Fyrst quhen thow come with hart and hail entent
Thow the submyttit till my commaundement.
Now now thairof me thynk to sone thow falys
I weyn nathyng bot foly that the alys.
ʒe clerkis bene in subtyle wordis quent.
And in the deid als scharpe as ony snalys. ( 710 – 17 )Douglas’s clerical identity exists here only as a legalfiction to be used against
him. At the beginning of the poem, this dreamer who entered the love-
garden to do his“observaunce”as a lover was decisively dissociated from
Gavin Douglas’s historical and clerical being. This original appearance in
the poem is now thrown back at him with contractual force (“Thow the
submyttit till my commaundement”; we recall May’s remonstrance about
Dunbar’s prior promise inThe Thrissill). A generic lover has reneged on a
purely literary promise. The dreamer has already spoken of the“frenesyis”
which“nakyt”–stripped–him of his“sempyll cunnyng”( 134 – 35 ), a trope
literalized in the horror-comedy of his mobbing (“Pluk at the craw [crow]
thay cryit, deplome the ruke” 651 ).^47 Now Venus subjects him to the
ultimate dismantling. He is“clerkly”only in his production offictions; he
has fallen away from the lover role mandated by his original appearance in
the garden;finally, his“quent”verbal skills do not disguise his absence of
“manhood”when it comes to“the deid.”The integrity of the dreamer’s
body may have been spared, but his tropical body is now hopelessly undone.
After hisfinal annihilating confrontation with the“god armypotent,”his
guiding Nymph reverts to the earlier terms:“My hede in wed [I’ll wager my
head] thow hes a wyfis hart. / That for a plesand sycht is so mysmaid”
( 1937 – 38 ). The dreamer is angered by further evidence of his“mismaking,”
but the Nymph, with wonderful condescension, proverbially calms him
down: “kyrkmen wer ay Ientill to ther wyuys” ( 1944 ). “After this,”
Parkinson comments,“the dreamer could never be mistaken for a great
spirit, a high mind, or even much of a man.”^48
The poem’sfinal and most striking revision of love-poetry opens it out in
new but unforeseeable directions. Critics have notedThe Palice’s highly
parodic view of the medieval encyclopaedic tradition. When Calliope and
the Muses rescue the dreamer from Venus andfly him to the Palace of
Honour itself, the organization of the world below them answers to bib-
liography rather than geography; the rivers they cross are not ordered
according to any possible real-world journey, even in the terms of medieval
cartography. The encyclopaedia, however, emerges at the poem’s culminat-
ing point, in an episode that most readers have passed over in embarrass-
ment or mystification, and it is here that we return to Venus’s mirror.
104 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland