Good morning, afternoon, or evening, ladies, gentlemen, and everybody, and welcome to a spanking new episode of the Classic English Literature Podcast.  I hope you’re all doing splendidly (that’s a word I should like to use more often – splendid – so I will be trying to work it into my everyday vocabulary.  It’s just such a pleasant word: splendid).

I’m still looking for your advice and preferences for how to approach William Shakespeare on the podcast.  Let me know what you’d like to hear by emailing classicenglishliterature@gmail.com or by shooting me a message on the Instabook or Twit-toc.  Thank you very much to those who already have – I appreciate the feedback.

One more thing before we give rhyme its reason today, I need to offer a mea culpa: mea maxima culpa.  I was quite sloppy in our late Subcast bonus episode on Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and the Mystery Plays.  I mistranslated one of the Middle English passages.  I’m very sorry.  Usually, I write out translations to ensure some degree of accuracy, but for that episode, I translated on the fly, and away my accuracy flew.  Here is the offended passage: it’s Absalom’s serenade to Alisoun:

 He syngeth in his voys gentil and smal,

  "Now, deere lady, if thy wille be,

 I praye yow that ye wole rewe on me."

Now, I believe I garbled the last line as something like “I pray you will be true to me.”  Which is utter nonsense, dear listener, I know that now.  I should have known it then.  I misread the Middle English word “rewe” as “trewe” in my head, and the balderdash just spilled out.  “Rewe”, of course, is pity – think of our world “ruthless” which means something like “without pity.”  So a better translation of Absalom’s plaint to Alisoun is “I pray that you will have pity on me.”  As I do you, friend listener.  I beg your forgiveness.  My soul feels lighter.

I hope that my honesty has earned your approbation, so may I ask that you take a moment to like and subscribe to the podcast.  A posted positive review would assure me of your forgiveness as well as make the podcast more visible on platforms for new listeners.  If you’d like to help me keep the lights on and the mike hot, please consider a small donation by clicking the “Support the Show” button on the upper-right corner of the homepage.  I appreciate your indulgence.

Phew!  Today, we begin a bit of a transitional period in the podcast.  Roughly speaking, we’ve hit about the year 1500 in our historical survey and around this time, the culture of northern Europe, including England, begins to undergo a major shift in its worldview.  I am, of course, talking about the Renaissance – that period in which the glorious light of ancient Greece and Rome is reborn to scatter the darkness of a benighted medieval world.

I don’t believe a word of that, but it is the popular impression, though I hope our little talks have helped to convince you of its outrageous mendacity.  But we like our tidy little timelines, neat dates that carve up history into bite-size pieces.  450-1066: the Anglo-Saxon period.  1066-1485: the Middle Ages.  1485-1660: the Renaissance and Early Modern period.  Ah, would that eternity were so neatly divisible.  Of course it’s not, but we do have to admit that times change, attitudes change, and if such dates give us a bit of a handle on the amorphous shifts in the weltanschauung, who am I to complain?

We usually ballpark the end of the Middle Ages to around 1500 – actually, 1485 is the preferred date in English history because it’s the year Richard III thoughtlessly misplaced his horse at the Battle of Bosworth and Henry Tudor became Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch.  So, give or take a Tuesday, we’ll say that the podcast is entering the English Renaissance.

So today’s poet, John Skelton, is a good guy to start with.  He’s a transitional figure: the last medieval poet or the first Tudor?  Who can say?  Equally contested is his stature.  He has been called the first great Tudor poet.  Critic John M. Berdan called Skelton “the greatest English poet to have been born in the fifteenth century.”  But other poets, Alexander Pope, derided him as “beastly.”  Skelton, I feel, is pretty obscure now, even to English majors. 

In fact, when researching for this episode, I opened my own copy of the Oxford Anthology that was assigned for my undergraduate British literature survey and was surprised to find that I had annotations for the Skelton excerpts – I don’t even remember reading them!  Granted, my college years were nearly antediluvian, and the professor I had was not a paragon of pedagogy.  At the beginning of the semester, he handed you an exhaustive syllabus, detailing all the readings, the quiz dates, the prompts for essays and their due dates.  He directed you to the campus bookstore to purchase the Oxford doorstop, and then left you to your own devices for the next 14 weeks.  He sat in the front of the room reading the NY Times, figuring if you had a question, you’d ask it.  Otherwise, he presumed your competence. Not a great teacher, but I did enjoy his company.  Occasionally, during free blocks around lunchtime, we two would slip off to the local bar, fetchingly called The Dog, drink Rolling Rock longnecks and talk about TV shows – Northern Exposure being a favorite of the time. I didn’t learn a great deal of Brit Lit from this man, but I did do a fair amount of day-drinking, which, I think you’ll agree, most undergraduates would prefer.

Anyway, my original point was that Skelton is, for most poetry readers, at best a minor writer and at worst completely unknown.

Which is too bad, because he is kind of an impressive guy.  Born in the early 1460s, his scholarly reputation was already sufficient enough that William Caxton, the first English printer, referred to it in 1490, recalling “Master Skelton’s” poet laureateship, a degree in rhetoric.  Skelton also tutored the young Prince Henry, he that would go on to become Henry VIII with his clutch of wives.  And Skelton certainly knew upon which side his bread was buttered.  In the poem “Laud and Praise Made for Our Sovereign Lord the King,” written upon the 1509 accession of that most notorious of English monarchs, Skelton lays the groundwork for what would become the Tudor myth.  It is a tour de force of sycophancy (no judgment here – nascent tyrants should be stroked if you want to stay intact).  The young dynasty, under the new king, appointed by God’s grace to quell the land’s chaos after the Wars of the Roses.  Now, all is equanimity:

The Rose both White and Red

In one Rose now doth grow:

Thus thorough every stead

Thereof the fame doth blow.

Grace the seed did sow:

England, now gather flowers,

Exclude now all dolors.

Noble Henry the Eight,

Thy loving sovereign lord,

Of kings line most straight

His title doth record.

Got a little something there, John.  Brownish.  No, there, on your nose.  There you go, good man.

So the white rose of the Yorks and the red rose of the Lancasters now firmly grow in the one Tudor rose (a rose with both red and white petals, if you’ve never seen the symbol). But, while quite conscious of the value of tradition (both politically and literarily), Skelton would prove to be one of the more inventive poets in the language.

To be fair, much of his work stays within the lanes established by medieval literary tradition.  He wrote dream allegories, like “The Garland of Laurel,” which has antecedents in Langland, Gower, and Chaucer.  His satirical poem “Colin Clout,” which points out the corruption of the Church and aristocracy, is in the vein of much anti-clerical literature of the age, like Piers Plowman, spoken by a representative of the peasant class.  He wrote a morality play, “Magnificence,” that, kind of like Malory’s Morte, offered a prescription for the proper behaviour of the royal court and aristocracy.  So, certainly a man of the medieval tradition.

But his metrical skill and ingenuity points the way forward.  At a time when Chaucer’s introduction of the iambic pentameter line had begun to fall out of fashion (indeed, much verse of the 15th century is hardly remarkable), Skelton experimented with short, clipped lines with a curt, punchy rhythm.  We now call his style “Skeltonics.”  In general, a Skeltonic line contains two or three stressed syllables, often emphasized by alliteration, with a single rhyme pattern (usually over two to four lines, but sometimes up to 14). Anaphora, or the repeating of a word at the beginning of successive clauses, also makes frequent appearances.  Here’s an oft-anthologized example, a genial blazon of feminine virtues:

To Mistress Margaret Hussey

Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as a falcon
Or hawk of the tower:

With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly
Her demeaning
In every thing,
Far, far passing
That I can indite,
Or suffice to write
Of Merry Margaret
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower.

As patient and still
And as full of good will
As fair Isaphill,
Coriander,
Sweet pomander,
Good Cassander,
Steadfast of thought,
Well made, well wrought,
Far may be sought
Ere that ye can find
So courteous, so kind
As Merry Margaret,
This midsummer flower,
Gentle as falcon
Or hawk of the tower.

James VI called it “tumbling verse,” for the rhythm seems to tumble off the page.  The effect of the meter varies depending on the context of the poem, but it’s this brusque, frenetic style that lead to writer George Puttenham’s complaint of Skelton’s “rude railing” (rude, in this case, meaning unsophisticated, not necessarily bawdy).

Critics note that in some ways, Skelton points toward later Elizabethan and eighteenth century poets like Edmund Spenser, the aforementioned Pope, and Thomas Gray, whose “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” of the 1740s finds its antecedent in the poem that today’s episode will focus on, John Skelton’s “The Book of Philip Sparrow.”

“Phillip Sparrow” is a mock elegy, that is, a poem of serious reflection (an elegy), the subject of which is ill-suited to the genre.  This poem commemorates the death of a young girl’s pet sparrow, Phillip, at the paws of the vicious cat Gib.  Skelton posits the young girl, Jane Scroop, being educated at Norwich’s Carrow Abbey, as the speaker, officiating at the funeral of her lost bird.

