lover’s condition is immediate:“I thynke some thynge be from you past and
gone”( 705 ). His response–“I am not hole / your mercy maye me ease”
( 824 – 25 )–seems clear enough. But if his loss really has so simple a narrative
referent, we may still wonder what to make of the extraordinarily haunting
and disquieting close of Amour’sfinal speech, with its characteristic insist-
ence on memory:
Of my herte I wolde ye knewe the preuyte.
Forgete not me; remembre loue dere bought.
Than as I thynke ye wolde remembre me. ( 922 – 24 )Amour has by now fully revealed his passion to Pucell–the“preuyte”of his
heart–so what can remain of which she is unaware? The lines, positioned as
they are, clearly have a petitionary aim, but there is also a hint that Amoure’s
loss lies deeper than the poem has revealed, or can reveal.
There is, indeed, a parallel here to Freud’s conception of that“object-loss
which is withdrawn from consciousness”and which results in melancholia,
a phenomenon associated by Freud with the strange workings of narcis-
sism.^88 Hawes’s text is a ceaseless, often broken reshaping of genres straining
towards the construction of narratives which, whether they employ
romance, advice or prophetic conventions, repeatedly attempt to identify
with patterns that link origins and ends, and to combine genres in a manner
that reinforces his lover’s word. It directs its energies to the concealment
of a loss it is unable to acknowledge. This process cannot be conceived
of outside those forms of authority and societal power outlined above,
intimately bound up with the narrative patterns I describe, with which as
ego-ideals the poem seeks a kind of narcissistic identification. The third
mirror, with its sword placed there by a“grete lady in antyquyte,”promises
to authenticate Hawes’s ambitions through association with lineage and
divine influence. We might speculate that the poem seeks to close the gap
generated by expulsion from court, the poet’s enforced removal from the
sphere of a royal power that could empower his own voice; its strenuous
attempts at this may mark a mourning substituting for the one which in
history–as the records tell us by their silence–Hawes was not offered a
chance to attend. But this collapsing of past, present and future is undercut
by a petitionary structure that must mark temporaldifference–Hawes is
now outside the court, complaining perhaps to a former patron–and must
consequently end in postponement and indecision. The embryonic
romance narrative and the predictions inspired by the Holy Ghost of“the
resynge of a knight”come to nothing, since to fulfill its function as petition
the text cannot show a satisfied petitioner.
142 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland