Maidstone A.XIII

One of the manuscripts I looked at this summer, Maidstone A.xiii, has the lyric "Man mei longe him liues wene." I should say that it's actually a song lyric: the Maidstone witness has music above it.

Here are the words, edited by Carleton Brown, English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century.

Man mei longe him liues wene
ac ofte him liyet þe wreinch
fair weder ofte him went to rene
an ferliche maket is blench .

Here's my ad hoc translation:

Man may imagine a long life for himself
but often a trick awaits him
his fair weather often turns to rain
and filthy turns the sunshine .

The song lyric is edited by Brown as having short octosyllabic lines, but such breaks are not evident in the copy text. I think I'd favour longer lines, perhaps with spaces between line sections to emphasize the line-internal rhymes. Still, I guess the rhymes indicate what we would now think of as poetic line breaks, in English poetry, anyway.

There is however a punctus after “blench,” suggesting that it might be good to pause the stanza here. This seems important given the sense of the phrase. "Fair weather often turns to rain / and dreadful turns the sunshine” is a nice chiasmus which plays upon the similar-sounding “fair” and “ferliche.” ("Ferliche" could be suddenly, as well as dreadfully--here I used "filthy" just because it sounds better.)

I see a similar kind of wordplay going on with "longe" and "wene"--I think the sense is "long life" but there is a play on longing for or yearning for a long life. There is also a distinctive Anglo-Saxon alliterative echo here: “man mei” is echoed by “maket,” and the “w” of wene, wreinch, and weder also echo throughout the phrase. The other repeating sound is “l” (longe, liues, liyet, blench).

I don’t usually think of alliterative poetry as having been sung; shame on me. Maybe it's because in English studies my focus is so often on the words, to the exclusion of all else. I haven't seen any articles on the music of this song, and it's not in DIAMM from what I can see.

This song is indexed as NIMEV 2070.

Multiple “Sayings”

Accumulation of Meaning in “The Sayings of St. Bernard”

The short lyric “The Sayings of St. Bernard” appears in several late-medieval manuscripts. There is, therefore, significant dialect variation between the poem’s extant copies: Oxford, Bodleian, Digby 86 (SC 1687); London, British Library MS Harley 2253; Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1; Oxford, Bodleian, Eng. Poet. a. 1 (SC 3938); Oxford, Bodleian, Laud Misc. 108 (SC 1486), and Oxford, Bodl. Add. E6(a) (SC 30314). Moreover, since the Digby 86 copy has been called the “archetypal text,” it is intriguing that this copy appears to cut the poem short. A rubricated title in Digby 86 is, to some critics, a sign that the second part of “The Sayings of St. Bernard” is an entirely new poem: the “Ubi sount qui ante nos fuerount.” In addressing this controversy, I deploy techniques of dialect analysis that Frances McSparran uses with the Harley 2253 manuscript. By analyzing differences in the forms of the pronouns “them” and “their,” I suggest that the Digby 86 scribe considered the “Sayings” and the “Ubi Sount” to be separate poems. I also argue that the poems were circulated in the north of England prior to being copied into Digby 86. My question is how these two poems came to be considered as one. To this end, I propose to uncover a literary relationship between body-and-soul dialogues and the ubi sunt topos which exists in other body-and-soul poems. By evaluating the poem’s literary forms, dialectal evidence, and manuscript evidence, I work to reveal a multiplicity of textual origins in the poem. If a word is “a bridge thrown between myself and another,” then the poems’ pronouns, like its imagery and titles, are bridges between multiple places, times, and meanings.

[Abstract for a talk at the Conference on Editorial Problems, Toronto, Canada, November 6-8, 2009]