Learning from Langland: theo-poetic resources for the post-Hind ...

is to open and close the gates of the kingdom. The narrator declares that he will not find
fault with the way in which the cardinals elected the pope since all was carried out
according to the demands of love and learning – ‘in love and letture the eleccion belongeth’
(B Prologue. 110). The words ‘love’ and ‘letture’ are blandly alliterated, as if no-one could
contest their compatibility, and then immediately undercut by the abrupt shift in the next
line:
‘Forthi I kan and kan naught of court speke more.’
(therefore I can and cannot say more about the court.)
Thus begins a process of interrogation of the uses to which the Church puts learning, and of
the relationship of learning to a life of love, and thus begins also a pattern of uncertainty as
to the stance and reliability of the narrative voice. Tone is hard to judge; the reader is
unsure as to where irony lurks and where not. An equivocal note is introduced to the
narrative, and some of the characteristics of the poem as a whole begin to appear: wordplay
(for example the punning on cardinal), a feature of the poem which A.C. Schmidt and Mary
Clemente Davlin expound in detail; the instability of the narrative voice; the various other
voices which make pronouncements, the truth or untruth of which we have to judge for
ourselves. 60 In part this drawing back from a position of outright criticism of king or pope
is to do with the political climate of the time, when between 1378-1406 there were
60 These characteristics are explored in depth by A.V.C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker, D.S.
Brewer, Cambridge, 1987; Mary Clemente Davlin, A Game of Heuene, D.S. Brewer,
Cambridge, 1989. For an analysis of wordplay in the B Text, see Bernard F. Huppe, ‘Petrus
id est Christus: Word Play in Piers Plowman, the B text’, ELH Vol. 17, No.3, Sept 1950,
pp. 163-190.
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