Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

Of suche an industry

And suche a pregnacy,

Of hevenly inspyracion

In laureate creacyon,

Of poetes commendacion,

That of divyne myseracion

God maketh his habytacion

In poetes whiche excelles,

And sojourns with them and dwelles. ( 365 – 78 )^7

Disembodiment here, however, is purchased at a price. These lines are
appended to an attack on Thomas Arthur and Thomas Bilney, both
denounced as heretics and commanded to carry symbolic faggots at Paul’s
Cross in public penance. Skelton’s poem is particularly forceful in its
denunciation of their attack on“that glorious mayde and mother”Mary
( 257 ). The poem, however, also sinks into onomatopoeic alternations that
nominally denote the heretics’“Wytlesse wandring to and fro!”/ With“te
he, ta ha, bo ho, bo ho!”( 74 – 75 ), approximating once again to sound at its
most material in the“wandering”region of unlikeness. Similarly, Skelton
catches one of the heretics laughing

whan he dyd pas

With his fagot in processyon.

He counted it for no correction,

But with scornefull affection

Toke it for a sporte,

His heresy to supporte. ( 187 – 92 )

This brief moment of unregulated bodily sound cannot but double
Skelton’s own torrent of monosyllabic invective. The doubleness of
Skelton’s enterprise is at its most apparent when Skelton bids to recall the
heretics from their error:

Wherfore make ye no mo restrayntes,

But mende your myndes that are mased;

Or els doutlesse ye shalbe blased,

And be brent at a stake,

If further busynesse that ye make. ( 293 – 96 )

Disembodied“inspiration”and the smoke of thefires from the Lollard’s Pit
outside Bishopsgate, where Bilney was later burned as a relapsed heretic,
mingle in the murderous, punning blazonings of Skelton’s pen.
From this preface to a literary history of the Reformation in England we
turnfinally to a different act of poetic disembodiment, one far closer to the
corporeal exchanges we have seen in Dunbar. As Skelton constructed a

170 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland