What it [sic] this worlde but a blast of wynde?
I must nedes dye; it is my natyf kynde.”
And as I was at this conclusyon,
To me dyde come dame confessyon. ( 5390 – 96 )“This conclusyon,”indeed; the rhetoric of self-understanding here (the
conclusion to which Amoure comes about himself) rests on the proximity
of physical extinction. As J. A. W. Bennett reminds us, the Delphic injunc-
tion to“Know thyself”was in many late-medieval sermons a call to the
recognition of inward sinfulness.^29 The variousfictional modes ofThe
Pastimeare gradually giving place to a nonfictional mode of penitence.
This shift carries the reader through confession, contrition and satisfaction
( 5396 – 403 ) and culminates in this startling stanza:
Of holy chyrche, with all humylyte,
My ryghtes I toke, and than incontynent
Nature auayled in so lowe degre
That dethe was come, and all my lyfe was spent.
Out of my body my soule than it went
To purgatory for to be puryfyed
That after that it myght be gloryfyed. ( 5404 – 10 )Amoure’s narration of his own death near the end of this extended poem has
long seemed to most readers the nadir of Hawes’s ineptitude; Derek Pearsall’s
claim that the moment is“an extraordinary gaffe”^30 is typical. A more
attentive response comes fromThe Pastime’s most careful reader, C.S. Lewis:
even from the outset–perhaps because [Hawes’s] imagination is so earnest and
his conscious skill so weak–the good passages have had this peculiar quality, that
they seem to come from nowhere, to be a disembodied voice, not always a perfectly
articulate voice, coming to us out of a darkness; so that when, at last, it comes to us
admittedly from the grave, it at once compels belief.^31
Amoure’s speech is the most dramatic of The Pastime’s configurations
of the relation between lyric and narrative, as lyric stasis becomes deadly.
Thefluidity and openness of this speaking subject are radically recoded; a
poem that has expanded the reader’s horizon of expectations through
unexpected combinations of existing genres suddenly becomes a devotional
lyric, reminiscent of several nominally spoken from beyond the grave
(“Speke softe, ye folk, for I am leyd aslepe!”).^32 Through this lyric inter-
polation the poem is retrospectively organized as a hierarchy of literary
discourses, with the penitential evidently at the apex. As the earlier sugges-
tions of thepèlerinagegenre come to dominate the poem, the subject of the
énoncéand the subject of theénonciationfinally merge,^33 and the poem’s
Mémoires d’outre-tombe 119