Thou knowest the trouthe; I am to the true;
Whan that thou lyst thou mayst them all subdue.” ( 39 – 42 )In an unexplained shift, God has been set up in the lady’s place as recipient of
the lover’s complaint, and allusion made to a mysterious“them,”presumably
the lover’s opponents, though as yet we are not certain. Mention of God’s
power and protection leads to meditation on their former beneficiaries:
Who dyde preserue the yonge edyppus
whiche sholde haue be slayne by calculacyon?
To deuoyde grete thynges the story sheweth us,
That were to come by true revelacyon,
Takynge after theyr hole operacyon
In this edyppus, accordynge to affecte,
Theyr cursed calkynge holly to abiecte. ( 43 – 49 )The motif of prophecy arises through memory, in thefield of the lover’s
desire; here as throughout the poem, remembering entails looking to the
future to establish temporal continuity. A distinction is apparently drawn
between those prepared to wait on the divinely moved outcome of events,
and those who misguidedly attempt to predict that outcome and so act to
forestall it. But the Oedipus story hardly provides the most obvious proof
of mistaken prophecy. As the editors of theMinor Poemsput it, in under-
standable bafflement: “Hawes seems to be saying that Oedipus was
preserved in order to demonstrate the folly of foretelling events. Yet the
example is equally well suited to supporting the validity of divination.”^57
In this moment of aporia, anexemplumcited to prove one thing barely
suppresses a countertext proving its complete opposite.^58
This, however, is as nothing to the difficulties of the lover’s colloquy with
the“lady of goodly age.”Herfirst request is reminiscent of psychoanalyst
speaking to analysand:
Tell me your mynde now shortly euerydele;
To layne the trouthe I charge you to beware.
I shall for you a remedy prepare. ( 80 – 82 )The lover’s response here has the quality of free association, structured by
a rigorous but inaccessible symbolic net of meanings. It is held together,
ironically, by a series of plays on the word“trouthe.”He affirms that his
“trouthe and loue”( 88 ) are the cause of his trouble, as he has“watched many
nyghtes”( 95 ) for his lady,“To her and hers my trouthe well to take”( 96 ).
He then moves into an apparent digression on how nature constantly tests
the“trouthe”of origins, culminating with the romancetoposthat noble
blood will reveal itself in the most unlikely places. Another rapid switch
130 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland