threefigures of Jamesian royalty:“the Lyone, gretast of degre”( 87 ),“the Egle
king of fowlis”( 120 ), and“the awful Thrissill”( 129 ). Royal plurality of being
appears as three symbolic creatures; history depends not on Bernard André’s
occluded“fields,”but on the highly visiblefields of heraldry (the Lion stands
“On feild of gold...full mychtely,” 97 ). The heraldic, elsewhere a strand in
Dunbar’s diction, is crucial here, and the bejeweled ground ofThe Goldyn
Targeis consolidated into real property. The Lion, appointed king of beasts,
is endowed with a“dyademe full deir, / Off radyous stonis most ryall for to
se”( 101 – 02 ). On the Rose herself, characteristically, is bestowed“A coistly
croun with clarefeid stonis brycht...Quhill all the land illumynit of the
licht”( 155 , 157 ).
Beginnings are not so decisively past in Nature’s gift of a crown to the
Thrissill. As Nature surveys“allflouris that grew on feild”( 127 ) she sees the
thistle
kepit with a busche of speiris.
Concedring him so able for the weiris,
A radius croun of rubeis scho him gaif
And said,“In feild go furth and fend the laif” ( 130 – 33 )The Thistle’s qualification for kingship, then, is his strength in arms, an
oblique reference, perhaps, to earlier history, but one which realizes usur-
ping as defensive violence.^49 If the poem presents“three symbols of James
IV, the royal lion (justice), the eagle (liberality), and the thistle (strength),”
the only symbol given a justification for its coronation–and, indeed, a
mate–is the one whose emblematic attributes can compel coronation.^50
Fradenburg’s superb account ofThe Thrissillconceives of its heraldic
symbolism as direct revision of Chaucer’sParliament of Fowls. Unlike
Chaucer’s tercel eagles, whose competitive and endlessly self-replicating
language of aristocratic complaint can only be locked in the gap between
body andfigure–to speak of dying for love and to die are not the same–
“Dunbar’s triplication of sovereignty...tries to assert a fullness of being in
and through the very‘irreality’of the monarch, his entitlement to a surplus
figuration, a richness of imagination.”^51 There may, however, be something
disquieting in this very fullness. Dunbar’s dreamer must, as herald, enter
afield which already abounds with other desires–not only the sovereign’s,
but the multiple desires attending on the metaphors and registers on which
the poem draws–and which is thereforefinally inscrutable.
Certainly some interdictions are more recognizable than others. The heraldic
sign is necessarily conflicted, and in ways that suit this particular royal referent
well.AsD.VanceSmithobserves,thatsign’s genealogical dimension
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 39