Reading the Harley Lyrics: A Master Poet and the Language of Conventions

Abstract

Before the late fourteenth and fifteeenth-century lyrics of Chaucer and the so-called Chaucerians, little has survived in English of the great flowering of medieval erotic poetry stimulated in Europe by Latin and Romance models. The major exception is a dozen or so texts among the English poems of an important miscellany (which includes Latin and French texts), collected by an unknown scribe in the first half of the fourteenth century: MS Harley 2253. Most of these lyrics are written in a style whose aggressive alliteration and complex stanzaic rhyme patterns show a distinctive and vigorous attempt to fuse native and Romance elements in a new, elegant synthesis. The Harley lyrics, despite their clear links with earlier and later poetry, provide a lively contrast with the smoother, aureate style of most later English love lyrics, and have earned high praise from critics since their earliest publication.1 But the reader first grappling with these poems, familiar with either Renaissance or medieval European amorous poetry, may well be frustrated as well as charmed. The force of much exuberant imagery and passionate statements of desire and despair seems often dulled by mechanical or indiscriminate schemes of elaboration, catalogues or amplifications, or worse, dissipated'by clumsy shifts of theme that render character or situation incoherent. Earlier critics often charitably judged the results naive, along with much other medieval literature. But as respect for and understanding of medieval poetry has grown, scholars have returned to the Harley