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The Scottish Chaucerians
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to pervade Scottish writing through the centuries, especially after the
severe and highly influential Protestant theology of the Swiss-based
reformer Jean Calvin (1509–64) took hold. Henryson gives us a neat
early example of this ‘binary’ of joy and pain.
Yit efter joy oftymes cummis cair
And troubill efter grit prosperitie . . .
Henryson’s The Moral Fables of Aesop the Phrygian, from which these
lines come, are moralities in the Aesop vein, but show a great sympathy
for the animals, like this mouse who was dancing for joy:
The sweet season provoked us to dance
And make such mirth as nature to us learned.
Again, as in Chaucer, the reader is left to judge. Human roles are
examined and questioned as the reader recognises and identifies with
the characters of the fable.
William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers is about poets (‘makers’) –
including Chaucer, Gower, and Henryson – and the fact that they die.
This intimation of his own mortality troubles Dunbar, and he makes it
into a Latin line, one of the most resonant of repeated lines in poetry.
The last line of each stanza goes:
Timor mortis conturbat me. [The fear of death does trouble me.]
This is the first great work which concentrates on death as the ultimate
leveller, which brings ‘all estates’ to the same end. Dunbar, conscious
in his writings of the immortality of his own work, anticipates one of
the major concerns of Renaissance poetry: the transitory nature of
all human achievement.
The stait of man dois change and vary,
Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,
Now dansand, mery, now like to dee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
We have come a long way from the Anglo-Saxon celebration of
heroic valour, and are heading rapidly towards the new world of the
Renaissance, where Protestant and Humanist values will dominate.