As he enters this illumined“lustygairdinggent”( 44 ), the dreamer accordingly
becomes part of its optics, and it is useful at this point to glance atThe Goldyn
Targe. This poem has regularly been assigned to the periphery of courtly
ceremonial, with Pamela King offering the judicious perspective that it is a script
for an imaginary pageant.^38 The beginning offers a notoriously virtuoso rendi-
tion of an aureate landscape, with Dunbar’s Latinate diction at its most elevated:
Wp sprang the goldyn candill matutyne, of the morning
With clere depurit bemes cristallyne, purified
Glading the mery foulis in thair nest. delighting
...
Anamalit was the felde wyth all colouris. Enameled
The perly droppis schuke in silvir schouris,
Quhill all in balme did branch and leuisflete. fragrance;flow
...
The rosy garth, depaynt and redolent,
With purpur, azure, gold and goulis gent,
Arayed was by dame Flora, the quene,
So nobily that ioy was for to sene
The roch agayn the riwir resplendent,
As low enlumynit all the leues schene. flame;brightly
(B 59 , 4 – 6 , 13 – 15 , 40 – 45 )This is a landscape where discourse is, to borrow Lacan’s phrase,“aligned along
the several staves of a musical score.”^39 The landscape that May promises to
speakintoexistenceinThe Thrissillishereapoeticfait accompli.Previous
scholarship has done much to elaborate the sources and resources of Dunbar’s
diction: his periphrastic techniques, the metaphors which in theartes rhetoricae
lend form and body to words, lapidary, biblical, liturgical and doctrinal symbol-
ism, various forms of artisanal labor.^40 Nature is conceived in terms of artifice,
and a repertory of verbs–“Apparalit,”“Anamalit”( 12 – 13 ),“Ourgilt”( 27 ). The
narrator here is, like thefigure in theThrissill’s long central section, little more
than a“pair of eyes”mediating text to reader, and as the colors of line 41 hint,
oneelementinthepicturetheseekphrasticeyesobserveisheraldic.^41
This poem too is a dream vision. The narrator falls asleep on“Florais
mantill”( 48 ) and a form of semantic slippage begins. If the poem’s prologue
began“Ryght as the stern of day begouth to schyne”( 1 ), the dream starts
with the approach of“A saill als quhite as blossum vpon spray, / Wyth merse
[top-castle] of gold brycht as the stern of day”( 51 – 52 ). As Spearing has noted,
these lines seem to enact an entirely programmatic reversal; while the garden
toposat the beginning of the poem rendered the natural world through a
lexis of artifacts, the emblematic ship that suddenly arrives on the scene
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 35