Of my lady and me, by dame fortunes chaunce,
To mete togyders by wonder[f]ull ordynaunce.
The seconde is, where fortune dooth me brynge
In many placys, I se by prophecy,
As in the storyes of the olde buyldynge,
Letters for my lady, depeynted wonderly,
And letters for me, besyde her meruayllously
Agreynge well vnto my bookes all
In dyuers placys I se it in generall. ( 281 – 94 )No less than inThe Bowge of Courte, the dreamer is inside a living modesty
topos. The convention we witness at the end of afifteenth-century poem
likeThe Isle of Ladies–where the display of“letters”on a wall becomes a
means of occult communication between true lovers^79 – is here writ very
large indeed, as this amatory bush telegraph appears“in many places.”All
the world, it would seem, loves a lover. In this all-engulfing erotic textuality,
the poetry of England’s poetic fathers augurs and authenticates a lover-
author’s“felycyte”as if shadowing forth a historical truth, in a preposterous
genealogy.
Prophecy looms largest as the lover confronts the three mirrors. Whereas
the earlier part of the poem presented a profoundly impaired relation
between past and present, the mirrors show their connexion as an imaginary
continuity. They are a transposition into narrative of the advisory com-
monplaces from the end ofThe Pastime; as Ashby puts it,
Thinges past, remembre & wele deuide;
Thinges present, considre & wele governe;
For thinges commyng, prudently prouide... (Active Policy, 912 – 14 )and they have advice texts attached to them. Thefirst shows the lover’s
misspent youth (“As vnto wyldnesse alway affirmatyf,” 325 ) and is itself
full ofDistich-like precepts. The second returns to“cursed calkynge”; the
lover’s opponents are envisaged as astrologers and false prophets, and the
accents become increasingly obsessive and paranoid (“I sawe there trappes, I
sawe theyr gynnes all,” 407 ) as he foresees the perils that lie ahead. Hawes
here echoes earlier representations of thelosengierof love-poetry as diabo-
lical,“practicing the art of divination.”The Comfortset up a series of
equivalences–between lover and prophet, the lover’s sincerity and the
prophet’s truth–in such a way that the“calkers”of the prophetic narrative
have the same function as the“faitours”of love-poetry: their ability to
mimic the voice of sincerity or“truth”deprives that voice of any claim to
authenticity.^80
136 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland