[“I tell you that St. Pry’s game can’t make my tool, feeble and round like an
egg, new again”].^54 Cerquiglini has demonstrated that in Machaut’s work
old age, impotence and the cleric’s poetic identity are intimately con-
nected.^55 In Dunbar’s case, too, such hints are apparent, both in“Sanct
saluatour”(B 61 ) and elsewhere in the begging-poems. The “magryme”
(B 35 , 3 ) leaves the sufferer’s“curage sleipeing”( 12 ), and we may recall
Langour’s“instrument full lamentable and deid”(B 75 , 22 ). Whether we
take Dunbar’s painful purse to suggest venereal disease or afigurative
castration less easily localized, the poems make it clear that the lassitude
induced by poverty is unmanning. In contrast to“men that hes pursis in
tone,”Dunbar is, in the evocative words of the second wife in his own
Tretis,“a right lusty schadow”(B 3 , 191 ).
All the features we have noted in connexion with the petitioner’s body are
signs both of humility and of humiliation; the poet as suppliant reveals his
lack of status, his“dependence on a highly-placed person.”^56 That depend-
ence takes especially interesting form in what is perhaps Dunbar’s richest
figuration of the petitioner’s body,“Schir, lat it neuer in toune be tald”
(B 66 ). Bawcutt hasfinely discussed the“comical-pathetical”and“witty”
qualities of the poem;^57 while these are certainly present, there may be a case
for modifying unduly cheerful readings. Here Ifind myself anachronisti-
cally recalling D. A. Miller’s point that Dickens’s characters derive their
“charm”from“the debt of gratitude we pay to theirfixity for giving us, in
contrast, our freedom. We condescend to praise these characters as‘inim-
itable’because they make manifest how safe we are from the possibility of
actually imitating them.”^58 It is in such a comfortable distance between
imagined audience and speaker that the poem’s“playfulness” resides.
Dunbar here is comically bestial, a “talking animal” whose fear is of
exclusion:“Gryt court hors puttis me fra the staw / To fang [get] the fog
[withered grass]befirthe [wood] and fald [field]”( 11 – 12 ).^59 He is also aged,
with“maine...quhyt”( 21 ), at the wrong end of a“lyff...miserabell”
( 28 ) and sacrificed opportunities ( 51 – 54 ). In this wintry poem,^60 time brings
decay and exclusion; the body cut off from the court, the community in
which it has its being, is abject, marginal and less than human. The reader
beholds thisfigure from the safe distance of inclusion within the frame of
the court.
Solidified in this poem is a relation not only between poet and reader, but
also between poet and monarch. Theplaceof its consolidation is the relation
between stanza form and refrain. The stanzas work through a number of
conceits in which the poet compares himself to a rejected“aldʒaid auer
[worn-out pack-horse]”( 3 ), hoping to divert the sovereign with a variety of
76 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland