the ups and downs of court life and its politics, dancing, eating, the corruption of friars and monks, the beauties of London and his desperate need for just a bit more money. But it would be a shame to leave this wonderful writer without his greatest poem, which returns us to the ubiquitous presence of death in late-medieval Britain. Plagues, hunger and disease, not to mention wars, raiding and executions, meant that corpses were a common sight and life expectancy was short. Bodies were generally buried close to the church or under its stones, which must have meant that the smell of decomposition was something everybody knew.
In ‘Lament for the Makars’, his elegy for dead poets, Dunbar gives full vent to his terror of death. We are told that he wrote the poem when he was sick himself, and there is nothing quite like it in British medieval poetry. Timor mortis conturbat me means, roughly speaking, ‘The fear of death upends me.’
I that in hail wes, and gladnes
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infermite;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Our pleasance heir is all vane glory,
This fals warld is bot transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
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.
The stanza that follows, in which Dunbar compares life to the wind rushing through reeds (‘wicker’), seems to me a small miracle of poetic skill, in which the rhythm and the meaning are indistinguishable:
No stait in erd heir standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this warldis vanite;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Death, says Dunbar, has taken the best from all the estates of life – heavily armed knights in the field, babies at the breast, champions, captains and beautiful ladies. Death has taken magicians and astrologers, rhetoricians, theologians, surgeons, physicians, and above all poets:
He hes done petuously devour,
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour,
The Monk of Bery, and Gower, al thre,
Timor mortis conturbat me.
And he is taking Scotland’s poets one by one, not forgetting Dunbar’s old enemy:
In Dumfermelyne he has done roune
With Maister Robert Henrisoun …
… Gud Maister Walter Kennedy
In poynt of dede lyis verily,
Gret reuth it were that so suld be;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
And so, eventually, that great clanging Latin bell can’t be avoided by Dunbar himself, as he well knows:
Sen he hes all my brether tane,
He will nocht lat me lif alane,
On forse I man his nyxt me be;
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The poem has a special poignancy because, not so long after it was written, William Dunbar’s whole world was destroyed on the battlefield. In 1513 his king and patron James IV honoured a treaty with the French and invaded Northumberland, where he was confronted by the Earl of Surrey and a large English army. What followed has been described as the last great medieval battle on British soil. Though both sides used artillery, not to great effect, most of the killing was done with billhooks and spears. James, who had lingered in chivalric manner before the battle, giving the English plenty of time to prepare, was slaughtered along with a dozen earls, almost all the senior clergy of Scotland and most of the chieftains – a shattering blow to a country just emerging from a long period of feuding. The short Scottish renaissance that James had symbolised, with its poets, architects, shipwrights and men of letters, came to a juddering halt. Timor mortis, indeed.
* This translation is by A.S. Kline.
* This modern translation is taken from the Harvard internet site.
* Translation from the poetryintranslation website.
* In Scots-English, ‘yak’ means ache; to ‘mak’ is to write poetry – still in Scotland today ‘makar’ means poet; and a ‘ganyie’ is an arrow.
3
In all the periods of poetry we’ve looked at so far, there is nothing quite as extraordinary as what happens in the 1500s – that great, bloody and turbulent century of Reformation. We begin it with the clearly medieval figures of the Chaucerians. Even if Dunbar feels different, it’s still a recognisably medieval world, crammed with religious meaning and allegory, in which the old stories are still popular, whether Aesop or Arthur. We end the 1500s, however, with William Shakespeare nearing his zenith, and a fresh universe of new poets who feel almost modern in their directness. It’s not that one world dies and a new one is born. Things aren’t like that. But the great age of Catholic Christianity, the age of Latin learning, polychromatic cathedrals and a clear social hierarchy deriving from feudal times, was waning very quickly. Wars would carry on being fought, but mostly abroad. British culture, from Edinburgh to London, began to feel much more urban, less close to the sounds and smells of the countryside. Above all, a new religious sensibility, deriving from John Wycliffe and the early reformers, meant that people had a more direct relationship to the gospel; this seems to be connected to what we today would call individualism. Also, thanks to printing and the lack of domestic warfare, we suddenly have a much larger number of poets to choose from: simply, much more stuff survives.
Politically, the biggest change was the victory of the Tudor dynasty in England, those bringers of Protestantism and a more ruthless royal overlordship. It was the court of Henry VIII that would take poetry forward again, and so it is appropriate that the first major poet of England in this century was a highly political figure, and indeed the first Poet Laureate to be mentioned here. John Skelton probably came from Diss in Norfolk, and was an unruly, unpredictable but star figure at Oxford and Cambridge. Notorious for secretly marrying a wife while a vicar, and having a child – who he presented, naked, to his congregation – by her, he later became a great flayer of priestly corruption just as England was in revolt against the Roman Church.
