Alas, I am dysdayned,
And as a man halfe-maymed,
My harte is so sore payned... ( 252 – 54 )The Christological identification of the lyric offers us something close to a
monologue of the“Woefully arrayed”Christ speaking directly to the sinner,
as pained and rejected body of the Passion. If we also follow earlier readings
in suggesting that Parrott echoes Psittacus–the son of Deucalion and
Pyrrha, transformed by the gods into a parrot after his death–there may be
another reason for the mutation and metamorphosis of thisfigure; like the
incarnate Christ, he is“as a man halfe-maymed.”As Christ, Psittacus and
“halfe-maymed”lover, Parott, at least at this point, has only the authority of
a logos itself maimed, afigure of verbal lack. Even Wolsey, scrambled into a
farrago of scriptural and other types, a batch of joltingly polysyllabic verbs
( 432 ) and a wolf’s head, has more substance; indeed, he challenges Parott for
the position of the poem’s ontological center.
The last part of the poem has often drawn accusations that it lacks the
imaginative texture of its previous sections in its drift into the standard mode
of“abuses”satire. Admonished by Galathea to“sette asyde all sophisms, and
speke now trewe and playne”( 448 ), Parrottfinally moves into a series of
ponderous antitheses. Yet these lines, for all their sententiousness, are no less
oblique than much that has gone before, and they draw on similar forms of
prophetic symbolism.“So myche newe makyng, and so madd tyme spente”
( 450 ) might suggest a conservative fear of Wolsey’sadministrativeinnova-
tions, but the“newe makyng”most evident here–seemingly perceived as
such by uncomprehending contemporaries– is Skelton’sown,andthe
“madd tyme spente”doubles back on the poem’s carnivalesque propensities.
Similarly, the reference to“So myche translacion into Englyshe confused”
( 451 ) works as a highly accurate gloss on the entire poem, in which translation,
the dominantfigure of metaphor as movement and transformation, shapes
both Parrott’s practice of allegory as a shuttling between orders and levels of
meaning (the ghosts of the exegetical four levels are very present here) and
Wolsey’s processions and diplomatic perambulations. Even the antitheses of
political clamor recall another kind of complaint; the reversions to“So
many,”“So myche”and“so lytell”take up the earlier erotics of privation
and excess manifested in Parrot’s dealings with the“ladyes”of the court.
Skelton may–though perhaps we shall never know how far this is the case–
have intended the poem as a petition to return to favor. In practice, however, it
sums up multiple allegiances: to king; to a court we cannot clearly envisage; to
the overweening cardinal it ostensibly detests but structurally requires, and his
radical reformings and deformings of church and state; to textual bodies as
158 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland