Thisfinal deferral is itself underwritten by an act of identification with
literary“auctoryte,”sinceThe Comfort’s echoes of Lydgate’sTemple of Glas
culminate in an open-endedness similar to that of the earlier poem. In
another interesting conjunction of literary and royal authority, Pucell, the
court’s voice, ends by suggesting the solution to love’s troubles offered in
Lydgate’s poem. Amour is left abiding the judgement of Venus and
Fortune, but Venus’s judgement inThe Templeis itself an injunction
to wait (“Abide awhile, and þan of þi desire / The time neigheth þat shal
þe most delite”).^89 If Lydgate is named among those authors who inThe
Comfort foretell Amoure’s plight, the tangled prophetic relationship
between Lydgate’s past text and Hawes’s present text becomes one of
potentially endless deferral, dissolving chronology altogether. Authority,
once again, undoes itself. In the one surviving print, the stanza that closes
the dream is, symptomatically, half-effaced, but seems to imply that the
lover’s conversation is interrupted“that tyme”( 927 ), a hint that it remains
to be taken up again–and again.
Hawes’sfinal poem is thus left in exhausted and isolated pathos. It
encrypts a loss it cannot securely translate into metaphor. Imaginary lady
and imaginary rivals alike supply objects and obstacles on which the poem
desperately fastens, while in the distance thefires of annihilation beckon,
at once desired and feared ( 560 ). But ifThe Comfort of Loverstries out
multiple modes with a view to constructing various narratives, it is on
another level not a narrative at all, merely a series of dialogues and com-
plaints surrounded by obscure intimations of greater things.The Pastime
of Pleasure’s relationship between lyric and narrative is here recast as one
between a lyric present in which the lover and his lady perhaps endlessly
rehearse the standardfigures of complaint and dialogue, and a completely
different–prophetic–temporality grounded in radical discontinuity, in
which the lover’s past texts, written before the action begins, point across
a void towards an apocalyptic horizon. In its simultaneous confirmation
and denial of the validity of prophecy, the opening allusion to Oedipus thus
foreshadows a deep division. As petitioner, Hawes tries to make his love-
poetry reenter the historical world of the court; as prophet, he makes the
most all-encompassing claims for the poet’s authority in his work. In this
curiously moving poem, though, the attenuated authority on show has
no support from any position in the world of politics, king and court, not
even that of a groom to the chamber. Indeed, its claims to absolute power
are a function of its very powerlessness. Hawes’s struggle to make all other
texts conform to his ownfictions only ends by reminding us all the more
poignantly that the self-reflexive solipsism of his poem, intended to
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