Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson
forth
This lyric interleaves the conventions of the solitary love lament and the performative and petitionary love complaint. Beginning with the conventional reverdie opening, it situates itself within a tradition of erotic poetry: “When the nyhtegale singes, the wodes waxen grene.” Nature’s eros makes a poignant, if conventional, contrast to the lover’s pain: “Love is to myn herte gon with one spere so kene.” The lover’s sighs in the second stanza demonstrate how voice is a tactic of both performance and text. Sarah McNamer remarks that the devotional lyric, “I syke when y singe,” “script[s] sorrowful sighs for the reader to perform”; saying “I syke” compels the speaker to perform the sigh that the song describes.7 However, in its use of the past tense, “When the Nightingale Sings” textualizes this performance: “Ich have siked moni syk, lemmon, for thin ore.” The immediate performance context of this verse, then, is not that of pain but of petition: “Suete lemmon, thench on me.” As a complaint, this lyric “negotiates between feeling and form,” in the words of Lee Patterson.8 The lyric’s perpetuation of the textual voice—its knowing participation within the traditions of reverdie, love lament, and complaint—depends on the lover’s consent to its performance, as suggested in the final stanza. The direct address to the “suete lemmon,” prominent at the beginning of two stanzas, anticipates an audience that is at once present (as the addressee of these lines) and absent (as the audience of the deferred performance). As heartfelt as it seems, the voice of the love petition is not private but invokes a wider community (“Yef thou me lovest ase men says”; “loke that hit be sene”).
Although the poem’s final stanza has generally been understood as simply another quatrain, on stylistic grounds I would speculate that this stanza acts as an envoy, perhaps even a later addition, to the first four quatrains. The final line of the fourth stanza ends “al Y waxe grene,” an ironic echo of the first line’s “the wodes waxen grene.” “Grene” works as a pun in the fourth stanza, suggesting that the lover grows ill or lustful—or both—with thoughts of his beloved. Ending the poem here gives it stylistic closure that is of a piece with the use of repetition elsewhere in these stanzas, such as the anaphora of “suete lemmon.” The final stanza amplifies or transforms earlier lines, for instance, giving “world so wyde” the geographic specificity of “Bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndesey, Norhamptoun ant Lounde” and offering another “suete lemmon” line. The last line of the poem as it stands opens up a new frame, shifting from the implied immediate presence of the beloved (the “suete lemmon” addressed in the imperative) to the deferral of her presence (“Y wole mone my song”). This shift calls our attention to a second lyric voice (even if it is that of the same speaker). This stanza’s change in voice recalls the envoys or tornadas of French medieval poetry, from troubadour lyrics to motets, which often employed such a shift.9 As Judith Peraino puts it, French lyricists often used the final stanza to “graft” multiple voices into a single lyric, whether these were the voices of lover and beloved, master and minstrel, or even the public and private personae of the poet himself.10
The final stanza of “When the Nightingale Sings” is in many ways similar to the French envoy tradition, but certain differences are worth noting. Many of the French envoys name or encode the identity of the poet, and the irony or humor in their vocal shifts is dependent on recognizing this identity. This poet, while firmly anonymous, is by no means what Leo Spitzer, in a seminal essay, calls an “everyman” whose words are completely fungible. Spitzer’s categorization relies on texts where a known author appropriates language that cannot possibly apply to him or her, usually by direct quotation or literal translation. In one example, he cites a passage from Marie de France where she claims personal experience of a story’s teller in an echo of the original but elsewhere acknowledges her use of a written source.11 The final stanza of “When the Nightingale Sings” uses voice differently. While drawing on the French envoy tradition, it neither directly appropriates its language nor relies on the poet’s identity for its effect. Instead, this stanza transforms the French convention tactically, suggesting an expansive but not limitless range of possibilities for its speaker, who would be familiar with the women and terrain “Bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndeseye, Norhamptoun ant Lounde.” In other words, while much of the poem consists of an arrangement of conventional lyric language (though beautifully executed), the final stanza locates this conventional language within a specific horizon of practices. As we will see, this poem’s compilation and layout in MS Harley 2253 amplifies how its voice mediates between such textual and performative practices, which in turn informs the arrangement of the larger miscellany.
To understand how this works in the manuscript as a whole, it is helpful to consider how medieval theories of voice express its multimodal capacities and how these can be put in dialogue with modern discussions of lyric voice. This discussion occupies the first half of this chapter. The second half of the chapter provides an overview of the manuscript’s contents and social context and reads a selection of English and French lyrics from the manuscript, both well known and lesser known, as well as some of the manuscript’s Latin devotional texts.
Voice and the Lyric
Voice is where sound meets language, a grammatically vexed and poetically fertile medium fundamental to human communication. In this section, I show that in medieval theory, voice—particularly literary voice—is inherently tactical, articulating relationships between writing and performance and between a subject’s interiority and his external