Dream Poems Research Articles

Robert Henryson's "Doolie Dreame" and the Late Medieval Dream Vision Tradition

This essay’s chief purpose is to explore the interpretive advantages of considering Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth-century Testament of Cresseid as a member of the genre of dream vision poetry. The Testament’s literary type is notoriously difficult to pin down, as are many features of its structure. Its title identifies the poem as a literary “testament,” the title character’s expression of her last will and testamentary intentions. Since it offers an alternative ending to Chaucer’s great romance Troilus and Criseyde, the poem’s topic, however, anchors it in the genre of romance. The sole time the poem names its own genre comes near the end, when it describes itself as a brief ballad, a “ballet schort.”1 Overall, its restlessness works against any single generic identification. In his influential Medieval Dream Poetry, A. C. Spearing sidelines the Testament as “a narrative that includes a dream as an important episode” rather than as a dream poem proper, a position that remains substantially unchanged in the criticism to date.2 Like many late medieval poems whose experience is organized by the perspective of a first-person narrator, its openness of form provides the opportunity to showcase a number of lyric genres: complaint, astrological allegory, reflections on the brevity of earthly joy in the memento mori tradition. Finally, Cresseid’s exclusion from love and society links her to the narrators of

From Dream Poems for Lisa, in Distance : Dream Poem 1, and: Dream Poem 3, and: Dream Poem 4, and: Dream Poem 6, and: Dream Poem 7, and: Dream Poem 10

From Dream Poems for Lisa, in Distance: Dream Poem 1, and: Dream Poem 3, and: Dream Poem 4, and: Dream Poem 6, and: Dream Poem 7, and: Dream Poem 10 Richard Bausch (bio) "I wrote these poems in late July and early August of this past summer, when my wife and daughter were visiting family in Canada. I was alone in the house, trying to get back into the swing of work on a novel and spending a lot of time reading and watching old movies. I cooked dinners for myself and kept the house and experienced that strange sense of being the only human noise in a collection of empty rooms. I discovered again that I am not bad alone, as long as that condition is not ongoing. I was trying to put some regularity back into my work habits. "That week and a half, as usual, I spent a lot of time in the provinces past midnight. It was in night hours that I composed the poems. There were more than a dozen of them, and I considered them something to send only to my wife as a kind of morning greeting. But then I found satisfaction with the playfulness in them, and so I put the less idiotic few into a little series. This is not to say I tossed them off, nor do I mean to sound glib about the work itself. For me, poetry has always been the most demanding form of expression; my confidence as a writer is, I believe, healthily low, anyway. But regarding poems, I simply feel that my own efforts are seldom much beyond idiocy. I hope these are somewhat beyond it." [End Page 25] Dream Poem 1 Richard Bausch (bio) It rained hard all afternoon.A figure came from the curtain of it& knocked on the door. It was you.You had a little girl in your pocket.You held her out to me. We went inside out of the rain.The weather stayed outside.We sat together at the window & watched it go away,Disconsolate, sad to miss us.But then you rose & followed. I went to the door & calledBut you were too far.The rain closed over you. The little girl ran after—She caught you,Throwing her arms wide, Disappearing with youInto the curtain of rain.It ran down my face as I followed. I said your name.The little girl called out mine.You turned with her, & waited. I saw you,Far off in the rain.It took forever to reach you. [End Page 26] Richard Bausch Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels, seven volumes of stories and, just out from LSU Press, a book of poems and prose titled These Extremes. Copyright © 2009 The Curators of the University of Missouri Dream Poem 3 Richard Bausch (bio) I was in Ireland standingBy a lime-colored riverSwollen with rain. You were on the other side& you beckoned to meWith a little wave of your slender hand. But my feet were rooted to the ground,All my branches bending,Leafless, in the thrumming fall. I was cold, & my trunk shivered.You smiled & turned, I thought, to go.There was a tree on that side, too, Where I thought you'd placed your heart.Your heart was a radiance, but I saw thatIt was a little green-eyed girl, who waved to me From the branches. She settled in your armsLike snow, & you held her & kissed her hair.You both sang softly to me without knowing I could hear you over the roar & ruckOf the river. But I knew in my woodenHeart, like light coming to hills, that you Had decided you would cross,Stepping carefully on the little stonesGreen with moss & held by the clear Rushing there, to lie down together,Resting under the leafless branchesOf my arms, my crooked shade. [End Page 27] Richard Bausch Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels, seven volumes of stories and, just out from LSU Press, a book of poems and prose titled These Extremes. Copyright © 2009 The Curators of the University of Missouri Dream Poem 4...

