Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 7

Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the Day, such as the
Ormulum, or Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints;
poems in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five
joys of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell,
the seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment, and
dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only
of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in {25} smaller part of
the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety and
superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the marvelous, the
allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material
horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body
and the loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then a
single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the
general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely
personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in
his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve Ron (A
Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of
which recalls the French poet Villon's Balade of Dead Ladies, with its
refrain.
"Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?" "Where are the snows of yester year?
Where is Paris and Heleyne That weren so bright and fair of blee[1]
Amadas, Tristan, and Idéyne Yseudë and allë the,[2] Hector with his
sharpë main, And Caesar rich in worldës fee? They beth ygliden out of

the reign[3] As the shaft is of the dee." [4]
A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of
mention, among others, The Owl and the Nightingale, generally
assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an Estrif, {26} or
dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the
aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation
and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The Land of Cokaygne is an
amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, belonging to the class
of fabliaux, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse. It
describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where the geese fly down all
roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the bills for their dressing, and
where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of
white monks and gray, whose walls, like the hall of little King Pepin,
are "of pie-crust and pastry crust," with flouren cakes for the shingles
and fat puddings for the pins.
There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a
single collection (Harl, MS., 2253), which are almost the only English
verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are
written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes
have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical, fresh,
simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the gladness of
spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and woodruff.
"When the nightingalë sings the woodës waxen green Leaf and grass
and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, And love is to my hertë gone
with a spear so keen, Night and day my blood it drinks my hertë doth
me tene."[5]
{27} Others are love plaints to "Alysoun" or some other lady whose
"name is in a note of the nightingale;" whose eyes are as gray as glass,
and her skin as "red as rose on ris." [6] Some employ a burden or
refrain.
"Blow, northern wind, Blow thou me, my sweeting. Blow, northern
wind, blow, blow, blow!"

Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.
"Winter wakeneth all my care Now these leavës waxeth bare. Oft I sigh
and mournë sare When it cometh in my thought Of this worldes joy,
how it goeth all to nought"
Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed
in the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry
united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry
and the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the
soul, had made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of
the 13th century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English Golden
Legend, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on saints'
days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church
Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael; partly
from the calendar of the English Church, as the {28} lives of St.
Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin--who is