I present a poem, specifically a ballade. The ballade is a fixed form of poetry which was especially popular in France in the early-to-mid 15th century. Poets from every station in life wrote ballades, including women; it was a favorite form of Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430). I chose the legend of the pelican as it was proliferated in medieval bestiaries for my subject, namely that the pelican would kill its own young and then revive them with blood. As a companion of the Order of the Pelican, I am frequently privy to criticisms of candidates based on temper, and I often remind my brethren that we are killers by our nature, or so the legend says.
Subject
The pelican was not a commonly known bird in most of Europe; rather, its reputation came from classical scholars whose work was copied into medieval bestiaries. Probably the most important legend of the pelican came from the writings of Isadore of Seville (560-636), cleric and scholar:
Pelicanus avis Aegyptia habitans in solitudine Nili fluminis, unde et nomen sumpsit; nam Canopos Aegyptus dicitur. Fertur, si verum sit, eam occidere natos suos, eosque per triduum lugere, deinde se ipsam vulnerare et aspersione sui sanguinis vivificare filios.
(The pelican is an Egyptian bird which lives in solitude on the River Nile, the waters giving them their name; so the Coptic Egyptians say. Further, if it is true, they kill their own young, then after three days of mourning, they then wound themselves and sprinkle their own blood to revive their children.)
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae; Book XII: De Animalibus, 7:26
(with my own translation)
Similar descriptions appear in several medieval bestiaries, including the one referenced above from which I selected my illustration, as well as the Harley Bestiary, produced in England circa 1230 (British Library, Harley MS 4751, folio 46r). Isadore enjoyed such a fine reputation as a scholar that his work was accepted as accurate through the end of our period; he was canonized in 1598, only increasing his fame.
Shakespeare references the attributes of the pelican in several works; he praises the generous sacrifice of the pelican in Hamlet (IV,v):
| LAERTES: |
To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms; And like the kind life-rendering pelican, Repast them with my blood. |
He also uses the blood-sucking trait of the pelican young as an insult in King Lear (III, iv) and King Richard II (II, i):
| KING LEAR: |
Death, traitor! nothing could have subdued nature To such a lowness but his unkind daughters. Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers Should have thus little mercy on their flesh? Judicious punishment! ’twas this flesh begot Those pelican daughters. |
| JOHN OF GAUNT: |
O, spare me not, my brother Edward’s son, For that I was his father Edward’s son; That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapp’d out and drunkenly caroused: My brother Gloucester, plain well-meaning soul, Whom fair befal in heaven ‘mongst happy souls! |
Structure: Form, Rhyme and Meter
Inspired by my chosen illustration, I selected a poetic form appropriate for France circa 1450, the ballade. The ballade, though a fixed form, often varied in line length; accordingly, in order to determine a precise structure, I selected two particular poems as models: “Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis” (‘Ballade of Women of Past Times’) by François Villon (1431?-1463?) and “Balade: Ma Seule Souveraine Joye” (‘Ballade: My Sole Sovereign Joy’) by Charles, duc d’Orleans (1394-1465). The ballade was popular with writers from diverse backgrounds, as my particular choices illustrate; Charles was a royal Duke, and François was a criminal (hence the uncertainty of the date of his birth as well as that of his “death”—he was banished from France in 1463 and no more is known of him). Any accomplished poet of the period would have been writing ballades.
Both poems share the basic structure of three eight-line stanzas, each rhymed ababbcbC, followed by a four-line envoi, or dedication, rhymed bcbC. The capital C indicates a full repeated line which functions as a refrain; no other rhyming words are repeated. The lines are eight syllables each, roughly iambic tetrameter, though the stresses are quite fluid. A stressed syllable often begins a line, though the refrain line always ends on a stressed syllable. (The poems appear as an appendix for purposes of review.) Note that a terminal “e” was pronounced as a syllable unless the following word began with a vowel, so “les neig-es” ‘the snows’ is three syllables, as is “comm-e vous” ‘as you’.
Poetry in Middle French often ended intermediary rhyming lines with unstressed syllables, probably because there were so many available. In spoken French, terminal “e” continued to be pronounced well into the 16th century, whereas in English, a word like “ale” which was pronounced roughly like “all-a” in Middle English had its single-syllable modern pronunciation by the 15th century. Words like “cola” and “sofa” that end in unstressed syllables hadn’t yet been borrowed into English; Shakespeare ends lines in unstressed syllables rarely, usually with gerunds like “singing” and “ringing”. I decided to try to give a sense of the French sound by choosing three-syllable words for my “b” rhymes, all of which are dactylic, i.e., they begin with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (tragedy, victory, etc.).
The envoi is both part of the poem and not part. The envoi first appears in the songs of the medieval troubadours, addressed to the poet’s beloved or to a wealthy patron. In fact, the envoi begins so often with the word “Prince” that it is sometimes called “the prince” in poetic discussions. While many works included a dedication, certain fixed poetic forms actually made the dedication part of the piece, including the ballade and the chant royal, both of which unite the envoi with the whole by the use of the repeated refrain line.
