Lyric Tactics. Ingrid Nelson
bone and blood.” Even the musical accompaniment to “Fowls in the Frith,” which some readers have believed to be liturgical, might have been used for secular purposes.65
The poem’s topoi locate it within a network of lyric forms while also pointing to the expansiveness of lyric practice. They demonstrate how this particular form creates mobile relations rather than totalizing and isolating the lyric text. Like the rest of the poem, the opening topos works across sacred and secular meanings. Birdsong frequently opens love lyrics, especially in a springtime setting, or reverdie. This season excites carnal love but can also heighten a rejected lover’s feelings of dissatisfaction. In a secular reading of the poem, the birds and the fish are in their proper places in nature, enjoying the satisfaction of their carnal desires, while the speaker is out of place, experiencing sorrow on account of the “best” woman “of bone and blood.” The poem’s economical language does not reveal whether the cause of the speaker’s sorrow is Christ or a woman.
Further, “Fowls in the Frith” uses its topoi, the rhetorical common places, to thematize place as a poetic and metaphysical construct. The first two lines locate animals in their habitats with isocolons that hinge on the word “in.” The preposition replaces the verb in these lines, substituting location for action, and evokes a classical definition of place that was well known in the Middle Ages. In the Physics, Aristotle describes eight different uses of “in”: the part in the whole, the species in the genus, and so forth. The two opening lines of “Fowls in the Frith” demonstrate Aristotle’s final use of “in,” when “something is contained in a vessel, and, in general, in a place.”66 These lines thus thematize place by using this preposition in lieu of a verb. They suggest stasis but also motion, evoking the micromovements of each animal within its habitat. And indeed, Aristotle conceives place and motion as interdependent concepts: “[I]t would never occur to us to make place a topic for investigation if there were no such thing as change of place. That is the main reason that we think that even the heavens are in place—because they are in constant motion. This kind of change may be either movement or increase and decrease.”67 Aristotle here identifies two kinds of motion, what he calls “movement,” or locomotion, and “increase and decrease,” or change. Place itself, however, is motionless; it is “the limit of the containing body, [where] the container makes contact with what it contains.” Further, the “contents” of such a container must be “a body which is capable of movement.”68 In other words, it is the potentiality of motion that defines the boundary of place, and of form.69 The first two lines of “Fowls in the Frith” announce this theme, locating mobile entities (birds, fish) in their respective places.
Following the assertion of place and in-place-ness of the first two lines of “Fowls in the Frith,” we have an image of Aristotle’s second kind of motion, change: “And I mon waxe wod.” The verb “waxen,” to grow, alludes to an affective state, which the next line connects to Aristotle’s first kind of motion, locomotion: “Mulch sorw I walke with.” The alliteration of “waxe” and “walke” and the parallel affective terms “wod” and “sorwe” suggest a relationship between the two kinds of motion, change and locomotion, that makes explicit the potential mobility of the birds and fishes invoked in the first two lines. Change and locomotion enter the poem concurrent with its affective content: “I mon waxe wod.” As Curtius points out, the topics of medieval poetry, even though they reflect “timeless” emotional states and human relationships, are also figures of change: they generate more topoi, and they describe changes in affect.70 In other words, this poem’s concern with motion is multiply valenced: rhetorical, affective, and hermeneutic.
We have seen how the poem’s rhetoric thematizes tactics as situational movements, both human and poetic, across determinate structures (natural, poetic, and metaphysical). But what of this lyric as an object of practice? We have already noted that its musical accompaniment is similarly tactical, with both secular and religious potential. Further, the material form of the lyric is itself displaced in its unique manuscript witness, Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 139. Largely a collection of thirteenth-century legal documents relating to the town of Coventry, the codex also includes copies of a reissue of the Magna Carta from 1253 and a French verse rendition of the Statute of Gloucester from 1278. “Fowls in the Frith” and its music appear on folio 5r. The poem shares a hand, which appears nowhere else in the manuscript, with the Anglo-French lyric “Ay queer ay un maus,” also set to music.71 These lyrics, copied around 1270, were inserted in the manuscript as quire endpapers after the rest of its contents were compiled. The lyric copies were essentially scrap paper used to protect the more valuable legal material within the book.
In other words, not only does the text of “Fowls in the Frith” thematize displacement, the material text of the poem is itself displaced from a literary context. The vernacular songs have been located in a context of documentary place, among the legal records of an English town. MS Douce 139 owes its existence to an increasing emphasis on the documentary construction of place (in this case, Coventry) arising from the bureaucratic expansion of thirteenth-century England. As the presence of “Fowls in the Frith” shows, the lyrics of medieval England rely on such literary and textual structures but navigate them tactically. This navigation is at once “internal,” within the form and rhetoric of the poem, and “external,” in the material and performative contexts of its transmission. Yet tactical practice inherently belies the distinction between interiors and exteriors, as the mobility of the one displaces and reshapes the other.
Most vernacular texts of later medieval England are influenced by its particular cultures of textual production and performance. As the example of “Fowls in the Frith” demonstrates, certain formal features of the lyric—its brevity, its rhetoric of the commonplace—make it more amenable to tactical inclusion among other texts and, indeed, to the implicit theorization of the tactical. This conjunction of forms and practices unites these short poems as a genre specific to the culture of later medieval England. How, then, can we understand the relationship between what I am calling the medieval English lyric and the transhistorically defined literary genre of “lyric”? To address this question, I briefly examine the modern emergence of theories of the lyric and of the definition of the Middle English lyric corpus.
Medieval English Lyrics and “the Lyric”
Middle English lyrics have entered modern literary criticism through the highly mediated apparatus of modern genre making, which has been informed as much by post-Romantic aesthetic expectations of lyric poetry as by the philological methods central to medieval studies. Thus, it is worth considering what is at stake in using the word “lyric” to describe this corpus and to what extent the integration of medieval short poems into modern genealogies of lyric can inform and revise transhistorical lyric theory. As many critics of lyric and nonlyric poetry seek to integrate formalist methodologies with their political and historicist critiques, the medieval lyric’s difference from the post-Romantic genre promises to make it paradigmatic rather than marginal, as it has frequently been conceived in literary histories of English poetry. This premodern corpus offers a lyric theory that precedes the early modern appropriations of Classical poetics that defined lyric poetry as a genre, as well as Enlightenment concepts of subjectivity that influenced modern poetics.72 In order to begin to locate medieval short poems in this longer history of lyric genre, I describe below how this corpus came to be identified with the genre, despite the lack of a generic name or poetic theory in the Middle Ages. I then briefly discuss the post-Romantic aesthetic theories that defined and privileged the lyric genre, as well as their more recent critiques, suggesting how medieval lyric can advance culturally and historically inflected formalisms and poetics.
If individual medieval lyrics take shape by means of rhetorical and material tactics, so too does imagining this corpus as a genre—within its own cultural context as well as transhistorically—require tactical thinking. For a medieval person, there was no such thing as a lyric. The Latin lyricus seldom appeared in the Middle Ages, and the word “lyric” entered the English language only in the sixteenth century, when it was used to translate Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the neoclassical treatises on poetics of Sir Philip Sidney and others.73 In one of its few medieval appearances, in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (615–30), lyricus