refrain, however,finally becomes corporeal; Dunbar’s anguished anticipa-
tion“breikis my hairt and birstis my brane”( 83 ). In other poems, too, the
body is both confined and confining, its boundaries imprisoning the aging
or impoverished speaker and isolating him from community. This self-
enclosed misery recalls the“thocht” named elsewhere, and here too a
penitential dimension, sometimes spun to parodic ends, may be noted. In
“Sanct saluatour, send siluer sorrow!”(B 61 ), poverty“grevis”Dunbar
both evin and morrow,
Chasing fra me all cheritie.
It makis me all blythnes to borrow... ( 2 – 4 )Charity’s participatory integration in the social world^40 is unavailable to the
speaker, and it strikes too at the roots of his courtly“makyng”:“Quhen I wald
blythlie ballattis breif / Langour thairto givis me no leif”( 6 – 7 ). Like the
Archpoet’s, this poet’s verse is dependent on material considerations. Like the
Archpoet’s, too, the performance it enacts has a penitential edge, since as
Chaucer’sParsonnotes,“langour”is associated with a branch of the sin of
sloth:“Thanne comth undevocioun, thurgh which a man is so blent...and
hath swich langour in soule that he may neither rede ne singe in hooly
chirche, ne heere ne thynke of no devocioun, ne travaille with his handes in
no good werk, that it nys hym unsavory and al apalled”(i, 723 ). It broods over
the petitioner even as he dreams, playing excruciating music:
Langour satt wp at my beddis heid
With instrument full lamentable and deid
Scho playit sangis, so duilfull to heir,
Me thocht ane houre seimeit ay aneʒeir. (B 75 , 21 – 24 )“My heid didʒakʒester nicht”(B 35 ), however, takes melancholic languor to
its limit. A migraine“Perseing my brow as ony ganʒie [arrow]”( 4 ) cuts the
speaker off from social pastime and writing ( 6 – 10 ). As Burrow acutely notes,
“the tone of complaint suggests an unspoken petition.”^41 The poem’s peti-
tionary force is indeed reliant on its muteness. There is no generic or
theological frame to which bodily pain can be assimilated, and no overt
cause, only an irreducible, inaccessible anguish at the heart of petition.
Physical sickness bulks large in the petitionary poem, and ailments may
even be a poetic signature. The most famous instance, of course, is the
cough that interrupts the Archpoet’s inscriptions:
Continuam tussim pacior, tanquam tisicus si...........m.
Sencio per pulsum, quod non a morte procul su......m.
Esse probant inopes nos corpore cum reliquo pe..... s.^42“My panefull purs so priclis me” 73