Mediæval Poetry in Praise of the Blessed Virgin (Part Five) - The Blessed Virgin's Appeal

MEDIAEVAL POETRY IN PRAISE OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN [PART FIVE]

THE BLESSED VIRGIN'S APPEAL

 
A fourteenth-century poem in two quatrains offers an alternative to the quiescence of the Blessed Virgin implicit in the foregoing thirteenth-century quatrain. The Blessed Virgin's Appeal is a plaintive cry from a mother who, while she expects no justice, finds her flesh and blood rebelling against the ignominious and unjust treatment meted out to her Son:

     THE BLESSED VIRGIN'S APPEAL

    Wy haue ᵹe no reuthe on my child?          pity
    Haue reuthe on me ful of murni (n) g        mourning
    Taket doun on rode my derworþi child     on/from . . . to precious
    or prek me on rode with my derling          nail . . . to the cross

    More pine ne may me ben don                 cannot be inflicted
    þan laten me liuen in sorwe & shame       to let
    as loue me bindet to my sone                    binds
    so lat vs dqyᵹen boþen i-same                 die both together 

There is an intensity of pain in the plaintive cry of the first line; the incredulous appeal from a mother so 
grief-stricken that she is unable to summon the energy for indignation. Loving her child as she does, she clearly cannot understand how others could treat him with anything less than tenderness. In the second stanza, she strikes a note of firmness; if they have no compassion on her Son and will not take him down from the cross, there is a way they can satisfy their vengefulness and lessen her heartache at the same time: they can nail her to hang beside him. In its depiction of the tender, yearning mother love of Mary for her crucified Son, this poem illustrates the Catholic belief that devotion to the Blessed Virgin is but a step in enhancing the Christian's love for God, so that hyperdulia serves to bring people closer to him, rather than separating them from the Godhead.

As is the case with Sunset on Calvary, the mainly monosyllabic text serves to emphasise the stark anguish of a mother more than any intricately-composed protest would have done. The profundity of the sorrow of the mother who sees her innocent child in torment without being able to do anything to alleviate his anguish does not permit of garrulity. It is all Mary can manage to state her case before she recalls her child and calls him by the tender mediæval term of endearment; my derling (4) ]my little dear]. The counfoundingly unadorned appeal; Or prek me on rode (4) [or nail me to the cross] suitably precedes the words  
with my derling. Whereas her child earns the dignity of so gentle an appellation of praise, Mary's own fate is disdained; being nailed to the cross herself cannot be worse than being forced to behold the child of her heart a prey to this fate. As with reuthe, so too does the Dutch word for derworþi (3) [dierbaar/dierbare: beloved/precious] have a far more heart-linked connotation in the sense of beloved or worthy of love than a simple translation such as   "dear worthy" which could be interpreted as "expensively valuable", almost literally meaning "precious" or of high prize, since the English translation, unlike the Dutch one, by being seen as reducing love to a valuable commodity, appears to attempt to quantify pricelessness.

In the second quatrain the mother contemplates the horror of a future without her Son; a future vision of sorrow and shame. As love binds her to her Son she longs to die beside him rather than remain behind all alone. The compassion of the anonymous poet could not emerge more clearly if it were his own child dying in agony on the cross and he were the parent ordained to witness the dreadful sight. Yet he is absent from the poem - the "I" is Mary - an example of the "abnegation of individuality" to which Woolf (1968:6) refers.

Dr Luky Whittle

pdf; Theology and Poetry in the Middle English Lyric; A Study 
https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Weber%20Theology/08.pdf
With thanks to Ohio State Press