who seems to represent Sidney’s wife, Barbara, while
“the knight that loves me best” (l. 8) and who “griefs
livery wears” (l. 16) is clearly a projection of himself,
described as an abandoned pilgrim, exiled in the Low
Countries away from “the lady that doth rest near
Medway’s sandy bed” (l. 74), a reference to the river
near Penshurst. Sidney’s is a more personal adaptation
of the ballad than Raleigh’s. Like most of his poetry, it
is melancholic, focusing on the awareness that “love no
perpetuity / Grants of days or of joys” (ll. 39–40). It
shares with Raleigh’s poetry something of the same
haunting quality of a nostalgia that is more than just
personal but conveys something of the whole age’s loss
of shared meaning in a world of unpredictability and
changing political and religious meanings. Ultimately
the poem conveys a broader sense of loss and silence as
it bids farewell to the medieval world.
See also HERBERT, MARY SIDNEY, COUNTESS OF PEM-
BROKE.
FURTHER READING
Croft, P. J., ed. The Poems of Robert Sidney. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984.
Hay, Millicent V. The Life of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester.
Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1984.
Waller, Gary. English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. 2nd ed.
London: Longman, 1994.
Gary Waller
“LENTEN YS COME WITH LOVE TO
TOUNE” (“SPRING HAS ARRIVED
WITH LOVE”) ANONYMOUS (1300) As printed
in modern editions, “Lenten is come” comprises three
12-line STANZAs rhyming aabccbddbeeb. In the generally
accepted three-stanza poem, the b-rhyme lines contain
three metrical feet, while the other lines contain four.
The structure therefore separates each stanza into four
discrete three-line sections, loosely connected by the b
rhyme. Like many MIDDLE ENGLISH LYRICS AND BALLADS,
the poem’s fi rst stanza celebrates the coming of spring,
praising the blossoming fl owers and the birds’ songs.
As the stanza ends, the poet begins to project his own
emotions onto the birds, whom he represents as rejoic-
ing over their good luck so that all the wood rings with
their song.
In stanza 2, this pathetic fallacy (concept of celebrat-
ing spring) continues as all of nature rejoices at the
coming of spring, but in such human terms that it is
clear the speaker is projecting his emotions into the
natural scene. The poet depicts the rose deliberately
donning her red face, the leaves in the bright wood
beginning to grow with desire, and the animals cheer-
ing their mates. But as the second stanza ends, a new
note is sounded as the speaker complains of his own
unrequited love.
The poem’s third stanza is structured much like the
second: It opens with further description of the secret
songs of the birds and animals, then shifts to the
human world. In a striking juxtaposition, the speaker
says that worms make love under the ground, but that
women simply grow inordinately proud. Women,
therefore, are depicted as unnatural, out of step with
the natural impulses of spring in which even the
worms, God’s lowest creatures, participate. Clearly his
mistress’s rejection has caused the speaker to make this
judgment, and he ends the poem declaring that if his
lady continues her disdain, he will run off to live in the
woods.
The poem has been called the most artistic REVERDIE
in MIDDLE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, but some have criticized
it for including the conventional “love longing” in a
“nature poem” where it does not seem to belong. The
scholar Andrew Howell, however, notes that such a
nature opening would have led the medieval reader to
expect the lover to reveal himself after the opening
stanza, and notes that the beginning of the poem may
allude to the Middle English poem “The Thrush and
the Nightingale.” The point of the work seems to be
the deliberate contrast between the harmonious natu-
ral world and the human confl ict caused by unrequited
love. The critic Edmund Reis sees the speaker of the
poem as being out of step with the natural world,
because his love longing makes it impossible for him to
participate in the joy of the spring (l. 67). The speaker’s
vow to leave the world of humans and join the natural
world of the woods seems appropriate as well, until
one remembers that in medieval literature, the wild
man of the woods who abandons human society was a
conventional image of madness, or of an unnatural
man. Thus, the poem ends with the speaker and his246 “LENTEN YS COME WITH LOVE TO TOUNE”