the“flour”of English, but also linking the“desolate”(in Scots“left without
a king”)^46 “ile”to the“wildernes”that is“the space of a luke”between
figures, and to the death as well as the–literal–floreatof makars. The
topology of Dunbar’s pageant language, too, is caught within iteration.
Rereading the poem enacts a fall, since the reader knows that the language of
the paradisal opening will unavoidably enter a region of unlikeness, begin to
differ from itself.^47 Readerly desire, like that of Dunbar’s voyeur, is wedded
to style in a strange andfinally disrupted intimacy. This aggressively visual
poem isfinally located in a“could have,”and a paradoxical injunction to
draw itself“out of sicht”( 277 ), with a hint that its evidently seamless
flamboyance is in fact“disteynit, bare and rent”( 278 ), perhaps because it
is made up of the languages of others.
The Goldyn Targebegins by drastically reducing its cast of characters
to ekphrastic eye and style as object, and goes on to take as its very subject
the dissolution of boundaries drawn between ekphrasis and the erotic
I/eye. A reified language, detached from the vocal register of praise in
which aureate diction thrives, arouses visual idolatry, and even those words
most densely bound to the most irreproachably doctrinal meanings are
haunted by the danger of expropriation, or of sliding back into a form of
fetishism. InThe Thrissill and the Rois, Dunbar’s strategy of leave-takings–
displacing the poem steadily from some imagined point–purposefully
strives to evade such risks, just as it seeks to withdraw from a treacherous
history. The notion that this poem mightfind its own object in its style
and be narcissistically lost is here allowed to fall away abruptly. This
garden is introduced with a relative minimum of Latinisms, and
Aurora’s earlier prosopopeic appearance is recast in the form of the rising
“purpour”sun
Throw goldin skyis putting vp his heid,
Quhois gilt tressis schone so wondir cleir.
That all the world tuke confort, fer and neir,
To luke vpone his fresche and blisfull face,
Doing all sable fro the hevynnis chace. ( 52 – 56 )This solar“fresche and blisfull face”ushers in a language of dazzlingly irradiated
surfaces, which, as Fradenburg observes, transfigures the garden and transcends
history. The ekphrastic“I”gives place entirely to the vivid landscape, just as
narration cedes to the attraction tofigure to which it is invariably prone.^48 After
restraining potentially disturbing forces, such as“Eolus the bawld” ( 65 ),
Nature summons birds, beasts andflowers, her power to compel obedience
magically asserted in the“twynkling of ane e”( 85 ). Chief among them are the
38 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland