Brief History of English and American Literature | Page 7

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 Yseud? and all? the,[2] Hector with his sharp? main, And Caesar rich in world?s 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 nightingal? sings the wood?s waxen green Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, And love is to my hert? gone with a spear so keen, Night and day my blood it drinks my hert? 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 leav?s waxeth bare. Oft I sigh and mourn? 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 mentioned by Shakspere--and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in the Nonne Presto's Tale. The verse was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. Brandan's search for the earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris.
About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of