Ye, all thyng mortall shall torne unto nought
Except mannes soule, that Chryst so dere bought;
That never may dye, nor never dye shall:
Make moche of Parrot, the popegay ryall. ( 208 – 17 )The apparentgravitasof these haunting lines leads one to expect a major
programmatic statement, and in a sense, that is what we get. For all that,
however, what Parrott stands for here has never been satisfactorily
explained. He is“the poetic faculty,”the soul, an uncorrupted saintly
body:^33 all are possibilities, but none have exclusive purchase. If Parrot is a
figure for poetry, then he can only be adjudged an uncanny one, confound-
ing categories: split between spiritual and carnal, a dead yet not putrefying
body whose proximity to the soul (the two seem teasingly close, yet not
quite identical) surrounds it with an aura not easily described. (We might
compare another of his Greek and Latin interpolations, in which“Vita et
Anima / Zoe ke psiche”[“Life and Soul”][ 267 – 68 ] are followed by more
dubious copulations of both terms and tongues:“Concumbunt Grece. Non
est hic sermo pudicus”[“They lie together in the Greek manner. This is not a
modest way of speaking”][ 269 ].) Parrott, not surprisingly, evades desig-
nation, and the question of interpreting him turns the mirror on the reader:
the“pereles prynce that Parrot dyd create, / He made you of nothynge by
his magistye”( 218 – 19 ). In the provisional moment of reading, the reader,
like Parrott, is createdex nihilo, summoned to“Poynt well this probleme
that Parrot doth prate”( 220 ) and remember mortality.
Galathea, a reader herself made up of many prototypes,^34 enters to hear the
lament of Pamphilus, marginally glossed as“the all-loving,”when he“lost his
mate.”Parott’sresponseisaversionofthelyric“Comeovertheburne,Besse,to
me.”The poem exists in a moralized version in which“Bess”is“mankynde”
summoned by Christ. It can thus be read as entirely continuous with what has
gone before–where“wylfulnes ys vicar generall,”Christ calls an erring church
back to him. In the other version, however, Bess is a young woman“Goten with
child”by“Awantonchyld.”^35 Parrot reasserts the identity of the green lover:
I wyl be ferme and stabyll,
And to yow servyceabyll,
And also prophytabyll... ( 246 – 48 )As Griffiths notes, this sudden phallic reinvestment may draw Galathea into
a temporal continuum that will be“prophytabyll”and so“profit”her.
Griffiths suggests that this may be a“doubledouble entendre,”^36 finding
closure in a triple pun. However, behind this petition there suddenly
appears a specter whose meanings are disquietingly unsettled:
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 157