Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

does indeed borrow the generic framework ofLe Chevalierand its crucial
device of structural disclosure–and the absence of English analogues, along
with Kipling’s demonstration of Burgundian cultural connections, makes
this a real possibility^43 – then he displays a literary sensibility that is not
backward-looking but distinctlyau courant. However, Hawes’s comparable
moment ofmise en abîmereverses de la Marche’s generic ratio. The poetry
of fame and chivalry promoted in de la Marche’s words is, in Hawes’s poem,
finally discarded for piety, in what may be seen as a calculated“outdoing”of
the Burgundian precursor text. Remembrance begins to writeThe Pastime
as the romance of the knight Graunde Amoure, only for the text to privilege
a poetry that both includes romance–and all the other genres it cites–and
at the last reaches beyond them.
There is a notable negativity in the affirmations that concludeThe
Pastime, and it presents us with some puzzling paradoxes.“As narration,”
writes Jonathan Goldberg, “allegory embodies death, a realm that the
mind represents to itself as a space in which the human dilemmas of time
and otherness are overcome because they arefinally beside the point.”^44
Goldberg’s words seem a curiously accurate description of Hawes’s allego-
rical art, which validates itself at the point of its own extinction.^45 As we
have seen, the evocation of Eternity exposes thefictionality of all things,
and Hawes’s art of cloudyfigures turns out to embrace nothing less than
the sensory world itself. This disclosure, however, is also, and inevitably,
the poem’s closure; where, after all, can it go after this? Hawes’s art asserts its
own authority at the moment, and indeed through the very act, of sub-
mission to the highest of all authorities in the semantic structures that
produce allegory, and so is a form of poetic self-annihilation.

everything that dies someday comes back

The analogy just drawn might suggest that Hawes displaces de la Marche’s
accent on worldly honor and service to the state in favor of a more
parochially devotional closure. Hawes’s narrative and rhetorical strategy in
The Pastime, however, is hardly so innocent. Let us recall Lewis’s observa-
tion that Graunde Amoure’s narration of his death, however immediately
unexpected, nevertheless seems to emerge quite naturally from the rest
of the poem, given that the narration throughout has suggested“a disem-
bodied voice...coming to us out of a darkness.”I have tried here to define
the elements of Lewis’s“darkness.”In some respects,The Pastimecultivates
a generic indeterminacy whose resolution in the form of Amoure’s death is
hidden from the reader; in others–allusion to the pilgrimage genre, lyric

124 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland