History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to SwinburneLang, Andrew
History
History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne
Lang, Andrew
English literature -- History and criticism
The sun rises fair in France,
And fair sets he,
But he has tint the bonny blink
He has in my ain countrie,
writes the Jacobite exile, accustomed at home, only to a "blink" or
gleam of the sun through clouds. After 1520, or thereabouts, Dunbar saw
no more of the sun.
Dunbar, with his satires, "flytings," Court poems, allegories of the
usual kind, rhymed petitions, poems of penitence and faith, and the
rest, was versatile enough, and wrote in many forms of verse, even in
the old unrhymed alliterative cadences ("The tua Mariit Wumen and the
Wedo"). To his glory be it said that this, his longest piece, is only
of 530 lines. He also used the heroic rhymed couplet, "Riding Rhyme,"
and the rhymed octosyllabic couplet, strophes of various arrangements,
and even the tripping French triolet.
One allegorical poem, "The Golden Targe," full of classical mythology
and the usual praise of May, contains the lines
O reverend Chaucere, Rose of rethoris all,
As in our tong are flour imperiall,
"rethoris," being masters of rhetoric.
Dunbar escapes from Venus and other gods, and from a crowd of
allegorical people--including Danger, of course,--at the end of 278
lines. Apparently Scotland did not love the long-winded style. The
"flyting" combines with rhyme copious alliteration.
For wealth of strange coarse terms of abuse Dunbar may compare with
Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais. A poem to the young Queen is
unspeakably nauseous. In short to be plain, it is not easy to see why
Dunbar has been reckoned above James I and Henryson; while Barbour,
with a chivalrous heart and a spirited story, is infinitely more
agreeable and profitable than the Court-haunting priest of James IV. In
Scotland, Dunbar at no time has been so popular as the poets already
mentioned. He praises Chaucer, but the lesson of Chaucer he never fully
learned.
Blind Harry.
Blind Harry, or "Henry the Minstrel," is a mysterious personage. Who
was Harry? John Mair or Major (1469-1550) (?) is not an accurate
historian; the Antiquary, in Scott's novel, calls him "a pillar of
falsehood". Major says that, in his own infancy (say 1480) a man blind
from his birth wrote "Schir William Wallace," and supported himself by
chanting it to the nobles. The manuscript is of 1488. A few entries of
small sums paid to "Blind Harry" occur in the Royal accounts, ending
in 1492, and Harry was dead when (1508) Dunbar printed his Lament for
poets dead and gone. Harry may have become blind, but can hardly have
been blind from his birth. Though he calls himself "a borel man," an
unlettered man, he had some education; he was not a ballad maker, but
produced a romance of nearly 12,000 lines. He says that he had a Latin
source, a narrative written by Wallace's chaplain, John Blair, of which
nothing is known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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