who appears only to be sent into the heraldic wallpaper, becomes an
unanswered question, an unsettling surplus in a vision akin to Lacan’s
“ambiguity of the jewel.”^56 In contrast to the modestytoposwhich belatedly
replaces the garden ofThe Goldyn Targewith“this ile,”the end ofThe
Thrissill, like that of André’sVita, hints at the subtraction of the object of
vision from memory:
Than all the birdis song with sic a schout
That I annone awoilk quhair that I lay,
And with a braid I turnyt me about start
To se this court, bot all wer went away.
Than vp I lenyt halflingis in affrey, half
And thus I wret, asʒe haif hard toforrow,
Off lusty May vpone the nynt morrow.
( 183 – 89 )For Fradenburg, the birds’“schout”is sovereign authority which becomes
all too loud:“the univocity deafens; the poem is silenced by its own phonic
power.”^57 Yet in this poem that has been concerned with pointing to
origins beyond origins, thefinal stanza returns us to the beginning, giving
us another origin, another explanation for the poet’s activity. The poem is
pushed into existence not by the birds’sudden chorus (“Go se the birdis
how thay sing and dance”[ 40 ] has been replaced by“sic a schout”) but
by the vanishing of the court. May demanded that the poet return to his
former state, and produce a“hairt...glaid and blissful...Sangis to mak
undir the levis grene”( 27 – 28 ), but now it is the very absence of the court,
the lack framed by the“space of a luke,”that requires the poet to produce
court poetry.
The Thrissill’s attempt to establish a “natural” basis for the Anglo-
Scottish marriage, like André’s contemplation of Henry VII’s progress to
the throne, evolves into a subtle meditation on oblivion. Here Smith is once
again instructive in his exploration of heraldry’s memorial workings. While
it commemorates, he suggests, it is also bound in the end to an antiquity
beyond reach; it is a mortuary practice resting on the dead that cannot
be memorialized, a time“dont memoire de home ne courte.”The“very
potency of the heraldic depends upon something unknowable, ungraspable
at its very heart,”a“failure of technologies of registration to account for
something that will always be a remainder.”^58 Absorbed in its own enjoy-
ment,“this court”that the dreamer so desperately tries to“see”goes away
because, as the double story told by the dream structure makes clear, it was
never there and cannot look back. In the end,The Thrissillpresents two
accounts of its genesis, one which styles it a response to a command, and
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 41