34THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORYstatus) and then killing and eating him. While the poem’s story makes
the wolf an explicit tyrant, the poem’s narrator nonetheless offers a
lengthy elaboration of the story’s meaning. He notes that while the lamb
“may signifie / As Maill men, Merchandis, and all lauboureris” (“Maill”
refers to tenant farmers),^16 the wolf in fact represents three kinds of
tyrants: those who abuse the law to seek their own ends, those who are
so greedy that they seek out the poor as victims, and those landowners
who abuse their poor tenants.
While the allegory seems straightforward, and the explicit moraliz-
ing by the narrator enforces a sense of the cultural and highly anthro-
pomorphic work of the tale (and poet), the poem is more complex than
it seems at first glance. There are odd tensions in the allegory: the nar-
rator ends his moralizing by asking God to protect the lamb from
wolves, and also to “saif our King, and gif him hart and hand / All sic
Wolfis to banes of the land” (to save our king, and give him heart and
hand; all such wolves to banish from the land). Thus the tale protests the
arbitrary power of rulers, even as it pays deference to the king, the per-
son in whom all power is vested. The lamb’s innocence is at least some-
what compromised (as the wolf also suggests) by the simultaneously
comic and impressive sophistication of his legal knowledge and his
claim that the Bible (the origin of a notion of original sin) denies that
sins of the father can be visited on the son, or “for my trespass quhy suld
my sone have plycht?” (2669; for my sin, why should my son be blamed?).
In killing the lamb, the wolf “drank his blude and off his flesche can eit”
(2702), a striking allusion to the rite of communion. The wolf ’s consump-
tion of the lamb can be a perversion of the sacrament or an act through
which he is made holy. This allusion also might suggest some discom-
fort with the cannibalistic undertones of the communion itself, since
the wolf allegorizes the human participant of communion who drinks
the blood of Christ, revealing it as a strangely animalistic act. The allu-
sion makes relatively explicit too that the lamb must be read as allegori-
cal of Christ, God as human as animal (making the wolf simultaneously
Satan and human). The discomfort over the nature of communion is also
discomfort or wonder over the strangeness of the idea that the father
(God) sacrifices the innocent son (Christ). Finally, the force of the tale’s