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| Image by Catherine Nicolette. With thanks to the Wall Artist |
The poetic examples in the previous posts, which were taken from the vast mass of mediæval Marian lyrics, were selected because of the ways in which they represent some of the various trends encompassed in the entire corpus. There are other poems as well-known as - and some even better-known than - several of the examples cited, which might be considered more suitable for the present purpose. However, since an examination of text books on the topic of mediæval lyrics reveals a tendency on the part of some writers to keep harking back to the same examples, it was decided to include some unfamiliar and perhaps less meritorious ones, in an effort to introduce new perspectives on the corpus of Marian poetry.
Incorporating the majority of trends manifested in mediæval lyrics as they do, the mediæval lyrics presented here have among their uniting factors the fact that rhyme is a common feature of all the examples. Rhyme is an aid to memorisation, a practice that might have been deemed desirable at that time by teachers of religion such as William of Shoreham 1 and John Grimestone, in a bid to ensure that those to whom they taught their catechism would remember the lessons, as many of their pupils might have been illiterate while others, though able to read, might not have had easy access to textbooks. In fact this belief in memorisation of poetry and scriptural texts has been honoured by educationists and carried well into the latter part of the twentieth century (although during the past few decades "parrot learning" appears to have acquired a bad reputation).
This would support the view that mediæval lyrics (in contrast to modern ones) might have been intended for use by others as prayers, or as aids to devotional meditation. This point, which appears to be generally believed to be true of mediæval religious lyrics as a whole, might account for the profusion of the flowering of poetry in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages, which constituted the Golden Age of the religious lyric.
What the mediæval Marian lyric did for Christians of the era was to bring a mother figure into their homes and hearts. Unsophisticated and untutored as many of them were, their deep fear of God tied up with their atavistic dread of the unknown. As the second person of the Divine Trinity, Christ was likewise to be feared. Though He had redeemed them, they were a contrite people whose knowledge of their own sinfulness caused them to remain unsure as to how they stood with Him. The Marian lyrics taught them that in Mary they had a link with Christ, that she was not only His mother but theirs also, since, shortly before His Death on the Cross, Christ had given her to John, and by implication to themselves. They felt perfectly at home with Mary, questioning neither her virginal conception of her Son nor her own Immaculate Conception since they believed these graces not to have come about by her own power but through the power of God working within her. If God worked such miracles through Mary, could she not obtain the miracle of easing their passage to Heaven from him? Their feeling of security in respect of Mary probably accounts for much of the warmth and tenderness found in the mediæval Marian lyric.
The poetic merit of the genre should not be seen as tarnished by its apparent simplicity. It is far from certain that those who wrote these poems were unacquainted with the lofty Latin and Greek traditions of poetry. Even if they were unfamiliar with secular classical poetry, since the majority were probably Church-educated, they were bound to be acquainted with ecclesiastical panegyrics. To discard the lofty poetic traditions from their lyrics in favour of an unselfconscious spontaneity may well have been a deliberate attempt by the poets to make their work accessible, understandable and useful to those of the faithful who, though lacking in education and intellectual insight, were not short on faith.
Despite - or perhaps on account of - their simplicity, the lyrics at times reach a high degree of skill and beauty. According to Woolf (1968:14-15) :
The unselfconsciousness of these poems not only saves them
from the censure of later ages, but also, at its best,
produces works where, through the transmission of the
meaning of the subject-matter to the audience, often for
practical purposes, may have been the primary aim, the
result is a poetry which surpasses much of the work of later
writers striving more consciously for "art".
Art for art's sake was soon to come to England, however, and the death knell of the devotion to Mary was about to be sounded along with that of the Marian lyric, which for centuries had flowed from the child-like faith of the Christian lyricist of the era and become an integral part of English literature.
Dr Luky Whittle
1. William of Shoreham
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