presents human making in the terms of nature.^42 The erotic allure of those
terms becomes unmistakable when the ship’s passengers disembark:
quharfro anon thare landis
Ane hundreth ladyes, lusty in to wedis,
Als fresch asflouris that in May vp spredis,
In kirtillis grene, withoutyn kell or bandis, cap
Thair brycht hairis hang gleting on the strandis,
In tressis clere wyppit wyth goldyn thredis, bound about
With pappis quhite and mydlis small as wandis. breasts
( 57 – 63 )Style is decomposed into a series of metaphoric shifts that are also courtly
“guisings,”and the narrator remains a cipher, a moving eye (“There saw I,” 73 ,
82 , 87 ). When, their number swollen as if in some glossator’smythographic
delirium by a company of gods and goddesses, they begin to dance, the narrator
Crap...throu the levis and drew nere,
Quhare that I was rycht sudnynly affrayt,
All throw a luke, quhilk I have boucht full dere.
( 133 – 35 )The rest of the poem unleashes the force of what has hitherto been a
seemingly redundant“look,”as if to demonstrate the terrifying potentiali-
ties that might lie within ekphrasis itself. Venus spots the voyeur and sends
in her“archearis kene”( 137 ):
Than ladyes fair lete fall thair mantillis gren,
With bowis big in tressit hairis schene
All sudaynly thay had a felde arayit.
And yit rycht gretly was I noucht affrayit,
The party was so plesand for to sene.
A wonder lusty bikkir me assayit. assault;beset
( 139 – 44 )Interiority emerges in the gap between the menace presented by this erotic
artillery and the narrator’s (largely) unperturbed response; the“wonder lusty
bikkir”introduces the playful irony of love-dit, conspicuous till now by its
absence. Yet erotic arousal still belongs chiefly to the landscape, released from
within its verbal and corporeal folds. These ladies expose themselves and deploy
their amorous and bodily armory; the ladies’hair, a standard fetish ofamour
courtois(compare Chrétien de Troyes’sChevalier de la Charrette)^43 now
becomes a weapon. The lover-narrator’sdesireisfullyalienatedinspectacle;
indeed, he himself is on the side of the spectacle, defended by Reason“with
schelde of gold so clere”( 151 ). He is assaulted by a steady wave of person-
ifications–beginning with“dame Beautee”( 146 ), followed byfigures of the
36 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland