aspects of the song must be imaginatively recre-
ated in the reading, for they are unrecorded in print.

If i synge 5e wyl me lakke,

& wenyn I wer out of myn wyt;
per-for smale notes wil I crake;
so wolde god I wer qut.

Syn me muste take his mery toyn
to glade with-a1 bis cumpany;

I rede or ony swych be don,

for godes loue, tey vp our ky!
ffor-sope I may not synge, I say--
my voys & I arn at discord;

but we xul fonde to take a day

To takyn myn avys & myn acord.

A singer must sing and be judged for it, though circumstances may to a

159

greater or lesser extent impair his ability to do it well: this is the
token reading of this text. On a type reading, the lyric becomes a
comment on the social obligations of minstrels--and poets--to fulfill
exacting expectations on the part of their audiences whether willing
or no. Moreover, it asserts the mutuality of obligation, of function.
The audience must "take up its key" in order for the lyric to succeed,
whether this means to supply a pitch or musical burden or to bring to
the song the necessary interpretive apparatus. Hence the lyric is a
reminder that the nexus between a poet and his art--his "voys"--is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for the success of his dis-
course. The further connection between speaker and audience is vital.

Much the same point is made by a spurious defense of women, which
depends for the sense of its type-reading on the two-line refrain, re-
peated after each stanza, "of all Creatures women be best: Cuius con-
trarium verum est." The piece (Robbins:38) is a compendium of misogy—
nist canards each of which has been cast in the form of its logical
contrary; the Latin tag in the refrain denies these, in turn, and there-
by restores the conventionally intended sense. A sampling: "women be
trewe as tirtyll on tree, Not lyberall in langage, but euer in secree";
"tell a woman all your Cownsayle, & she can kepe it wonderly well"; "by
women was neuer man begiled"; "To be tavern they will not goo . . . To
sspende ther husbondes money 800." I suppose that the performative hu-
mor of the piece lay in the differentiation of the audience into come
prehenders and non-comprehenders of the Latin line. The former would
have enjoyed sharing an in-joke with the performer, while the latter no

doubt thought the Latin represented the voice of auctoritas in support

 

of the song's ostensible thesis.

160
The second great functional category consists of lyrics whose in-

tent is commemoration. Dronke suggests that these are linked ultimate-
ly to the authoritarian nature of the social system: "Seignurial au-
thority presupposes retainers. A ruler maintains around him a body of
courtiers and officials; they try to win praise and glory in his eyes,
and he in theirs. For praise and glory to be truly won, however, they
must be celebrated in some lasting mode. Hence the very nature of a
court implies the need for the arts, and in particular for the art of
celebration by poetry and song, which has the greatest potentiality of
diffusion."5 Curiously, only a few such "commissioned" formal commem-
oratives survive from the Middle English period; these tend to be late,
aureate in style, and the work of known authors such as Lydgate, Hoc-
cleve, and Dunbar. Subtlety, evidently, was not a quality their au-
thors strove to give them (an observation which probably reflects more
on the predilictions of their intended audiences than upon the authors'),
as can be seen from this opening stanza of an eleven-stanza piece come
posed by Lydgate to accompany a New Year's gift of an eagle to Henry
VI and his mother, Queen Katherine (Robbins:96):

bis hardy foole, bis bridde victoryous,

bis staately foole moste Imperyal,

Of his nature fiers and corageous,

Called in scripture be foole celestyal--

bis yeeris day to youre estate ryal

Lowly presentebe t'encresce of your glorye,

Honnour and knighthoode, conquest and victorye.

But it was evidently not only nobility who desired commemoration

in some form likely to be diffused. To judge from the following "Vers-
es on a Chained Horae" a successful member of the burgeoning middle

class at the close of the period could aspire to no less.

This present book legeble in scripture,

161

Here in this place thus tacched with a cheyn,
Purposed of entent for to endure,

And here perpetuelli stylle to remeyne,

Fro eyre to eyre; wherfore appone peyn

Of cryst-is curs, of faders and of moderes,
Non of hem hens attempt it to dereyne,

While ani leef may goodeli hange with oder.

Now this stanza seems no more than a conventional though neatly turned
imprecation of the kind popular on book plates throughout the period.
But the second stanza shows the man of affair's familiarity with the
waywardness of material things (perhaps already foreshadowed in the im-
age of the last line of the first stanza).

But for-as-moche that noo thyng may endure

That urthely ys, alwey, y trowe, certeyn;

When-so-euer thys book here-aftyr in scripture

Eyder in koueryng begynneth fause ayeyn,

All tho therto that diligence doth or peyn

Hit to reforme, be they on or other,

Haue they the pardon that criste yafe magdaleyn,

With daili blessyng of fader and of moder.
Having thus made his chained book of hours an objective correlative,
as it were, for the transitoriness of all things, the speaker now seiz-
es his chance to make it as well the memorial of him who cause it to
be written.

Gret reson wolde that euery creatur,

Meued of corage on hit to rede or seyn,

Shuld hym remembre in prayer that so sure

Bothe preest and place and bokes lust ordeyn

At his gret cost, John Harpur, noght to leyn;

Wherfor in speciall his eires wyth all oder

Ar hyly bondon to pray the souereyn

Lord of all lordes present hym to hys moder.
The bathos in these lines speaks volumes of a man whose values Church
doctrine officially condemns but Church practice daily depends upon;
and yet John Harpur's request is without a trace of insincerity or ex-

cess of sentiment.

The same cannot be said for the thirteenth—century "Regret de

162

Maximian," (Brown XIII:51) an? English paraphrase of the Latin "First
Elegy of Maximian." Excess is reflected in its very length, some 273
lines, giving the speaker more than ample scope to bewail the passing
of his many fine attributes in his old age. In fact, like Gertrude,
he protests too much--it is the attributes themselves, and not their
passing, that really interest him:

be ich wes goung and wis,

And werede grei and gris,

Ich heuede frendes bo.

Foul sob I-seid hit Iis,

be mon bat is of pris,

He haueb frendes be mo.
And again:

Riche I wes and rigt

Borlich I—wis and liyt,

As ich am ounderstonde.

Of herte ich wes wel ligt,

Sobliche wiis and bri}t,

And franc mon of honde.

ber nis clerk ne kni,t,

Ne mon of more miyt,

bat meuere was in londe.
To be sure, the speaker does admit that these attributes (and many more,
all fair) have passed, that things have changed with him, that death ap-
proaches. In that sense the lyric is allied with the This WOrld group
discussed in the previous chapter. But whereas impending death typical-

ly engenders the spirit of contemptus mundi, and a concommitant spirit

 

of contemptus ipsius, as it might be termed, this speaker is full at

 

the end of bitter resentment of his loss, a resentment he expresses in
shamelessly scurrilous fashion:

Iich may seien alas,

bat ich I-boren was;
I-liued ich have to longe,
Were ich mon so ich was,
Min heien so grei so glas,
Mdn her so feir bihonge,

163

And ich hire heuede bi be trasce

In a derne place,

To meken and to monge:

Ne sholde hoe neuere at-witen

Min helde ne me bifliten,

Wel heye I shulde hire honge.
The overall effect, and in particular this final stanza, makes the work
less a "regret" than a self-commemoration, such as it is.

Comparatively few lyrics whose primary function was entertainment
seem to have survived from the Middle English period, though many must
have been written; few lyrics whose primary function was formal commem-
oration, in the sense intended by Dronke, seem to have been written at
all; but when we come to examine the lyrics whose primary function is
the expression of cult, the saving hand of the clergy has passed num-
bers of them down to us. Among these are quite a few in which language
is present to itself in discourse deixis. If language can entertain
through its power to surprise, and commemorate through its power to
publish, it can also give expression to faith through its power to
praise and to ponder. These two impulses, the open declaration of be-
lief and the close confrontation of unbelief, are at the heart of any
cult. Both find vivid expression in the Middle English lyrics.
Late in the period an anonymous lyricist brought both strains to-

gether in a single brief work (Brown XV:120):

A God and yet a man?

A mayde and yet a mother?

Witt wonders what witt Can

Conceave this or the other.

A god, and Can he die?

A dead man, can be live?

What witt can well replie?

What reason reason give?

God, truth itselfe doth teach it;
Mans witt senckis too farr vnder

164

By reasons power to reach it.
Beleeve and leave to wonder!

The poised paradox and fascination with wit and reason anticipate the
metaphysical school of the Renaissance, but its quiet submission--not
to dogma but to faith itself--marks this word as medieval in spirit.
From the beginning of the period the more usual tendency is to

give clear expression to one strain or the other, to declare belief or
to confront doubt. The thirteenth-century "Hymn to the Heavenly Fa-
ther," Brown XIII:59, belongs to the former category. According to
Brown, it is a "free rendering" of a Latin Paraphrasis Orationis Domin-
icae, which immediately precedes it in the MS.6 Thus it has two appar—
ent sources, the Latin paraphrase and its source in the Gospel of Mat-
thew; yet the concern of the Middle English lyric for the role of lan—
guage in the expression of cult is unique to it. It begins:

Hit bilimpef'forte speke, to reden & to singe

Of him be no mon mai at-reke, king of alle kinge.

He mai binde & to-breke, he mai blisse bringe,

He mai luke & unsteke, michte of all binge.
The speaker's confident assertion of his faith in the rightness of his
function is missing from the Latin piece, which begins "Pater rerum omr
nium pius et fidelis"; rather it reflects the spirit of the context in
which the Lord's Prayer arises in Matthew 6:9. In the verses which pre-
cede it in the sixth chapter, Jesus rebukes religious ostentation, say—
ing in particular "when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypo-
crites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and at the
corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men"; and again, "when
ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the pagans do; for they think
that they shall be heard for their much speaking." But the present

speaker, confident that what he prays is blameless (for it is modeled

165
on the Lord's Prayer itself), can shape the way he prays unselfcon- A
sciously.

There is evidence in the rimes of the third stanza that this lyr-
ic was composed to be read, as they first line suggests, as well as to
be heard. The four-line stanza contains the following four end-rimes:
eorbe; feorbe; eorbe; neor be. The last of these, "near thee," is a
perfect eye-rime in the original, but in ordinary pronunciation the
phrase could scarcely have suggested a rime with the others. be, as
the head nominal of the phrase, would receive a degree of stress far
greater than that given to the last syllable (if the final -e be not
elided) of eorbe and feorbe, and with this stress the vowel undoubt-
edly would have had the quality /e/ rather than /3/. Evidently the
accent marks were supplied with this in mind--while the eye-time would
suffice the silent reader, the reader aloud needs a clue to negotiate
a tricky bit of scansion.

The following lyric (Brown XIII:64) gives expression to the other
strain in the expression of cult, the confrontation of unbelief. The
penitential spirit of the work is evident from its opening lines:

Hi sike, al wan hi singe,

for sorue bat hi se

wan hic wit wepinge

bi-holde a—pon be tre.
What the speaker beholds, in his mind's eye, is the Crucifixion scene,
which he sketches in a series of brief, vivid images:

Hey a-pon a dune

as a1 folke hit se may,

a mile wyt-hute be tune

a—bute be mid-day,

be rode was op a-reride.

(his frendis werin a1 of-ferde,

bei clungin so be cley)
be rod stonit in ston.

166

mari hir-selfe al-hon,
hir songe was way-le-way.

When I see with eye and heart both his cold body, hanging between two
thieves, "hu soldi singe mor?" the speaker asks; yet he goes on to de-

tail the wounds, the spear at the heart and another at the side, the

nails "too long, the cross "too big , the stones growing wet at his
feet, the meager companionship of John and Mary. All these defy com-
prehension; they can only be sorrowfully accepted. But the speaker
expresses true astonishment at those who, seeing what he sees, can
choose to ignore it to pursue the attractions of this world:

Wel ofte wan hi slepe

wit soru hic ham soit,

wan hi wake and wende

hi benke in my boit,

allas! bat men beit wode,

bi-holdit an be rode

and silit--hic li noyt--

her wouelis in—to sin

for any worlde-his win,

bat was so der hi-boyt.

Cult itself is sometimes a difficult phenomenon to isolate in the
literature of the Middle Ages, in particular where it concerns the
treatment of women. The relationship between the secular cult of court-
ly love, on the one hand, and the Christian veneration of the Blessed
Virgin, on the other, is difficult to establish with precision, a task
which anyway is outside the scope of this study; but unquestionably
each influences the other so pervasively that strains of both belief
systems often run through the same poem. This is the case with sever-
al of the Harley lyrics, one of the more difficult of which directly
addresses the problem of the expression of belief in verse. Entitled

by Brook "The Poet's Repentance" (Brook:6) the lyric expresses the

speaker's desire to atone now for the wicked and witless songs he

167
formerly had composed on the subject of women:

Weping haueb myn wonges wet
for wikked werk ant wone of wyt;
vnblibe y be til y ha bet
bruches broken, ase bok byt,
of leuedis loue, bat y ha let,
bat lemeb a1 wib luefly lyt;
ofte in song y haue hem set,
bat is vnsemly ber hit syt.
Hit syt ant semeb noht

ber hit ys seid in song;

bat y haue of hem wroht,

ywis hit is al wrong.

The poet explains that his accustomed misogyny was to be blamed on Eve,
who "rafte vs alle richesse ryf." Now, however, since the birth of
Mary's baby, "wommon nes wicked non." The poet will no longer vouch
for the tales told in town "of brudes bryht wib browes broune." Rather
he will serve women with feet and hand "for on bat vs warp from wo."
More than this--he will retract all his objectionable earlier work:

Euer wymmen ich herie ay,

ant euer at neode y nyckenay

bat y ner nemnede bat heo nolde.

Y nolde ant nullyt noht,

for nobyng nou a nede

sob is bat y of hem ha wroht,

as Richard erst con rede.

These are curious lines, and not merely because retractions in

general are curious phenomena in the literary world-—one thinks of the

lengths to which critics have gone in order to account for Chaucer's

famous retraction at the close of fragment X of the Canterbury Tales.

 

It is curious, for example, that the poet of the Harley MS qualifies

" 'of necessity.‘

his retraction twice, specifying that it is "at neode,
If it is heartfelt, why qualify it? If it is not heartfelt, why make
it? And what is the meaning of the reference to Richard? Whoever he

is, it is clear from the final stanza that he is allied with just the

168

kind of courtly attitude toward women that the poet has renounced:

Richard, rote of resoun ryht,
rykening of rym ant ron,

of maidnes meke bou hast myht;
on molde y holde be murgest mon.
Cunde comely ase a knyht,

clerk ycud bat craftes con,

in vch an hyrd byn abel ys hyht,
ant vch an abel bin hap is on.
Hap bat habel hab hent

wib hendelec in halle;

selbe be him sent

in londe of leuedis alle!

Brown notes that Boddeker characterizes this

poem as "Eine Ironie,’

but maintains that a medieval poet would scarcely introduce the Virgin

"as the climax of his argument" if his intention were to satirize womr

en ironically.7

Yet it is tempting to allow an ironic reading along-

side the penitential public one--when pressed, perhaps by a humorless

or straight-laced retainer, the poet disowns his former work publicly;

but privately, for Richard's benefit say, "sob is bat y of hem ha wroht,

as Richard erst con rede."

Truth itself, and the capacity of language to convey or obscure

it, is a theme rarely encountered in the Middle English lyrics, but it

occurs in several of the poems in the Vernon series, Brown XIV:95-120.

In fact, it could be said of the entire series, with its characteristic

refrain in the closing line of each stanza, that the necessity to in-

corporate a fixed linguistic unit, such as Deo gracias, into a varying

 

syntactic and semantic context demonstrates more than the ordinary de-

gree of sensitivity to language itself, language as a subject of the

poetry.

Not that this sensitivity produces uniformity in the treatment

of language in the Vernon series, as two examples may show.

On the other hand, many of the poems are openly and simply

169

didactic, using the refrain to state a general moral precept, examples
of which are developed in the stanzas. The overall effect is to sug-
gest the homily of a parish priest. Brown XIV:115 is such a work.
Here is the first stanza.

The grete god so ful of grace

of whom al godnes growe ganne--

And alle bat listeneth me a space,

God childe hem from be fende satanne!

A litil word in my hert ranne,

I wole hit synge, 31f hit gou lest,

To gete be loue of god & man--

And al-wey fonde to say be best.
The speaker then proceeds straightforwardly to elaborate on his theme,
instancing the kinds of situations his dictum will encompass. The
fifth stanza suggests how widespread may have been the concern about
such tales as the speaker of the Harley lyric claims he now disowns,
though not precisely for the same reason that this speaker condemns
them:

In company 31f bat bou be

ber men speketh vilany,

jyve bou be tempted ’et turne be,

And ban dost bou a gret gentri.

A bad tale is ribaudi,

Hit gete no worship, est ne west,

For godis loue do cortesi,

And euer fond to say be best.
Such tales as "sownen into synne" are neither to be listened to nor re-
peated-~it is not sufficient simply to ignore them. Thus the Church's
moral counterthrust aims not at undoing damage already done, by con-
trary claims or virtuous counterexamples, but at stifling linguistic
production itself. In the uncomplicated moral universe of this poem,
such virtuous linguistic behavior can only produce the rewards of the

virtuous:

For good word may gete heuen blisse,

170
And do be lyue in ese & rest;
For cristis loue, tak a—tent to bis,
And euer fond to say be best.
But alongside this bright optimism the Vernon series also displays
a profound skeptical mistrust of the word, as can be seen in Brown XIV:

103. The speaker begins with a general condemnation of This World,

such as we have already become acquainted with, but his contemptus mun-

 

.Qi is soon discovered to be more specifically a contemptus orationi.

 

be mon bat luste to liuen in ese,

Or eny worschupe her to ateyne,

His purpos I counte not worb a pese,
Witterli, but he ordeyne

bis wikked world hou he schal plese
Wib a1 his pouwer and his peyne:

31f he schal kepe him from disese,
He mot lerne to flatere and feyne;
Herte & moub loke bei ben tweyne,
bei mowe not ben of on assent;

And git his tonge he mot restreyne,
For hos seib be sobe, he schal be schent.

The speaker casts this opposition between truth and falsehood in the
technical terms of the day which were used to distinguish not between
truth and untruth but between differing kinds of truth, simple literal
truth and the truth of interpretation, text and gloss:

bus is be sobe I-kept in close,

And vche mon makeb touh and queynte;

To leue be tixt and take be glose,

Eueri word bei coloure and peynte.
What is reflected here is doubtless the irritation of a Friar of one of
the preaching orders at the freedom with which anyone who had attained
some learning could apply the simple text—and-gloss analytical formula
to derive his own interpretation of scripture. But it is possible as
will that the speaker raises the point to rationalize (to himself?) the

notoriously poor treatment these mendicants received customarily at the

hands of the people whose welfare they ostensibly had in mind:

171
For let a frere in Godes seruise
be pereles to be peple preche,
Of vre misdede & vre queyntise,
be trewe tixt to telle and teche;
bau he beo riht witti and wyse,
3it luytel bonk he schal him reche.

The speaker's condemnation of the times in which he finds himself
is profound, even apocalyptic. What he sees as a universal sin against
language can only be cleansed by a horrible new vision of the Paracle-
tic tongues of flame announcing not the birth of wisdom but the death
of deceit:

Sebbe be tyme bat god was boren,

bis world was neuer so vntrewe;

Men recchen neuer to ben for-sworen,
To reuen bat is hem ful duwe;

be peynted word bat fel bi-forne,
Be-hynde, hit is anober hewe.

Whon Gabriel schal blowe his horn,
His feble fables shul hym rewe:

be tonges bat such bargeyn gon brewe,
Hit weore non harm bou; bei were brent.
bus bis gyle is founde vp of newe,
For hos seib sob, he schal be schent.

In the latter part of the Middle English period there is evidence
that the interpretational strategy alluded to here as "text and gloss"
itself becomes a kind of cult, capable of being exploited in a discourse-
deictic lyric. In order to understand the impulse that produced such
an apparently monotonous and banal moralizing as Brown XV:189, we need
to recognize in it the self-referential strain in which not merely lan-
guage but the whole analytical scheme from which language was felt to
derive its significance is present to itself. The "Song of 'Goods',"
as Brown entitles it, is far less a song about the nature of the good
than about the nature of song--and of language.

Each of the poem's four stanzas focusses on an aspect of goodness,

and it is in the arrangement and organization of these four distinct

172
aspects of goodness that the poem's self-referential interest lies.
The first stanza will illustrate the point:
While bou hast gode & getest gode,
for gode bou mdgt be holde;
Who hab no gode, he can no gode-—
a gode man so me tolde.
Hit is nogt gode for no gode
of gode forto be bolde;
But bi gode to god be gode
bi gode wil fail & folde.
Wib an .v. & an .I. gode wil come & goo,
but bi godes grounde be gode, bi gode wil worche be woo.
The stanza concerns itself with goods, in the sense of material posses-
sions; as the refrain lines suggest, they will come and go, and they
have no innate moral value. This level of analysis corresponds to the
literal level of scriptural interpretation in exegetical practice, in
accordance with the well-known mnemonic couplet "Littera gesta docet,
quid credas allegoria,/ Moralia quod agas, quo tendas anagogia." Each
of the following three stanzas in turn interprets the idea of the good
on the allegorical, moral (or tropological), and anagogical levels.
In the second stanza, the allegorical or belief-centered interpretation
of "good," the summarizing refrain says that "gode is gode to wisse,
for with gode bou miyt be gode, & bygge hevene blisse." The third, the
moral or tropological stanza, concerns itself with right action, and
ends with the refrain "gode is bat gode doth, ober gode was neuer gode
for certeyn & forsoth." And the final stanza, appropriately enough,
places the good within a cosmic perspective: "in gode is gode ende,
for al is gode which endeis gode & berto Crist vs sende."
The use of such a formal device announces, in a sense, the demise
of the original signification of the system upon which it is based.

If four-level exegetical interpretation were, for this speaker, a liv-

ing analytical strategy, he could not have used it to provide mere

173

exterior form for his work, however learned or clever the device may
have seemed to be. In order for the strategy to direct and control
the impulse toward polysemous reading, it must not itself be present
in the text to which it is to be applied. A system cannot be analyzed
in its own terms. Hence the fact that in this lyric it has become a
scarcely concealed organizational device argues that its living func-
tionality has passed into the fossilization of form. It is cult that
lacks the continual renewal of fresh revelation, and so is on the way

to becoming not cult but occult.

174

Notes

lFillmore, "Deixis II," p. 1—3.

2Dronke, pp. 14—15.
3Dronke, p. 24.
4Dronke, p. 30.

5Dronke, pp. 24—25.

6Brown XIII, p. 213.

7Brown XIII, pp. 228—29.

not a deictic poem.

Chapter VI: Poems Without Contexts

Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Sevenight fulle ant a—-
Sevenight fulle ant a--
Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Sevenightes fulle ant a

well was hire mete,
What was hire mete?
The primerole ant the-—
The primerole ant the--
Well was hire mete,
What was hire mete?

day.

The primerole ant the violet.

Well was hire dring,
What was hire dring?

The chelde water of the--
The chelde water of the--

Well was hire dring,
What was hire dring?

The chelde water of the welle spring.

Well was hire bour,
What was hire hour?
The rede rose an te-—
The rede rose an te--
well was hire bour,
What was hire bour?

The rede rose an te lilie flour.

175

By now it should be quite apparent what this poem is not: it
It contains not a single present tense verb, nor
a first or second person pronoun, nor a place-designating adverbial.
Its "situation of utterance" seems timeless, universal.

Yet, for all that, I do not think it is hard to see the shadowy

outlines of at least two speakers engaged in a conversation here.

176

the first stanza a speaker announces a topic for conversation and
asserts its tellability by repeating two quite remarkable statements:
that a maiden lay in the moor, and that she did so for seven full
nights and a day. The topic's tellability lies, in a word, in its
inconceivability. How should a maiden--a particularly vulnerable
and inexperienced human being--be lying in a moor--a particularly
sterile, inhospitable environment? And that for seven nights and a
day, enough time for her to need sustenance and shelter?

In the following three stanzas the suggestion of a new voice
can be heard raising just such questions in the second and sixth
lines. (If we assume, on the contrary, that the same speaker asks
the questions and answers them, their rhetorical effect is undercut
by the fact that the first line of each of these stanzas anticipates
the answer: "Well was hire mete," "Well was hire dring," "Well was hire
bour." On this reading a certain mechanical quality creeps into the
poem, one that hardly accords with the enchanting, even trancelike
quality critics of every interpretational persuasion have noticed in
it.1) The interpretive assumption of a new speaker to ask the ques-
tions, hence of a conversational dialogue, will give us a clue to a
satisfactory reading. Let us first examine some formal subtleties
that procede from this assumption and then ask what they might mean.

If we designate the fact that the maiden lay in the moor as Topic

A and the fact that she did so for a certain length of time as Topic

1
A2 the seven lines of the first stanza have the form A1A1A2A2A1A1A2.
This form is retained, in fact, even when the new speaker enters with

his questions in stanzas two, three, and four. They are simply WH-

questions derived by transformation from the statements in the first

177

lines. These questions in effect ask the first speaker to elaborate
on Topic A1. The first speaker does so, but only partially, in lines
three and four, which constitute TOpic A2. The incompletion of his
responses (marked both by their syntax, which demands a missing noun
phrase, and by their truncation of the four-beat metrical scheme) is
satisfied in the last line of each stanza, more accurately designated
as representing Topic A2_3. Hence the seven-line formal pattern
A1A1A2A2A1A1A2_3 corresponds to a form of the rhetorical device known

as enumeratio, the division of subjects into adjuncts, which is fur-

 

ther reflected in the relationship between the second, third, and
fourth stanzas and the first.2

Within each stanza the seven-line pattern of sub-topics corres-
ponds to a speech-situation pattern in which an initial speaker an-
nounces the topic (or sub-topic) with an assertion (line one), a sec-
ond speaker queries the assertion for specifics (line two), the first
speaker gives a partial answer (lines three and four) and repeats his
initial assertion (line five), the second speaker repeats his query
(line six), and the first speaker repeats his partial answer, adding
a second, seemingly final, detail (line seven).

