scientific materialism, usually signaled by citations from Bartholomaeus
Anglicus.The Paliceamplifies, repeatedly, the digression on sound supplied
by the windy eagle inThe Hous of Fame. At the very outset, another
sensorium-in-verse of an aureate Middle Scots landscape, Douglas’s“rep-
arcust ayr”( 25 ), pointing forward (or backward) to Dunbar’s Latinate
diction, sets this material register in place. The dreamer’s brief trauma in
love’s garden is in turn interrupted by“ane impressioun”( 105 )(“afiery
impression or exhalation,”according to Bawcutt’s note) that overwhelms
him. He takes the chance to tell us that this is not surprising,“for ouer
excelland lycht. / Corruppis the wit and garrys [causes] the blud auaile
[descend] / On tyl the hart that it no danger ale”( 113 – 15 ). The extended
gloss, offered half-apologetically, follows on the dreamer’s collapse in the
garden and itself brings on an equally explosive outburst of modesty. He
apostrophizes his own“barrant wyt”( 127 ), calling on it to show its“dull
exhaust inanytee”( 133 ) and its“beggit termis, mare than thryis”( 131 ). This
closes a metaphorical circle, barren wit prefiguring the wasteland’s“barrant”
growth ( 150 ), which appears both as a horrible infliction from without and
as the sorry product of the poet’s own“wyt.”The House of Fameintrudes
especially clearly when the music of love’s court is carried to the dreamer’s
ears by water, and the acoustic phenomena take Douglas in bizarre direc-
tions: loud noise disturbs the water, but thefish do not hear it,“For as we se
rycht few of thaym has Eris”( 377 ). Raw sound and unadorned diction, like
the violent swoons and collapses of Douglas’s dreamer, mark a body bereft
of any productive relationship to the signifier, driving a wedge between
“wyt”and language.
These effects of language impel a dreamer who is debilitated in a number
of regards. Not only is he set adrift by metaphor; his experiences also
dislocate the metaphors of sexual difference. The Maytime dreamer,
crushed by the disembodied voice, is shaken even more by the subsequent
“impressioun”:“Amyd the virgultis all in tyl a fary / As femynine so feblyt
fell I doun”( 107 – 8 ). Similarly, his narrow escape from the bodily meta-
morphosis threatened by Venus’s retinue cannot quite conceal the very real
metamorphosis he does undergo, and indeed has undergone. His desperate
plea of clerical privilege before the love-goddess, noted for its pointer to the
historical and well-connected churchman Gavin Douglas (“And, mare
attour I am na seculare,” 696 ), is perhaps more interesting for Venus’s
very precise demolition:
Not of a clerk we se the represent
Saue onely falsshed and dissaitfull talys,Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 103