Knapp, Ethan. The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and
the Literature of Late Medieval England. University Park:
Penn State University Press, 2001.
Mitchell, Jerome. Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-
Century English Poetic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1968.
Gavin Richardson
LAMENT A lament is a personal expression of
sorrow over loss. This lyric impulse pervades poetry
and song in secular and religious works throughout
the Middle Ages and forms the foundation for its later
use in EDMUND SPENSER and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. One
of the most infl uential works expressing lament is the
poetry in BOETHIUS’s CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY from
the sixth century. Boethian lyrics of loss echo in several
of GEOFFREY CHAUCER’s works, such as “The Knight’s
Tale” and The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS. Themes of mourn-
ing over the loss of innocence and the transience of the
fallen world occur in monophonic songs such as the
popular 13th-century English song “Worldes blis.” In
the Old English period, the most famous expressions
of lament are found in the elegiac poetry of the EXETER
BOOK, written before 1072: “The WIFE’s LAMENT,”
“WULF AND EADWACER,” The WANDERER, The SEAFARER,
DEOR, and “The RUIN.” In addition to these shorter
works, laments characterize the later sections of
BEOWULF and shape the tone of the “Storm Riddles” of
the Exeter Book. In the later Middle Ages, the lament
appears in English and Scottish BALLADs and in MIDDLE
ENGLISH LYRICS.
See also COMPLAINT, ELEGY.
FURTHER READING
Cross, James E. Latin Themes in Old English Poetry. Lund,
Sweden: University of Lund, 1962.
Frey, Leonard. “Exile and Elegy in Anglo-Saxon Christian
Epic Poetry.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62
(1963): 293–302.
Karmen Lenz
“LAMENT FOR THE MAKARIS” WILLIAM
DUNBAR (before 1508) The 25 STANZAs and 100
lines of WILLIAM DUNBAR’s KYRIELLE comprise a complex
meditation on death. This is accomplished through
adept and touching praise of the “makaris,” great poets,
that have passed on. The opening stanza and the fi nal
two stanzas are personal, and from a note in an early
printed version of the text, some scholars believe that
he was gravely ill at the time of its composition. Others
feel that the theme is common and that the biographi-
cal note serves as a poetic convention.
Whatever the impetus, the poem moves from the
personal to the universal: Stanzas 2–10 offer a univer-
sal refl ection on the mutability of the world and the
mortality of human life. This section names classes of
people from high and low positions whose end is death
and provides the segue to the next set of verses, as the
speaker realizes that poets, too, share this fate. Stanzas
11–23 catalogue those poets who have gone to the
grave before Dunbar. Some, like GEOFFREY CHAUCER,
are well remembered; others, like Roull of Aberdeen,
are lost to human memory. The argument of the work
returns to the personal as the speaker realizes that
death will take him as surely as it has overcome his col-
leagues and his fellow mortals.
Commentators present different interpretations of
the fi nal stanza, in which the speaker tells the audience
and reminds himself that humans must live in this
world in such a way as to live beyond it. A number see
this verse as an expression of the usual medieval con-
cern about life after death: The way people live now
determines how their souls will fare in the afterlife.
Some, however, see this QUATRAIN as remarkably free
from concern with the afterlife; rather, they see hope
for living on in human memory as the import of this
fi nal stanza, which would seem to point to the Renais-
sance belief in the eternizing quality of poetry.
The poem’s BURDEN suggests a religious reading; it
comes from the response in the seventh lesson of the
Offi ce for the Dead, which priests said nightly. The
REFRAIN is also found in eight of JOHN LYDGATE’s poems,
as well as in several medieval CAROLs. Within Dunbar’s
poem, the Latin refrain unifi es the work thematically
and universalizes the speaker’s refl ections. In addition
to having a metric form, the kyrielle, the composition
can be characterized by its theme, and critics have
called it a danse macabre (dance of death), a memento
mori (reminder of death), a vado mori (I go to death), or
an UBI SUNT (where are they?) poem. The list of people“LAMENT FOR THE MAKARIS” 239