Edward Robert Tregear, 1846–1931

Like other figures in the literary history of colonial New Zealand, Edward Robert Tregear was an all-rounder whose very versatility probably prevented him from excelling in any one genre. In his lifetime, he was best known as a civil servant who championed the cause of labour. Yet Tregear also harboured serious literary aspirations, trying his hand at fiction, poetry, comparative linguistics, anthropology and political analysis. Some of this — notably the controversial Aryan Maori — is now valued only by the historically curious. Still, Tregear’s efforts in producing his Comparative Dictionary were little short of Herculean, while the remainder of his writing is always lucid and interesting, even though much of it is doomed to remain locked in the cabinets of archaeological curiosity. Tregear was born in Southampton, England, in 1846, the eldest child and only son of seafarer (and eventually captain) William James Tregear and Mary Norris. Edward was an intelligent and imaginative child, who immersed himself in the classics and in Celtic and Nordic mythology. His enthusiasm for Northern Europe was fuelled by his Cornish ancestry. Though educated initially at boarding school, Tregear’s formal education was set back by financial disaster. In 1858, Captain Tregear was bankrupted, probably owing to gambling debts, and the family disaster was compounded the following year when he died of typhoid in Bombay. Four years later, in 1863, the teenage Tregear, his mother and his two sisters sailed to New Zealand, settling first in Warkworth and later in Auckland. In 1867, Tregear enlisted in the Auckland Engineer Volunteers for the Bay of Plenty campaign in the New Zealand wars. Decorated for bravery, he then worked throughout the Central North Island as a gold-digger, surveyor, and later Sub-Inspector in the Armed Constabulary. During these years, Tregear spent much time in the company of Māori, and he soon became fluent in the Māori language. Tregear’s itinerant lifestyle lasted until about 1875, although his itinerancy did not prevent him from literary projects. His most celebrated poem, ‘Te Whetu Plains’, was written during this period, although it remained unpublished until much later. ‘Gold’, however, was published in the New Zealand Herald in 1871 as the winner of a poetry prize offered by the Thames Mechanics Institute. Couched in the format of a dream poem, ‘Gold’ reads

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Second-Rate Stories? Changing Approaches to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Second-Rate Stories? Changing Approaches to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

The Overnight Temperature in "Ithaca"

he discovering in nature his concerns? In which direction is transla tion occurring? While determining the kinds of exchange between him and the world depends on readers' interpretations, it begins with an exchange, another type of transformation in Proteus. These four words are minor ones in a long wordy day, yet they should be listed with moments presenting Stephen's creativity. As such a creative moment, his wavespeech recalls the inspiration for his writing of the villanelle in A Portrait Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of had passed. He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet (P 217). Waves of light into music is an abstract mode of wavespeech. Then his wave speech recalls Chamber Music's dream poem, I hear an army charg ing upon the land, with its invaders and horses shaking as [t]hey come out of the sea (CP 44). Variations on this moment may easily be extended into a study of Joyce on the shore, ranging in his publica tions from the first poem of Chamber Music, Strings in the earth and air (CF 9), to the last paragraph of the (nightor dream-speech) Wake, its ocean's cold mad feary father ... moananoaning (FW 628.02-03). There is a nexus worthy of further explication and extension: river, sea, waves, music, wavespeech, light, darkness, isolation, loneliness, eros, in dream, nightmare, perception, vision, creativity, fusion with literature/myth, and liturgy.2 In any case, Stephen's sounds are more than mere mimetic ones.

Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

Dream Visions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Amy M. Amendt-Raduege (bio) J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked that reading a medieval text made him want to write one himself.1 The Lord of the Rings is widely regarded as the culmination of this desire. Although his works are necessarily modern, no one doubts that Tolkien incorporated many of the medieval themes and ideas that occupied his professional life into his creative writing. One medieval preoccupation that found expression in The Lord of the Rings is the medieval dream vision, though the influence of such literature on Tolkien has not been widely acknowledged. Although seldom recognized today, the dream vision was one of the most important motifs of medieval literature. While the dream framework is undoubtedly little more than a literary convention taken over through "sheer intertia" on the poet's part in some cases (Spearing 4), many serious and religious works were cast in this form. Chaucer wrote dream visions; so did the Venerable Bede. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Romance of the Rose, and the Chanson de Roland all contain elements of dream visions. Boethius cast his influential philosophical treatise, The Consolation of Philosophy, as a dream vision. Even Dante's Divine Comedy is usually regarded as a dream poem even though the narrator did not represent himself as falling asleep. Common to all medieval dream visions is the emphasis on the visual experience of the dreamer. As Constance Hieatt points out, "the imagery and description of the poem are richly visual, and the poem is to a very large extent an account of what the poet sees rather than of what he hears or thinks" (18). Landscapes are highly developed and often have symbolic significance, usually representing an incorruptible space that the dreamer may inhabit only temporarily. In keeping with this tradition, dream visions in The Lord of the Rings also provide rich visual detail. The graphic nature of these dreams are so fully developed that a number of artists have created depictions of events viewed only in dreams and visions—events not otherwise represented in the text. Beyond their intense visual quality, the conventions and characteristics of the medieval dream vision are almost as diffuse as its applications, and nearly every artist cheerfully adapted the form to suit his or her own purpose. But, of course, the conventions were not completely abandoned, or we should be unable to identify the form at all. Most notably, the dream vision functions as a means by which the dreamer attains knowledge which he or she would otherwise lack. Often, the dreamer [End Page 45] falls asleep wrestling with some problem or vexation, only to awaken in "an ideal or often symbolic landscape, in which the dreamer encounters an authoritative figure" (Spearing 4). In The Consolation of Philosophy, for instance, the figure is Lady Philosophy herself; in Dante's Inferno, the first book of his Divine Comedy, Virgil occupies his role. The figure and the dreamer engage in debate, although sometimes the dreamer watches a debate between dream figures, as in The Parliament of Three Ages. The debate thus guides the dreamer toward some concealed truth. But sometimes there is no debate at all: the dreamer simply experiences a transcendent moment which lends sympathy or insight, as in The Dream of the Rood. This kind of dream vision is simply prophetic, and the dreamer is "given access to a higher moral or eschatological realm" from which he or she "awakens enlightened" (Kruger 124). Many of the dreams and visions experienced in The Lord of the Rings follow the same conventions. All the hallmarks of the medieval genre are there: the intense visual quality of the vision, the ideal or symbolic landscape, the authority figure at the center, and even the five aspects of dreaming that informed medieval psychology. But while the inclusion of such conventions may be unconscious, his thinking about those conventions was clearly deliberate. As he says in the preface to his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tolkien appreciated the dream framework because it "allowed marvels to be placed within the real world" (11). He distinctly dis...

