Ghost, the spirit moving the poet-prophet to write his“fatallfictions.”
The three are linked by the absent monarch whose dynasty is affiliated with
the lineage of the poets, who may be“my lady’s father,”and who is himself
authorized by“grace.”Exclusion from the court seems to have given rise
in Hawes’s poem to a drastic attempt to merge all three authorities in one,
by inscribing his amorous texts and the works of his predecessors into the
sphere of prophecy, and seeking to make all three authenticate each other
and consequently his own vernacular writing. Alienated from that source
of power which the court embodies, Hawes makes his own bid for power,
by producing a poetic closed system in which the poet’s word alone counts.
The petitionary logic of its structure is not in itself difficult to grasp. If
the lover’sfirst interlocutor points to the desired outcome of Hawes’s suit–
she is able to read his perplexing hints, and draw from them a single
purposeful utterance–the encounter with Pucell herself returns us to
Hawes’s present position, and to the unsatisfied anticipation to which he
is unwillingly constrained. The combination of poetic, amatory and pro-
phetic discourses aims to affirm the absolute moral integrity of the speaker.
The prophetic elements also signal a desired future when all will be well,
and this divided speaker, with his differing generic commitments, will be
“re-membered,”healed by the (female) patron’s word, which will make
thought, word, deed and heart one.
The conflicts that emerge from those commitments, however, far exceed
any pragmatic aim. Hawes’s multiple identifications, his attempts to
empower his voice, do not lead to an especially settled text, to that“con-
forte”which moves uneasily between spiritualconsolatioand the“comfort
and solace”of love-allegory and tournament. The“trouth”that reaches
utterance becomes divided and unstable. And while Hawes’s premise that
love and prophecy share patterns of deferral is structurally justified, there is
a vast difference between the love complaint, with its sophisticated refine-
ments for exploring the lover’s desire, and the prophecy, in which the
speaker is merely the mouthpiece of a being altogether exterior to him.
The political prophecy of the early sixteenth century enshrined fantasy;
the riven human subjects of history couldfind imaginary satisfactions in
teleological narratives. Endeavoring to be restored to the center of power,
Hawes struggles to create a seamless fantasy in which origins are harmonized
with consequences, beginnings with ends, integrating disparate material
through prophetic and genealogical structures. His text is a veritable art of
memory, striving through commemoration to heal loss.
The true nature of that loss has not been clearly articulated, even at the
end. In this text of“mournynge”( 250 , 720 ), the lady’s diagnosis of the
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