Bennett (1982:32) calls the upsurge of devotional verse in England in the thirteenth century:
. . . one of the greatest revolutions in feeling that Europe has ever witnessed . . . Beside this phenomenon the emergence of 'courtly love', so called, is a mere ripple on the surface of literature, though . . . the two developments are not entirely unrelated.
No exact date marking the onset of the mediaeval period of literature can be precisely defined, since the growth of the English language and its literature has ever been an organic process of flowering, pruning and grafting, so that the mediaeval era may be said to have developed almost imperceptibly from the Anglo-Saxon period.
Problems of anonymous, undated and incomplete source material, compounded by insufficient or inadequate palaeontological evidence, make it difficult to determine any exact year when the roots of the mediaeval literary period, which marked a flowering in Marian poetry in England, first penetrated English soil.
The main feature which distinguishes mediaeval Marian poetry from its more officially ecclesiastical, sonorous Anglo-Saxon ancestry is the introduction of the lyric.
There are many definitions of the word lyric and not every critic would agree with the one employed for our purpose, but the lyrics of mediaeval times may be dexcribed as narrative, descriptive or laudatory poems of varying size, in which the poet expresses his thoughts, beliefs and feelings on universal issues, whether secular or religious, in melodic metre and in tones often distinguished by rapt tenderness, warmth and spontaneity.
Woolf (1968:6) might not be expected to agree with this definition as she feels that the mediaeval poets not only took many of their religious lyrics from the Latin but borrowed their feelings accordingly:
Of course, all religious poets have their subject-matter provided but the medieval poets . . . not only . . . borrow the subject-matter and the techniques of display from a meditative tradition, but they also borrow with the subject-matter the emotion appropriate to it. Their personal moods and emotions are therefore not revealed in their poetry, for they are not concerned with the question of how they feel individually but only with what kind of response their subject should properly arouse in Everyman.
Though at first sight it may seem that Woolf here questions the poets' ability to enkindle emotion in the reader/hearer, this may not be the case - in fact in the second part of the quotation she stresses that this was precisely their aim.
The poet ignored his own self or his situation and instead imagined how Christ, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, experienced events such as the agony of the Passion or the joy of the Nativity.
As a result such poems fulfil the meaning of the world compassion in all its richness, challenging the reader to remain unmoved.
The view of Cholmely (1940:327), who discerns the mediaevals' sincere fervour and love of God and regards their Marian poetry as constituting a vehicle for their lvoe of the Blessed Virgin rather than as an end in itself, confirms this viewpoint:
In that England which was Mary's dowry, men were eager to offer their gift of poetry to her. The thirteenth and two succeeding centuries are gemmed with lyrics praising and compassionating her. These poems are, on the whole naive in form; they have the terseness and singlemindedness of a short story. They are arrows winged direct from the heart. Simile is seldom used; praise is . . . direct. There are two or three poems . . . whose lines pulse with a passion of wonder, but, for the most part, the lyrics have the simplicity and pathos of folksong music. They are prayers in verse. The unknown authors were not thinking of fame: their hymns are wrought for their Mother's glory.
It is the glorious spontaneity of many of these mediaeval lyrics which would become one of the most striking casualties of the demise of Marian poetry during and after the Reformation, and prove to be a sad loss to the corpus of English poetry.
Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette - for use copyright free for any worthy purpose
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