Piercing the Screen of Words: Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver

Piercing the Screen of Words:Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver Carol Watts (bio) All politics the same crux: to define humankind richly. —Douglas Oliver (Penniless Politics 17) The relation between the writing of contemporary poetry and politics, understood in the broadest sense as a formal, affective and conceptual engagement with events in the world, or with kinds of commitment to their transformation, is an intensely contested one. It opens up a space that manifests the most complex, and occasionally disabling, kinds of interpellation: freights of identifying, cartographies of silence, incontrovertible demands. Such contestation has been known to descend into fistfights, even as its networks of collaborative connection can produce work of the most profound attention to the unfreedom of our time. Currently the range of contemporary poetries is burgeoning, aided by the speed and penetration of internet exchange, rolling blogzines, the possibilities of cross-medial experimentation; reinforced by the ambitious lists of print-on-demand publishing and proliferating numbers of artisanal small presses, which keep work in circulation and bring "lost" collections into view. At the same time, the practice of writing poetry also continues to carry with it the traditions [End Page 198] and more uncertain trajectories of such a contestation, marked by what is often described as the fate of the avant-garde. These struggles—internal to form, language, and a poetics of subjectivity and action—are always in transition, sometimes re-energized, as if brought into sharp focus again by new times. Or they can remain, like the rubble of barricades when the present action has moved elsewhere. It may be that the very conceptual terms for understanding these strategies and conflicts, and their sometimes corralling orthodoxies, are themselves undergoing a major shift. In such a generative environment, when the possibilities of poetry are being broken open, there are opportunities to read—and hear—earlier work anew, loosed from critical ways of seeing that could make its tactics and choices slip under the radar. It becomes possible to make out the risk of, and the stakes involved in, unique attempts to grapple with a writing "singed by the real," as Douglas Oliver put it in the late '70s (Diagram 11). The conjuring up of the barricades is appropriate as an entry point to the poetry of Douglas Oliver, since it is a dialogue with the "whisper" of Louise Michel, from the moment of the Paris Commune, which animates his final memoir, published after his death in 2000; it is, in central ways, a dialogue with the violence and hope of political necessity sustained throughout his writing, as John Hall has argued ("Ventriloquising"). Oliver's poetry is not widely known, and yet he is one of the most significant British political poets of the latter years of the twentieth century. His work draws on earlier traditions of prosody, from the use of visionary medieval dream poems (his response to Thatcherism in The Infant and the Pearl) and lyrics informed by Blakean songs of innocence and experience, to hybrids of satire and allegory, inventive in the manner of Pope and Swift, by way of Boccacio, Burroughs and a self-dethroning angry pathos of his own, brought to bear on U.S. democracy in Penniless Politics. Oliver's experience as a journalist in a Paris news agency also opens his writing in acute attention to the circuits of mediation governing events, in which the poet finds himself "skewing off sideways" (Salvo 13), or an unreliable point of transmission, as well as encountering news of lives and experiences he has no means to comprehend through the "screen of words" (Diagram 11), nor the right to represent. From The Diagram Poems, written between 1973 and 1979, to A Salvo for Africa, published in 2000, and the posthumous memoir, there is a continual process of reflection about the relation of writing to events, and the necessity (and impossibility) of poetic engagement "in the course of a world" in Theodor Adorno's words, "which continues to hold a pistol to the heads [End Page 199] of human beings" ("Commitment" 80). Necessity, because "our greatest cruelties often arise from a failure to imagine" (Salvo 9). Impossibility, because the lyric self as a...

Dream poetry as dream work.

This paper explores the relationship between dream poetry and dream work by presenting a representative dream poem, along with the text of the dream that inspired it; examining some of its poetic qualities and showing how these figured in the writing of the poem; and comparing the dream writing process to dream interpretation and to Jungian active imagination work. The formal demands of poetry introduce a unique type of critical thought into the creative process that develops the dream material in ways different from other forms of dream work. Writing dream poetry differs from both dream interpretation and active imagination in important ways, but can be viewed as a form of non-interpretative dream work. These observations are probably generalizable to all forms of dream writing and dream art.

Langland’s Fictions by J. A. Burrow

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER century works. The more than 300 pages of her book certainly give us our money's worth in information that is not brought together in any other place. For the Chaucerian and general student of Ricardian poetry the book is of limited value because it is weakest where the debt to the French was greatest, in the form and substance of the lyric. While there is certainly much to be praised in Boulton's book, including individual fine insights throughout, there is also a general unevenness in judgment as well as treatment. I found especially misleading, for instance, her concluding estimate of Froissart and Granson. Boulton finds a disintegration of the mode in the work of these poets, with Christine making a new start. She judges, "If Froissart was uncertain of the power of his poetry, Oton de Grandson lost heart altogether; not only were his poems despairing, but his narrative was unable to reach a conclusion, and finally dissolved into a series of songs" (p. 277). The analysis is quite unfair to Froissart, who was as proud of his verse as of his Chroniques, as witness his ceremonial presentation ofa manu­ script of his complete love poems to Richard II when he as an old man revisited England. The work supports his pride. And what the statement says about Granson is even more off the mark. Better medieval poets than Oton failed to "complete" the work they began, notably Chaucer. It would not be hard to defend the Livre Messire Ode as a work brought to the closure the poet desired. In any event, the notion that Granson's poems were de­ spairing, or that this brave knight who in his late fifties died in a judicial duel "lost heart" in his poetic composition, is completely at odds with what we know of the man and find in the poems themselves. Christine herself praised Oton enthusiastically. Manifestly, he was an admirable knight who liked Chaucer and his work and had a good amateur's ability to compose verse. The Complaint ofVenus shows that Chaucer liked him too and thought well ofhis poetry. Granson could not have a better supporter. )AMES WIMSATI University of Texas J. A. BURROW. Langland's Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 130. $29.95. This revision of J. A. Burrow's Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1989 presents energetic, and compact yet detailed, readings of 182 REVIEWS various "fictions" in Piers Plowman. Organized topically, the chapters ad­ dress controversial topics and episodes (mostly from the B version), provid­ ing nuanced introductions for early readers of Piers, and fresh stimulation for mature (or decaying) critics.Eschewing any search for a "single, contin­ uous narrative" (p.3) in the poem, he is concerned with links between and among dreams and repeatedly looks to contemporary French dream poems and allegories for comparison. Declaring that he is an "unbeliever" (p.1), interested in Langland more as a poet than as a Christian, Burrow examines "the imaginary worlds of Piers Plowman" (p.2).His carefully detailed readings give substance to Langland's varied fictions and delineate a "fictive imagination ...power­ fully at work" (p.2) in this fundamentally Christian poem. "A Gathering of Dreams" discusses the freedom from literal fact attained by the dream poem and identifies as a "radically original development" (p.8) the poem's comprising a series of dreams.Here, and in a suggestive appendix (pp.113-18), he guardedly concludes that if Langland did not come up with the idea of a series of dreams on his own, his source was probably a manuscript containing the three Pelerinages of Deguilleville, which he identifies as the one possible antecedent for such a sequence of dreams.Emphasizing the various discontinuities that mark the "strange centrifugal poly-narrative" (p.17) of Piers, he argues that the very incon­ clusiveness of individual dreams enables the series to continue without insisting on linear development or progress.He coordinates the poem's "unprogressive nature" (p.27) with its inwardly pointing toward "a single spiritual centre ...suggested ...by the figure of Piers Plowman" (p.27). In "Fictions of the Divided Mind" he locates...

The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle ed. by Robert A. Taylor, et al.