The question in line six in each stanza, though it is identical
with the one in line two, seems to beg for the last piece of informa—
tion from a speaker who, thoroughly in control of the speech situation,
teasingly withholds it until the end. Why should he do this? I will
suggest two answers.

The first is a pragmatic one derived from the dynamics of the
conversation. It is desirable, as we have seen, to get and hold the

floor during a conversation. A participant competes for this privilege

178

and will claim it from someone else before the latter is entirely fin-
ished if that speaker cannot hold interest until the end. Thus the
withholding of a fascinating bit of information until the last, togeth-
er with a bit of artful advertising of its coming, tends to guarantee
the continued interest of one's auditors.

But more than this, to read the poem is to sense the presence of
real mastery of frugal resources. The presumptive speaker, on my read-
ing, certainly retains masterly control of the conversation, as I have
just suggested, and this with a very small stock of information. But
in this he resembles the poet himself, whoever that may have been, who
marshalls the sparest of verbal resources, sound or sense, to create a
lyric whose fascination continues to draw the attention of its readers,
beginning students and seasoned critics alike.

And finally, the maiden in the poem. Is she not amazingly the
mistress of her situation? She seems not merely to survive but to

flourish in an inhospitable environment. People lost in the wilderness

are supposed to grub for roots to eat and cower by fallen logs at night,

but the sources of her nourishment and shelter are pure, sweet, and
wholesome. The very ordinariness of primroses and violets, chill
spring water, roses and lilies suggests that what is alien for most of
us is perfectly familiar for her. In this effect lies true mastery.
What the poem conveys, then, is a sense of control. The first
speaker, the poet, and the maiden all manage to channel the unruly, to
master the intractable, for a certain space. Not that this implies
complete dominion for any of the three, for the accomplishment of each
is bounded: speakers cannot hold the floor forever, poets cannot come

pose poems of infinite length, maidens are not immortal. "This World"

179

is a place of transition, after all. But to confront that which would
defeat one--another speaker, a silence or a blank scrap of parchment,
a hostile environment--and to master it without subjugating it, is art.
The poetry of deixis lies very close to the origin of all litera-
ture in ordinary conversation, in men speaking to one another. To en-
gage in a conversation is to relinquish exclusive claim to the title
of Self; it is to engage in a confrontation with another--with thg_oth-
er, in fact--in a way that is inherently present within the texts of
poetry written in this economy. But the example of "Maiden in the mor
lay" shows us that even without the overt signals of a conversation in
progress Middle English poems draw upon the dynamics of the nuclear
speech situation and derive from it power, economy, and timeless inter-

ESt.

180
Notes

1I have borrowed the title for this chapter, together with this
edition of the poem, from a masterly and instructive article by Pro—
fessor J. A. Burrow, "Poems Without Context," Essays in_Criticism, 29:
pp. 6-32. A summary of the various interpretations of "Maiden in the
mor lay" alluded to will be found on p. 21. The article discusses what
is known and what may be surmised about each of the twelve items con-
tained on a leaf from.MS Rawlinson D. 913, including the present poem,
which is item 8. Interestingly, only one other item of the twelve,
number 2, is also lacking a specifically deictic context. It reads
in full "The godemon on his weye" and seems almost beyond speculation.
But Burrow means something different, of course, by "context" than I
do. He means, on the one hand, knowledge of "the title of the text,
who wrote it, when, for what occasion, for what audience, etc.," and
on the other, knowledge of its genre (p. 27).

2Reiss thinks "the method may be related to the rhetorical device
of merismus (distributio)" but this is certainly wrong. Merismus im-
plies a division of the whole into parts. In fact, the assumption
leads Reiss to speak of the poem's "fragmented thought," the different
parts of which the audience is led to "focus on" and "savor" one by
one, as though it were not one poem but several (p. 103). See Richard
A. Lanham, A_Handlist gf_Rhetorical Terms, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968) s.v.v. Distributio, Enumeratio.

 

 

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