As we have seen, the“buke”is theAeneid, destined to be translated into
Scots as Douglas’sEneados, completed some twelve years later. The for-
merly hostile Venus reappears as afigure in a patrilineal chain of trans-
mission – Aeneas’s mother, and mediatrix passing an important
foundational text between Latin and a mother tongue that Douglas will
define as“Scottis.”The alien voice lauding the“maternall Moneth”returns
in the mirror of a love-poetry that contains an archive, and presages the
exaltation to epic vehicle of a Scots vernacular that earlier episodes had
brutally unmade.
The Palice of Honouraccordingly affirms what Derrida calls the“patri-
archive”:^52 thefinal encounter with the“god armypotent”is framed by
recuperative gestures–an allegorization of the household ( 1779 – 827 ), the
limiting assertion that“Prosperite in erd is bot a dreme”( 1983 ). Yet the
dream sputters out amid a reversion to the punitive rituals of its earlier
episodes. Told by the Nymph that he has just lost the opportunity to see
how“trespassouris”against honor are rewarded ( 2056 ), the dreamer is seized
by an aggravating desire to look back, for less than Orphic reasons:
Madame (quod I) for goddis saik turn agane.
My spreit desyris to se thair torment fane. ( 2058 – 59 )Returned to the garden, he is left praising honor, and the poem’sfinal
dedication to James IV follows. YetThe Paliceis sent into the world not
with anenvoi de quare, but with an unusually explosive dismissal:
Thy barrant termis, and thy vyle endyte
Sall not be min, I wyll not haue the wyte.
For as for me I quytcleme that I kend tha,
Thow art bot stouth, thyft louys lycht but lyte.
Not worth a myte, pray ilk man till amend tha.
Fare on with syte, and on this wyse I end tha. ( 2164 – 69 )The poet suddenly turns into a“flyter”against his own text, rehearsing,
with a barrage of internal rhyme, charges with which we are by now familiar.
His poem is purloined, sterile, worthless–waste matter, in effect. The
relation assumed here between poet and text mirrors the one we have
already seen at work in Calliope’s court of the Muses. Douglas here departs
from his precedent inThe House of Fame, where poets are pillars supporting
the deeds of heroes. Of Skelton’sGarland of Laurel, Seth Lerer has written
that when Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate make their appearance, they are
“voiced presences,”^53 embodiedfigures. Douglas, however, makes the poets
embody their works. Ovid, clerk of the court, shows (“schew,” 1216 ) the
multiple contents of theMetamorphoses. Virgil in some way enacts the
106 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland