his own grievances: as we shall see shortly, the poem’s movement is one of
gradual diminution, the complaint’s pretensions to universality slowly drain-
ing away. At the opposite extreme of generality falls an unusual instance of the
anecdotal vignette more popular with other petitionary poets, as Dunbar harks
backtoatimewhenhe“wes...on nwreice kne / Cald dandillie, bischop,
dandillie”(B 68 , 61 – 62 ) and ironically reflectsthatagehasnotfulfilled the
narcissistic predictions of baby talk. Hethus inscribes himself within the poem
as boy-bishop, protagonist in a disorderly carnival of“thocht.”
The petitioner more than once cites time lost as evidence of“liell seruice”
(B 79 , 13 ), telling his king“How that myʒowthe is done forloir / Inʒour
seruice with pane and greiff”(B 68 , 2 – 3 ). Retrospect is testament; called to
witness, the pastfigures in a moral balance sheet used to underwrite the
petitioner’s request for notice.^37 Time and court service are quite differently
related in a poem to a different courtly subculture,“My lordis of chalker
[exchequer], pleisʒow to heir”(B 36 ), which once again turns on a witty
contrast of scale. Penitential hindsight is replaced by its analogue in the
records of the court concerned with royal revenues, where timefigures as
“rekkyning”( 6 ). In this small-scale local judgement day, the“lordis”have
no need to waste ink“In the ressaueing of my soumes”( 10 ); Dunbar’s
money is gone, and he does not know how:
I cannot tellʒow how it is spendit,
Bot weill I waitt that it is endit;
And that me think ane coumpt our sair. account;sore
( 13 – 15 )If other petitions depend on a conscious testamentary retrospect over time
past, Dunbar here is comically in the dark as to how his losses have come
about. Time’s predatory workings are inaccessible to the speaker–myste-
riously“out of his hands”–and can only be registered by appeal to another
witness, his purse“Quhilk wald not lie and it war luikit [examined]”( 20 ).
The purse’s unheard voice becomes part of a bureaucratic audit, and
biography is measured by income and expenditure.^38
In B 79 , time is hyperbolically mapped on to the space of precolonial
marvel. Dunbar waits for a benefice for so long that
It micht haue cuming in schortar quhyll
Fra Calʒecot and the New Fund Yle, Calcutta
The partis of transmeridiane.
( 61 – 63 )or from such wondrous regions as“the desertis of Ynde”( 66 ),“the orient
partis”( 70 ) and“the ylis of Aphrycane”( 71 ).^39 The universal“pane”of the
72 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland