"Ere Phoebus was in purple cape revest,
Up raise the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine
In May, in till a morrow mirthfullest.
"Full angel-like thir birdis sang their hours
Within their curtains green, in to their hours
Apparelled white and red with bloomes sweet;
Enamelled was the field with all colours,
The pearly droppis shook in silver shours;
While all in balm did branch and leavis fleet.
To part fra Phoebus did Aurora greet,
Her crystal tears I saw hing on the flours,
Whilk he for love all drank up with his heat.
"For mirth of May, with skippis and with hops,
The birdis sang upon the tender crops,
With curious notes, as Venus' chapel clerks;
The roses young, new spreading of their knops,
Were powderit bricht with heavenly beriall drops,
Through beams red, burning as ruby sparks;
The skies rang for shouting of the larks,
The purple heaven once scal't in silver slops,
Oure gilt the trees, branches, leaves, and barks."
The finest of Dunbar's poems in this style is "The Thistle and the Rose."
It was written in celebration of the marriage of James with the Princess
Margaret of England, and the royal pair are happily represented as the
national emblems. It, of course, opens with a description of a spring
morning. Dame Nature resolves that every bird, beast, and flower should
compeer before her highness; the roe is commanded to summon the animals,
the restless swallow the birds, and the "conjured" yarrow the herbs and
flowers. In the twinkling of an eye they stand before the queen. The
lion and the eagle are crowned, and are instructed to be humble and just,
and to exercise their powers mercifully:--
"Then callit she all flouris that grew in field,
Discerning all their seasons and effeirs,
Upon the awful thistle she beheld
And saw him keepit with a bush of spears:
Consid'ring him so able for the weirs,
A radius crown of rubies she him gave,
And said, 'In field, go forth and fend the lave.'"
The rose, also, is crowned, and the poet gives utterance to the universal
joy on occasion of the marriage--type of peace between two kingdoms.
Listen to the rich music of according voices:--
"Then all the birds sang with voice on hicht,
Whose mirthful soun' was marvellous to hear;
The mavis sang, Hail Rose, most rich and richt,
That does up flourish under Phoebus' sphere,
Hail, plant of youth, hail Princess, dochter dear;
Hail blosom breaking out of the bluid royal,
Whose precious virtue is imperial.
"The merle she sang, Hail, Rose of most delight,
Hail, of all floris queen an' sovereign!
The lark she sang, Hail, Rose both red and white;
Most pleasant flower, of michty colours twane:
The nichtingale sang, Hail, Nature's suffragane,
In beauty, nurture, and every nobleness,
In rich array, renown, and gentleness.
"The common voice up raise of birdes small,
Upon this wise, Oh, blessit be the hour
That thou was chosen to be our principal!
Welcome to be our Princess of honour,
Our pearl, our pleasance, and our paramour,
Our peace, our play, our plain felicity;
Christ thee comfort from all adversity."
But beautiful as these poems are, it is as a satirist that Dunbar has
performed his greatest feats. He was by nature "dowered with the scorn
of scorn," and its edge was whetted by life-long disappointment. Like
Spenser, he knew--
"What Hell it is in suing long to bide."
And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, where the burden is the
shortness of life and the unpermanence of felicity, his satiric rage
breaks out in single lines of fire. And although his satire is often
almost inconceivably coarse, the prompting instinct is healthy at bottom.
He hates Vice, although his hand is too often in the kennel to pelt her
withal. He lays his grasp on the bridle-rein of the sleek prelate, and
upbraids him with his secret sins in language unsuited to modern ears.
His greater satires have a wild sheen of imagination about them. They
are far from being cold, moral homilies. His wrath or his contempt
breaks through the bounds of time and space, and brings the spiritual
world on the stage. He wishes to rebuke the citizens of Edinburgh for
their habits of profane swearing, and the result is a poem, which
probably gave Coleridge the hint of his "Devil's Walk." Dunbar's satire
is entitled the "Devil's Inquest." He represents the Fiend passing up
through the market, and chuckling as he listens to the strange oaths of
cobbler, maltman, tailor, courtier, and minstrel. He comments on what he
hears and sees with great pleasantry and satisfaction. Here is the
conclusion of the piece:--
"Ane thief said, God that ever I chaip,
Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip,
But I in hell for geir wald be.
The Devil said, 'Welcome in a raip:
Renounce thy God, and cum to me.'
"The fishwives net and swore with granes,
And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes;
They gave them, with ane shout on hie.
The Devil said, 'Welcome all at anes;
Renounce your God, and cum to me.'
"The rest of craftis great aiths swair,
Their wark and craft had nae compair,
Ilk ane unto their qualitie.
The Devil said then, withouten mair,
'Renounce your God, and cum to me.'"
But the greatest of Dunbar's satires--in fact, the greatest of all his
poems--is that entitled "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins." It is
short, but within its compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The pictures
rise on the reader's eye, and fade at once. It is a singular compound of
farce and earnest. It is Spenser and Hogarth combined--the wildest
grotesquerie wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet conceives
himself in a dream, on the evening preceding Lent, and in his vision he
heard Mahoun command that the wretched who "had ne'er been shriven"
should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout present themselves;
"holy harlots" appear in their finery, and never a smile wrinkles the
faces of the onlookers; but when a string of "priests with their shaven
necks" come in, the arches of the unnameable place shakes with the
laughter of all the fiends. Then "The Seven Deadly Sins" begin to leap
at once:--
"And first of all the dance was Pride,
With hair wyld back and bonnet on side."
He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire.
"Then Ire came in with sturt and strife;
His hand was aye upon his knife;"
and with him came armed boasters and braggarts, smiting each other with
swords, jagging each other with knives. Then Envy, trembling with secret
hatred, accompanied by his court of flatterers, backbiters, calumniators
and all the human serpentry that lurk in the palaces of kings. Then came
Covetousness, with his hoarders and misers, and these the fiends gave to
drink of newly-molten gold.
"Syne Swearness, at the second bidding,
Came like a sow out of a midding:"
and with him danced a sleepy crew, and Belial lashed them with a
bridle-rein, and the fiends gave them a turn in the fire to make them
nimbler. Then came Lechery, led by Idleness, with a host of evil
companions, "full strange of countenance, like torches burning bright."
Then came Gluttony, so unwieldy that he could hardly move:--
"Him followed mony foul drunkart
With can and callop, cup and quart,
In surfeit and excess."
"Drink, aye they cried," with their parched lips; and the fiends gave
them hot lead to lap. Minstrels, it appears, are not to be found in that
dismal place:--
"Nae minstrels played to them but doubt,
For gleemen there were halden out
By day and eik by nicht:
Except a minstrel that slew a man,
So to his heritage he wan,
And entered by brieve of richt."
And to the music of the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass.
The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil is
resolved to make high holiday:
"Then cried Mahoun for a Hielan Padyane,
Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane,
Far north-wast in a neuck;
Be he the coronach had done shout,
Ersche men so gatherit him about,
In hell great room they took.
Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter,
Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter,
And roup like raven and rook.
The Devil sae deaved was with their yell,
That in the deepest pot of hell
He smorit them with smook."
There is one other poem of Dunbar's which may be quoted as a contrast to
what has been already given. It is remarkable as being the only one in
which he assumes the character of a lover. The style of thought is quite
modern; bereave it of its uncouth orthography, and it might have been
written to-day. It is turned with much skill and grace. The
constitutional melancholy of the man comes out in it; as, indeed, it
always does when he finds a serious topic. It possesses more tenderness
and sentiment than is his usual. It is the night-flower among his poems,
breathing a mournful fragrance:--
"Sweit rose of vertew and of gentilnes,
Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes,
Richest in bontie, and in beutie cleir,
And every vertew that to hevin is dear,
Except onlie that ye ar mercyles,
"Into your garthe this day I did persew:
Thair saw I flowris that fresche wer of dew,
Baith quhyte and reid most lustye wer to seyne,
And halsum herbis upone stalkis grene:
Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of rew.
"I doute that March, with his cauld blastis keyne,
Hes slane this gentill herbe, that I of mene;
Quhois pitewous deithe dois to my hart sic pane,
That I wald mak to plant his rute agane,
So comfortand his levis unto me bene."
The extracts already given will enable the reader to form some idea of
the old poet's general power--his music, his picturesque faculty, his
colour, his satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to form
any very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the most
part occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve
him from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although the
writer is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, his
personality is not made clear to us. There is great gap of time between
him and the modern reader; and the mixture of gold and clay in the
products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and
coarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable
partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly
from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his
narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in
these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and
nobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have been
transmitted to us along a line of ancestors. Five centuries share with
us the merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and intellectual
purity--although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheen
before we hand them on to our children--are no more to be placed to our
personal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's epigram, Marlborough's
battles, Burke's speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.
Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution. The
English duke is not the creator of his own wealth, although in his
keeping it makes the earth around him a garden, and the walls of his
house bright with pictures. But our inability to conceive satisfactorily
of Dunbar does not arise from this alone. We have his works, but then
they are not supplemented by personal anecdote and letters, and the
reminiscences of contemporaries. Burns, for instance,--if limited to his
works for our knowledge of him,--would be a puzzling phenomenon. He was
in his poems quite as spoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so wide an
area, they appear so contradictory, they seem often to lead in opposite
directions. It is, to a large extent, through his letters that Burns is
known, through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which imbedded
themselves in the memories of his hearers, from the recollections of his
contemporaries and their expressed judgments, and the multiform
reverberations of fame lingering around such a man--these fill up
interstices between works, bring apparent opposition into intimate
relationship, and make wholeness out of confusion. Not on the stage
alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his
asides. With Dunbar there is nothing of this. He is a name, and little
more. He exists in a region to which rumour and conjecture have never
penetrated. He was long neglected by his countrymen, and was brought to
light as if by accident. He is the Pompeii of British poetry. We have
his works, but they are like the circumvallations of a Roman camp on the
Scottish hillside. We see lines stretching hither and thither, but we
cannot make out the plan, or divine what purposes were served. We only
know that every crumpled rampart was once a defence; that every
half-obliterated fosse once swarmed with men; that it was once a station
and abiding-place of human life, although for centuries now remitted to
silence and blank summer sunshine.