stages of a woman’slife(“tender Youth,” 154 ;“Grene Innocence,” 155 ;“Suete
Womanhede” 160 )–and his defense collapses only in the face of“Perilouse
Presence”( 196 ). After a love affair, which evidently lasts“quhill men mycht
go a myle”( 221 ), the lover is deserted, and Eolus blows his“bugill”( 230 ):
And sudaynly in the space of a luke
All was hyne went, thare was bot wildernes,
Thare was no more bot birdis, bank and bruke. ( 232 – 34 )Allegorical representation fails when“Presence”–the point at which one
might indeed expectfigures to fail–“kest a pulder”( 203 ) in Reason’s eyes.^44
This is accompanied, too, by a stripping down of the landscape–all
properties and ladies vanish, and“the space of a luke”becomes contermi-
nous, as it always was, with lack and evanescence.
Christopher Pye speaks of the“specular conceit”that“lends the irrecov-
erable moment of the subject’s entry into the symbolic order its recursive
form, casting it as an instance of loss endlessly returning upon the self.”^45
Such recursiveness, I think, marks the bond in the poem between the
demolition of the gardentoposand the note of loss on which the poem closes.
The ship, like one of the elaborate structures of courtly revel, departs with a
deafening cannonade that awakens the dreamer:“Wyth spirit affrayde apon
my fete I sprent”( 242 ). He returns to the garden of the opening, but it is of
course a world of artifice, whose relations with the erotic body remain
obvious:“In quhite and rede was all the felde besene, / Throu Naturis
nobil fresch anamalyng”( 250 – 51 ). There is, however, afinal transformation
in store. Poetic fathers are absorbed into the landscape, or rather, perhaps,
theirpresenceisrevealed.Chaucerisapostrophizedas“rose of rethoris all,”
“aneflour imperiall,”and“all the lycht”of“oure Inglisch”( 253 – 54 , 59 ), who
“This mater coud illumynit haue full brycht”( 258 ). The poem then hails the
two other members of thefifteenth-century English triumvirate:
O morall Gower and Ludgate laureate,
Your sugurit lippis and tongis aureate
Bene to oure eris cause of grete delyte.
Your angel mouthis most mellifluate
Oure rude langage has clere illumynate
And fair ourgilt oure spech, that imperfyte
Stude or your goldyn pennis schupe to write.
This ile before was bare and desolate
Off rethorike or lusty fresch endyte. ( 262 – 70 )The fathers are evoked in a mobile terminology that moves between speech
and writing, transferring the metaphoric“sun”to Chaucer and making him
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 37