experience of reading the poem, in which their referent at any given moment
is slippery. In the face of the lady’s approving“I knowe your thought, / your
worde and dede and herte to be one”( 148 – 49 ), the lover’s word seems to be
the last place where any such unitary meaning is to be found. This lover’s
speech does not attest the truth and integrity of his inmost self, his single-
hearted“entente”; on the contrary, it would seem that the“truth”of this
subject is always differing from itself, is never quite where he says he is.
His complaints, however, also contain far more overt linguistic disrup-
tions. The mysterious“Aboue xx. woulues”of the passage quoted earlier
( 162 – 68 ) are followed by his declaration that“Thoughe in meane season of
grene grasse I fede, / It wolde not greue me yf she knewe my heuynesse”
( 204 – 05 ). There are unexplained references earlier to a house to be swept
and a broom set onfire ( 176 – 77 ). The words“Let the mou[n]t with all
braunches swete / Entyerly growe; god gyue vs grace to mete”( 181 – 82 ) drift
past spectrally, tracing for an instant the“rich mount”of Tudor iconog-
raphy, an erotic fantasy mingling dynastic fertility (the patroness’s body)
and royal bounty, and a restoration to a court which is the fount of being.
The sources of this referential scattering are wide-ranging; if the poet is
indeed hinting at a misspent past in which he feigned disloyalty, it may
be noted that“wylde wolves”appear in the moral allegoryThe Court of
Sapience, which Hawes certainly knew, haunting the narrator’s passage
through this world before he reaches Dame Sapience’s haven.^70
This rich supply of letters, numbers, heraldic emblems and enigmatic
colloquialisms, however, has its main source in the abundant storehouse of
political prophecy.^71 Students of this weird and invigorating genre have
identified several strands, notably the tradition of“prophecies of Merlin”
with its“heraldic or totemistic”symbolism of animals and plants (e.g.
Hawes’s“xx. woulues”); riddles, proverbs andimpossibilia; and the“pseudo-
Methodian”tendency (named after St. Methodius the third-century bishop
of Lycia) to steer away fromfigures towards literal evocation of the spectacle
of apocalypse.^72 As contemporaries noted, the internal logic of the more
figurative prophecies carries contradictions. The propheticfigure’s meaning
will not emerge until the prophecy has been fulfilled in history, and
the gap between word and thing vanishes with that“apocalyptic closure”
when all things will be revealed and all meanings decisively disambiguated^73
(Alan of Lille speaks of the period prior to revelation as a dilatioor
deferral).^74 This produces its own paradox for that relatively humble form
of prediction, the political prophecy. On the one hand, prophecies, because
they do not mean once for all, can come to mean almost anything. This is
especially apparent in thefifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when what
134 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland