Dissertation on Birds of Prey and the Sport - the Falconry Heritage ...

The exact topic of this poem is a vexed question among German scholars. It may be a
woman's lament for her lost lover; it may also be a "Wechsel", a poem spoken by two
voices, here the knight and the lady, who are far apart and hoping to see each other.24 It
is impossible to say whether this poem or others in German like it, in which falcons,
symbolizing lovers, are trained and fly away, would have had any influence on this
Tuscan tenzone of the following century. Similarity can also be noted between the Italian
poem and Chaucer's Squire's Tale, in which a lady falcon complains that she has been
betrayed by her falcon lover.'' All that can be said for certain is that the theme of the
falcon leaving its owner or lover can be found in a variety of European literature, because
of the widely accepted correspondence between falconry and love.
The lover as a falcon can be viewed also in a positive light: the falcon or hawk,
when it is well cared for, being content to stay with its owner is used as an image of the
happy lover. Guido Orlandi, a Florentine contemporary of Guido Cavalcanti, provides a
canzone full of hunting images used to illustrate his willing return to serve Love, despite
having once been free of it:
Come servo francato
sono servo d'Amore,
membrandomi l'onore,
e il ben ch'io presi nel primiero stato.
Stato gioioso presi di lui tanto,
ch'io mi potria dar vanto,
s'io ne volessi dir quanto riservo,
e rinnovello d'amore di tanto.
Porto cortese manto,
libero sono, e confessomi servo,
e fo siccome il cervo:
passando a corso lento,
dimostrasi leggiero,
24 See Hatto and McDonald for these views and several others besides.
25 The Squire's Tale is discussed in Chapter 1.