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ROBERT A. TAYLOR, JAMES F. BURKE, PATRICIA J. EBERLE, IAN LAN­ CASHIRE, and BRIAN S. MERRILEES, eds. The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor ofProfessorJohn Leyerle. Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 33. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan Uni­ versity, Medieval Institute Publications, 1993. Pp. xii, 474. $20.00 paper. This collection of seventeen essays was offered in celebration of John Leyerle's sixty-fifth birthday, and in both its scope and its title (a quotation from one ofLeyerle's articles) demonstrates the fruit ofhis energetic teach­ ing and promotion ofinterdisciplinary medieval studies. Following a short biographical preface by Brian Merrilees are studies which range over latin biblical and liturgical manuscripts, medieval and Renaissance theater, and texts in latin and many European vernaculars. One oftheir most notable shared features is a respect for the common scholarly profit to which indi­ vidual projects can contribute: some essays signal subjects and areas which merit further study; others offer methods and programs for adaptation and modification; a few even entice readers into correspondence with the offer ofvideos or computer databases. Overall, they convey an invigorating sense of informed and productive research in progress. The essays are arranged alphabetically by author but fall into certain roughly definable subject groups. Those concerned with manuscripts in­ clude a substantial survey by Andrew Hughes, "The Scribe and the Late­ Medieval Liturgical Manuscript: Page Layout and Order ofWork," which suggests guidelines for distinguishing different kinds of liturgical books and calls for more comprehensive tabulation ofevidence to facilitate such categorization. Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., scrutinizes the tonic marks and advice on pronunciation in a treatise ascribed to Grosseteste called Correc­ torium tocius biblie; his call is for the recording ofsuch markings in manu­ script descriptions and catalogues to indicate the extent of public perfor­ mance awarded to certain texts. Possibilities for future research into the textual tradition ofThe Battle ofMa/don are opened by Fred C. Robinson's report on fragments ofa newly studied transcription, probably made from the burned Cotton manuscript which formed the basis of the earliest printed edition. Among the multidisciplinary and comparative contribu­ tions are essays by A. G. Rigg, who investigates the fourteenth-century English propagandist circulation ofLatin texts preserving the legend ofthe supposedly lowly origins of Hugh Capet; Robert A. Taylor, on "Bar­ abarolexis Revisited: The Poetic Use ofHybrid Language in Old Occitan/ 268 REVIEWS Old French Lyric"; and from David N. Klausner, who compares "The Topos of the Beasts of Battle in Early Welsh Poetry" with approximately analogous examples in Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian literature. Essays on the subject ofmedieval theater range from close textual studies to analyses of the localities and social organizations which fostered certain texts or traditions of performance. Alexandra F. Johnston locates patterns and emphases in the York plays which reveal their sophisticated realization of the Augustinian paradox of Christ as silent logos, while James F. Burke traces in the taurine symbolism ofLope de Vega's seventeenth-century play Peribafiez the survival of an ancient ritual process for controlling the inte­ gration of young men into the community. John Cartwright surveys the texts and documents ofa volume commemorating the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561, an opportunity for local chambers of rhetoric to debate a pre­ scribed question, and Anne Lancashire takes a new look at records asso­ ciated with the London Drapers' Company before 1558 to assess the level and nature of members' involvement in dramatic performances. Chaucer scholars will find much that is suggestive, not always explicitly in relation to Middle English, in the contributions which address French texts. Frames of reference and terminology appropriate to discussing narra­ tors, for example, are considered in David Staines's account of the romances of Chretien de Troyes. Basing his study primarily on the prologues, Staines distinguishes different kinds of narrating voice or "literary self" and probes the gradually diminishing number of "first-person appearances" over the course of the five romances. Intertextual rewriting in Froissart's Prison amoureuse is the subject of a perceptive and witty study by Laurence de Looze which illuminates several features of Chaucer's dream poems: their complex interweaving ofthe crafts ofpoetry and oflove; their concern...

Chaucer’s Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues by Barry A. Windeatt

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and to the publishers for making this facsimile available m such an exemplary form. A. S. G. EDWARDS University ofVictoria BARRY A. WINDEATT, Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Analogues. Chaucer Studies, vol. 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. Pp. xviii, 168. $42.50. With this important collection of translations Barry Windeatt aims "to draw together conveniently in one place the more important narrative sources and analogues for Chaucer's dream poetry which are otherwise difficult of access" and "to enable the reader to gain an impression for himself of the intricate nature of the works...and thus to enable assess­ ment of what Chaucer has achieved creatively in his absorption of the French influences upon him" (p. xviii). This book fulfills both purposes well, and while it lacks original texts, it makes a worthy companion to William F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster's Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. As with that standard reference work, there are improvements that one might suggest, but the chief needs are filled. Until now students of Chaucer have had to ferret out and translate for themselves most of the French sources, whether they wished to know the background of individual passages or to determine the general nature of the materials with which he was working. Windeatt appropriately omits Chaucer's materials for the dream poems that are readily available in translation, notably the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, the Romance ofthe Rose, and Ovid's poems. He also leaves out sources for minor passages. Most of the works that he includes, then, are French dits amoureux, the long love poems that filled the air that young Chaucer breathed but were forgotten even by the Renaissance. As one who has read more than once most of these works that are extant, I was particularly pleased to find the proof drawn together in one place of Chaucer's good taste in his choice ofFrench models. In my view he drew on the best of Machaut's dits in making use of the jugement dou Roy de 210 REVIEWS Behaingne, Remede de Fortune, the Dit de la Fonteinne Amoureuse, and the Dit dou Lyon. Of these poemsWindeatt presentsBehaingne complete, most of the Fonteinne amoureuse, the substantial portions of the Remede and the Lyon, all in the section on The Book ofthe Duchess. Also in that section is my favorite among Froissart's long poems, the Paradys d'amours complete. Parts of two other fine dits that are major sources for Chaucer and important in the history of Middle French love poetry, Nicole de Margival's Dit de la panthere d'amours and Machaut's]ugement dou Roy de Navarre, appear in the parts devoted to The House ofFame and The Legend ofGood Women respectively. All the works named clearly are sources for Chaucer. In his section on The Parliament ofFowls, for which the French background is uncertain, Windeatt provides a large set of analogues, some to the demande d'amour of the poem and others to the assemblage of birds. He gives complete translations of Lifoblel dou Dieu d'Amors, of great interest for its early date, andJean de Conde'sla Messe des oisiaus et li plais de chanonesses et des grises nonains, a lively work that shows how apparent irreverence is transformed into edification in a medieval poet's allegorization. Although these works can hardly be called near analogues to the Parliament, they are happily included. Making less of a contribution to the book are the three debates argued by birds on the question of who is the superior lover, clerk or knight. One of these poems would have sufficed. Only three non-French works are included, all in theParliament section. It is good to find there The Dream ofScipio complete, and also the passage of the Teseida which Chaucer draws on in the garden section. The small piece of Alanus de Insulis's De planctu naturae, however, is disappointing; it is not even from the part that Chaucer refers to. We are given only the passage about the advent of Nature, and nothing of her dress and visage, the matters for...

Vision and Experience in Hardy's Dream Poems

Research Article| March 01 1980 Vision and Experience in Hardy's Dream Poems Norman Arkans Norman Arkans Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (1980) 41 (1): 54–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-41-1-54 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Norman Arkans; Vision and Experience in Hardy's Dream Poems. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 1980; 41 (1): 54–72. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-41-1-54 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1980 by Duke University Press1980 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Li Po and Tu Fu

Li Po (AD 701-62) and Tu Fu (AD 712-70) were devoted friends who are traditionally considered to be among China's greatest poets. Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet whose writing, often dream poems or spirit-journeys, soars to sublime heights in its descriptions of natural scenes and powerful emotions. His sheer escapism and joy is balanced by Tu Fu, who expresses the Confucian virtues of humanity and humility in more autobiographical works that are imbued with great compassion and earthy reality, and shot through with humour. Together these two poets of the T'ang dynasty complement each other so well that they often came to be spoken of as one - Li-Tu' - who covers the whole spectrum of human life, experience and feeling.