equine parallels to his own neediness. Yet the speaker’s deepest anxiety
appears to be that rumor and reputation, putting these conceits in the
mouths of others, may give them a more pejorative cast, and that his own
imaginative description of his situation will be transformed into the dis-
missive contempt of others. The stanzas of ambiguous authorship that
conclude the poem in the Maitland Folio thus concretize Dunbar’s conceits
in a double-edged way:^61
Efter our wrettingis, thesaurer,
Tak in this gray hors, auld Dumbar,
Quhilk in my aucht with seruice trew possession
In lyart changeit is his hew. grey
( 69 – 72 )At the last, the extended tropes of Dunbar’s poem are replaced by the executive
and administrative“wrettingis”oftheking.ThesegiveDunbartherewardhe
desires, but at the same time confirmfinally the identity the poem simulta-
neously enacts and dreads, even going so far as to banish the fruitful gap
between the suppliant and hisfictions in a decisive act of closure (“this gray
hors, auld Dumbar”). If the petition apparently succeeds, it does so by con-
firming the distribution of power betweensubject and sovereign. The subject is
finally spoken for, and by the same token is decisively reduced to an animal
voicelessness, ceasing of a sudden to be the talking creature of beast fable.
“the kingis grace” v. “johne thomsounis man”Rivalry, emasculation and physical impotence deprive Dunbar of a clearly
limned identity, reducing him to the zero term in the court’simaginative
economy. In the poems on“feasts of benefices,”the court obeys an insane
arithmetic whereby“Quha monyast hes makis maist [most]requeist”(B 43 , 2 ).
“[V]plandis Michell,”with his two or three“curis,”“playis with totum and I
with nychell [nothing]”(B 68 , 71 , 74 ).“Sir Iohne Kirkpakar,”who has seven
“kirkis”( 88 ), boasts that“ʒitt I think thai grow sall till ellevin, / Or he be seruit
in ane,ʒone ballet maker”(B 75 , 89 – 90 ).Theplayerwithnocardsisa“syphir
[cipher]”among the rapacious benefice seekers who metaphorically feast on
their gains (B 43 , 20 ). Variations on the same theme appear in other poets:
Deschamps, too, claims that at the banquets of the great he is“tousjours serviz
d’oublie,”punningly merging the host with the court servitor’s perennial
neglect.^62 In Dunbar’spoems,thisneglectwillonly be abolished with the
very different economy of the Last Judgement:“Quha maist hes than sall maist
repent, / With largest compt to pairt amang thame”( 29 – 30 ).^63
“My panefull purs so priclis me” 77