The poem borrows heavily from the Office of the Dead, the Roman Catholic liturgical prayers for the repose of the soul.  At the beginning, Jane speaks of the circumstances of Phillip’s death, begs that his soul be remembered in the telling of the Rosary, details her great grief, recalls pleasant memories.  About halfway through part 1, Jane launches a vicious diatribe against cats, with a disturbing catalog of the punishments and tortures she wishes befall them.  There follows an imagined congregation of the entire avian kingdom, like a state funeral.  Finally, Jane offers to produce an epitaph for poor Phillip, but before doing so goes on a digressive listing of all the writers she has and has not read, asserting her maid-like humility.  Thus ends part 1 of the poem.  Parts 2 and 3, which will not concern us today, concern Skelton’s ruminations on young Jane’s beauty and then an explanation of why such was necessary, respectively.

But let’s look at the very beginning of the lament.  Here are the first few lines:

Pla ce bo!
Who is there, who?
Di le xi!
Dame Margery,
Fa, re, my, my.
Wherefore and why, why?

The first line, the word “placebo” broken up into three separate phonemes, as is the third line “dilexi”, comes from the antiphon and the Psalm of Vespers of the Office of the Dead.  Dividing the syllables in this way suggests plainchant or Gregorian chant.  They mean, by the way, “I will please” and “I love” respectively.  Dame Margery, of Carrow Abbey (the scene of the crime) is present.  Line five – fa re my my – sounds like nonsense, until one realizes these are musical notes.  Finally, lines 2 and six, pained interrogatives, alliterate the “H” and “W” sounds of the letter “W.”

All this strikes me as way, way ahead of its time.  There is something proto-modernist here – the fragmented syllables and musical scale indicating song, the macaronic verse, the ritual allusion, the letter “W” doing sonic-double-duty, the implied listener, the sense of despair, the near stream-of-consciousness voicing.  I could easily see TS Eliot writing like this – it wouldn’t be out of place in “The Wasteland” or something by Ezra Pound.  I’d believe you if you told me it was written in 1908, not 1508.

Yet, Skelton also deftly manages to have the versification underscore the youth and innocence of the speaker.  It can have a nursery rhyme feel that reminds the reader of Jane’s girlhood.  As a sidebar, we don’t know how old Jane Scroop was when bereft of poor Pip the sparrow.  The poem could have been written no later than 1508 as Alexander Barclay scoffed at it in his adaptation of Sebastian Brant’s “Ship of Fools” of 1509.  Jane Scroop’s birthdate remains unknown, so it’s altogether possible that she was not a child when her pet died, but Skelton’s rhythmic choices clearly present her as one, and one for whom the death is a monumental event.

Of course, this brings up the tension between the implied juvenescence of the speaker and the astounding learnedness she displays. Not only is this putative child family enough with the Office of the Dead to adapt it, she dazzles with repeated and copious allusions to classical mythology, world geography, Catholic liturgy, natural philosophy, Stoicism, history, and literature.  To be sure, the bulk of her text consists of these displays of knowledge.  Nor do they appear half-digested or ill-remembered as one might expect from so fresh a mind. The poem also handily uses rhetorical strategies like demonstration, exclamation, and digression (rhetoric, of course, being Skelton’s jam).  Is all this just Skelton flexing?  Well, I won’t discount the charge.   

And I don’t mean to be dismissive or indeed disrespectful.  I don’t want to appear as if I’m pointing out a major gaffe in Skelton’s poem.  I hate it when my students, because they don’t understand a text, charge the text with being impenetrable rather than reflecting on their own, perhaps, insensitivity to its nuances.  Maybe I’m falling into that very trap.

But I do have a hard time resolving what strikes me as a major aporia: Skelton’s ironic tone and Jane’s earnest grief.  As I said, it’s a mock elegy, and the “mock” part gets its power from the fact that such intense feeling and solemn ritual are expended on the trivial death of a bird.  Jane recalls

When I remember again

How my Phillip was slain

Never half the pain

Was between you twain,

Pyramus and Thisbe,

As then befell to me.

Pyramus and Thisbe, you may recall, are ill-fated lovers from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who commit suicide when they think their beloved is dead – a main source for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  So I suppose we’re meant to smile knowingly at the child’s hyperbolic grief.  Again:

I sighed and I sobbed

For that I was robbed

Of my sparrow’s life.

O maiden, widow, and wife,

Of what estate ye be,

Of high or low degree,

Great sorrow then you might see

And learn to weep at me!

But here’s why I don’t smile indulgently.  Because the loss of a pet is often a child’s first experience with death, the first move from innocence to experience.  The poem, from Jane’s point of view, marks a significant coming-of-age event, and this can trigger psychopathological symptoms that can recur for years.  

And Jane is, physically too, coming of age.  I don’t want to dwell too much on it, because psycho-sexual readings of literature often conceal more than they reveal, but we shouldn’t overlook Jane’s references to “my breasts soft” and the curious sexual undertones to Phillip Sparrow, who was “wont to repair / and go in at my spare / and creep in at my gore.”  Now, that word “gore” is a bit rich.  Its primary meaning is thick, clotted blood.  Of course, it’s also a verb – to pierce or penetrate or stab.  But it also comes from an Old English word gara that meant a triangular piece of ground, which came from an Old Frisian word for a piece of cloth, especially a three-cornered one sewn into the front of a skirt.  So, putting all this together we do get a sense of a girl undergoing puberty.  At the moment of sexual maturity and its physical manifestations, she also undergoes a consequential psychological blow.

Let’s take a look at the persona of the poem and try to suss out what she may be doing.  She’s presiding over a funeral, using the Office of the Dead.  I think there are two things going on here, psychologically.  One, Jane is imitating the behavior of adults, what psychologists call “modeling.”  Modeling allows children not only to learn the modes of being and behavior expected in a given culture; it also fosters in them a sense of identity and belonging.  It’s a socializing behavior.  And in this particular case, in which grief and anger are central emotions, such a sense of belonging also mitigates those powerful emotions, channeling the responses into ritual expurgations.  And this seems to be a universal human behavior, probably rooted in some hard-wired genetics and not the by-product of a particular environment.

Furthermore, the fact that those rituals exist – like the Office of the Dead – provides a framework allowing Jane to situate her loss in a larger system of signification.  Her feelings cease being abstract and untethered – instead, the prayers and the ritual give those feelings significance, they give them meaning. Experiential meaning is a sine qua non of mental health and maturity.

Additionally, we notice that Jane frequently anthropomorphizes the animals involved; that is, she gives animals human characteristics and behaviors. Phillip Sparrow wore a velvet cap and “learned after my school” how to behave properly.  She teaches him (more modeling).  Jane gives Gib, the cat, agency: “That cat specially / that slew so cruelly / my pretty little sparrow.”  She presumes a motive and intention beyond mere instinctual hunger.  In an apostrophe, Jane curses, “O cat of carlish kind, the fiend was in thy mind, when thou my bird untwined.”  Again, agency, motive (with a dash of demon-possession, evidently).  In the “state funeral” of birds she casts the robin as the priest, the popinjay will read the Gospel and the mavis an Epistle.  Puffins and teals will distribute alms to the poor.

This type of thing is not unknown to us – the bulk of children’s entertainment today features anthropomorphic animals.  But why do we do this? To imagine the minds of others, to evade a solipsistic conception of the world.  As such, anthropomorphizing helps children (and most adults, I would venture – you talk to your dog, yes you do!), anthropomorphizing helps foster connectedness to others, which cultivates empathy while reducing anxiety.  We make better sense of complex events.

In 1890, psychologist and philosopher William James delineated the distinction between “I” and “me.”  Using the grammatical metaphor, he defined the “me” as the “self as object”: how one reflects about oneself, the descriptors one would use to describe oneself, something of a detached appraisal – seeing yourself perhaps the way others would see you.  He defined the “I” as the “self as subject.”  Here, one perceives oneself doing things, being an active agent in the world, capable of self-directed thought and action.

Jane is doing all of this in her lament for her lost pet.  She embraces a ritual and verbal  framework that gives significance to her experience and then models the behavior of adults to activate that framework.  By doing so, she begins to imagine other lives, other minds, other ways of being that allow her to see herself as a self, a unique psychology in the world. 

And that’s what I think is remarkable about this poem.  Maybe you didn’t even notice, because it’s so common, so normal, for us.  But Jane speaks in the first person, the “I”, and articulates her emotional, physical, and spiritual experience from the position of a unique conscious being.  We’ve not really seen this before in our literature.  The closest we’ve gotten may be the Anglo-Saxon elegies, but I don’t feel the same psychological intimacy with those speakers as I do with young Jane’s persona.  Jane is not a figure of bathos, to be condescendingly patted on the head with a cooing, “Aw, isn’t she cute?  Poor girl! So dramatic at this age!”  This is the “thinking I.”  And this, I would argue, is really where that shift in the weltanschauung begins.  This recognition of the inchoate singular self underlies the philosophy of humanism, which will steadily erode the hegemony of the medieval world as it clutches toward modernity.