by nervous admonition (“Tycez-vous, Parrott,tenes-vous coye”[“Be quiet,
Parrot, keep still,” 55 – 56 ]). The ladies’whispers suggest courtly learning and
division, overlapping with sexuality (Parott has aroused a response) and
secrecy.
The pattern continues, and subterranean temporalities begin to rise in a
disquieting groundswell of Old Testament narratives. The butcher’s son
from Norwich is suddenly the Golden Calf (“Vitulusin Oreb,” 59 ) the
obscene bull-god nourished by an overmerciful priest-king androi fainéant
(“Melchisedeck mercyfull made Moloc mercyles,” 60 ).^22
Jereboseth is Ebrue, who lyst the cause dyscus.
“Peace, Parrot, ye prate as ye wereebrius!
Howst the,lyuer god van hemrik,ic seg;
In Popering grew peres, whan Parrot was an eg. ( 67 – 70 )Interpretation here is a delirium that runs along curious roads. Jeroboseth
(Gideon), the hero awaited by a neglected and downtrodden kingdom, is
“Ebrue”( 67 ), only to prepare a swerve into another kind of“truth”–the
drunkenness (“ebrius”) to which parrots were notoriously prone, Parrott’s
swift dance to a national stereotype (the drunken Fleming), and the double
pun on“Popering.”Wolsey’s libidinousness and supposed papal ambitions
shape Parott’s own verbal extravagance, his provocation offictional courtly
ladies and historical London mercers. Asked where this is tending, Parott
cuts back with“Over in a whynnymeg!”( 71 ), which Kinsman suggests is a
reference to a song“of sexual encounter and dispatch.”At the same time, it
shrinks into“places”where the sacral and the soteriological contract into,
but also pull against, the local and dialectal:
Hop Lobyn of Lowdeon wald have e byt of bred;
The Jebet of Baldock was made for Jack Leg... ( 72 – 73 )Threats of Scottish invasion meetEstherand folk legend, the hanging of a
wicked counsellor in Baldock that of a giant outlaw in Hertfordshire.
The poem’s alliteration enhances the carnivalesque qualities of such
popular reference. Repeated consonants and vowels insist on the material
body of sound, which also becomes here the material body of the all-
pervading usurper of the body politic. Yet that body is ironically the
“native”resonance of Skelton’s own poetic. Meanwhile, political allusions
suggest, through a landscape reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, a lover’s
impotence and a weak king:“A narrow unfethered and without an hed, / A
bagpype without blowynge standeth in no sted” ( 74 – 75 ). A theater of
corporeal fragments generates analogues both to Skelton’s psittacine lan-
guage, which wanders without an organizing center and generates terror,
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 151