The envoi often turns the tone of the ballade, either giving a more personal aspect to the piece or providing some ironic commentary, as frequently features in the envois of Christine de Pizan. Since there is usually a point to be made in the envoi, the rhythm may change to force the reader to stop and think. I have therefore used a single-syllable “b” rhyming word at the end of the first line followed by an enjambment (i.e., there is no natural rhythmic end to the line; rather it flows quickly into the next). There are no other enjambments in the piece, as there are none in my models. Shakespeare employs the enjambment sparingly, and for the same reason, to force the reader to pause and think. Hence the enjambment of “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments” causes a pause, which places greater emphasis on “Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds”.
The envoi was a recognized element of verse in Shakespeare’s time; there is an extended discussion about it in Love’s Labours Lost (III, i.):
| DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO: |
The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee, Were still at odds, being but three. |
| MOTH: |
Until the goose came out of door, And stay’d the odds by adding four. Now will I begin your moral, and do you follow with my l’envoy. |
This exchange also demonstrates that Shakespeare associated the envoi with verse featuring an eight-syllable line length, which is not typical of the play itself, but only some of the spontaneous verse within it.
Poetic Devices
Whether due to their differences in background and education, or simply in subject matter, the poet-authors of my two models employed very different poetic devices.
Charles d’Orleans’ poem uses quite a bit of alliteration, or repeated initial sounds, usually for emphasis, as in his refrain line, “my sole sovereign joy”. (This is one of the most problematic areas for a translator, as words rarely have the same punch in another language. “Without a heart, one cannot live” is a nice line, but it doesn’t grab you like “Car sans cueur vivre ne pourroye” does in French. If you don’t speak French, you’ll just have to trust me.) I have made use of alliteration deliberately in phrases I wished to highlight, either for emotional effect or irony, e.g. “born to bleed”, “surveys the shambles”, “denying death”, “marvel of maternity”. I chose to highlight my refrain using assonance, “Yet still the pelican will slay”; see below.
Orleans also uses very emotional language. When his love looks at him, he doesn’t just react, he dies. I have used the most emotional language in the first stanza, when describing the mother’s grief, the language becoming less emotional in the second stanza where the actual killing is discussed; the language of the third stanza, which features the miraculous resurrection, is least emotional of all. The nearer the reader gets to the miracle, the less I want them to identify with the mother pelican through human emotion.
By briefly personifying death (“denying death the victory”), I set up an alternate adversary in order that the joyful reunion of mother and young isn’t tainted by the inconvenient fact of the mother’s role as murderess. Charles does this in his envoi, briefly personifying love, thus relieving the lady in question of sole responsibility for his distress.
Villon uses allusion in virtually every line, not surprising as his subject is famous women of the past. My subject matter as a whole can be considered allusive as it is drawn from historical materials. I considered further allusion to one of the many women from history famous for killing their children (e.g., Medea), but since the lesson of the pelican is resurrection and redemption, something I found missing from famous infanticides, I decided against further allusion.
I have made sparing use, as does Villon, of internal rhyme (repeated internal or end sounds within a line) and assonance (repeated vowel sounds or vowel-consonant combinations), again for emphasis on particular images or ideas. A reader will unconsciously slow down and focus on repeated sounds, so lines like “cries to heaven and rues the day” and “not once, but twice” will sound louder in the reader’s head. I also used it to ease the transition in the second stanza from the murder to repentance by opposing “wailing” and “failing”.
Villon also makes heavy use of imagery, most famously in this piece using the refrain “where are the snows of yesteryear?” to indicate transitory natural beauty. I have used particular imagery in the murder stanza, especially in the use of “shambles”, or slaughterhouse, to indicate both the degree of the carnage and the helpless position of the victims.
Vocabulary and Language
Obviously, to be a perfect reproduction, my poem should have been written in Middle French; however, few among my chosen audience would likely have been able to read it. I turned instead to the language of Shakespeare. Every word of my poem was used by Shakespeare, in the exact same form, i.e., I found “mourns” and “repenting”, not merely “mourn” and “repent”, with one exception. The word “maternity” does not appear, nor does “motherhood” or “motherliness” or any other term for the state of being a mother. I wasn’t surprised by this, since mothers don’t come off very well in most of Shakespeare’s work. I was able to find it in Cotgrave’s A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues published in London in 1611:
“Maternité: f. Maternitie, motherhood, the being a mother.”
In searching in Shakespeare’s work for my words, I learned several surprising things. I did not know that the word “angrily” is not a period form; “angerly” is the spelling that shows up exclusively. I thought this was interesting enough that I preserved the period spelling in the modern version. I was pleasantly surprised to find “youngling” in several of Shakespeare’s works; it turns up so often in SCA compositions that it has a somewhat coined feel to me, but I was desperate for synonyms for children!
I originally chose “carnage” for the slaughterhouse reference, but I could not find the word used in pre-1600 English (though it does appear in French). I changed the word to “shambles” which sadly means simply a mess to a modern reader, but would have unequivocally meant a place of slaughter to a reader of Shakespeare’s time.
A note on “piteously”: modern usage demands four syllables, but Shakespeare did not always use it so. The line “Ruthful to hear, yet piteously perform’d” (Titus Andronicus: V, i) shows he used it as a three syllable word, pronounced roughly “pitch-us-lee”. The word “piteous” itself he seems to have used interchangeably as two syllables or three as need demanded: two in “But the true ground of all these piteous woes” (Romeo & Juliet: V, iii) and three in “The most arch of piteous massacre” (King Richard III: IV, iii). If Shakespeare can be so flexible, can I do less?
Text Presentation
I have given side-by-side transcriptions of my poem; the right-hand version is modern English spelling for ease of reading. The left-hand version is presented as a printed work by Shakespeare would have been set. Most spellings were taken from the 1609 London printing of Shakespeare’s sonnets for sale by William Aspley.
Aspley’s collection is somewhat haphazard when it comes to the representation of words which end in “y”; this presented a special challenge for me, as I used so many of them! For example, “only” appears as well as “onlie”, likewise “beauty” and “beautie”, “memory” and “memorie”, etc. I went with the exact spellings I found, so “posterity” appears, though it would not surprise me to see “posteritie” in a contemporary document.
The “long s” is a problematic character; it was used almost uniformly where a lower-case “s” appeared in any position other than as the last letter of the word (when a more modern-looking “s” was used). “Long s” was also usually joined to the character following, especially “t”, “l”, and “i”; since I couldn’t find a font to join “f” and “t”, I have joined those characters by hand, as I have the character of conjoined “c” and “t”. Lower case “v” always appears as “u”, unless it is the first letter of the word; contrarily, “u” appears as “v” at the beginning of words, as does upper-case “U” (as “V”).
Any word that was not used in the sonnets is spelled from the English definitions in Cotgrave’s Dictionarie or from A Handful of Pleasant Delights from 1584. The reprint of the latter preserves the period spelling with the exception that “long s” and related joined characters have been changed to modern “s”. A representative page from Cotgrave’s (the page, in fact, with “maternity”) appears as an appendix for comparison.
Bibliography
Cotgrave, Randle, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, London, 1611.
Available online, “Assembled from two scans in the French National Library by Greg Lindahl”:
https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cotgrave/
Farmer, David Hugh, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Guichard, J. Marie, Poésies de Charles d’Orleans, self-published, 1842.
Available online at Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14343/14343-h/14343-h.htm
Jannet, Pierre, ed., Oeuvres Complėtes de François Villon, self-published, 1854.
Available online at Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12246/12246-h/12246-h.htm
Lindsay, W. M., ed., Etymologiae of Isadore of Seville (2 vols.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911.
Available online through the University of Chicago:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Isidore/home.html
Perrine, Laurence, Sound and Sense, An Introduction to Poetry (4th edition), New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Preminger, Alex, editor. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Rollins, Hyder, ed., A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584) by Clement Robinson and Divers Others, Dover, 1965. A reprint, the original was published in 1924.
Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1974.
Shakespeare, William, Shake-speares Sonnets, London, 1609.
Online in facsimile through the University of Victoria.
https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/Son/Q1/default/
Appendix 1: Poems Used as Models
| BALLADE DES DAMES DU TEMPS JADIS. Dictes-moy où, n’en quel pays, Est Flora, la belle Romaine; Archipiada, ne Thaïs, Qui fut sa cousine germaine; Echo, parlant quand bruyt on maine Dessus rivière ou sus estan, Qui beauté eut trop plus qu’humaine? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! Où est la très sage Heloïs, Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denys? Pour son amour eut cest essoyne. Semblablement, où est la royne Qui commanda que Buridan Fust jetté en ung sac en Seine? Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! La royne Blanche comme ung lys, Qui chantoit à voix de sereine; Berthe au grand pied, Bietris, Allys; Harembourges, qui tint le Mayne, Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine, Qu’Anglois bruslèrent à Rouen; Où sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine?… Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! ENVOI Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine Où elles sont, ne de cest an, Que ce refrain ne vous remaine: Mais où sont les neiges d’antan! |
BALADE. Vueilliez voz yeulx emprisonner, Et sur moy plus ne les gectez; Car quant vous plaist me regarder, Par Dieu, Belle, vous me tuez; Et en tel point mon cueur mectez Que je ne scay que faire doye; Je suis mort se vous ne m’aidez, Ma seule souveraine joye, Je ne vous ose demander Que vostre cueur vous me donnez, Mais, se droit me voulez garder Puisque le cueur de moy avez, Le vostre fault que me laissiez; Car sans cueur vivre ne pourroye; Faictes en, comme vous vouldrez, Ma seule souveraine joye. Trop hardy suis d’ainsi parler, Mais, pardonner le me devez Et n’en devez autruy blasmer, Que le gent corps que vous portez Qui m’a mis, comme vous veez, Si fort en l’amoureuse voye, Qu’en vostre prison me tenez, Ma seule souveraine joye. L’ENVOY. Ma Dame, plus que ne savez, Amour, si tres fort me guerroye, Qu’à vous me rens, or me prenez, Ma seule souveraine joye. |
Appendix 2: Example from Cotgrave’s Dictionarie
