Tea at Trianon: A Springtide Song of the Redemption

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 12, 2018

A Springtide Song of the Redemption

From A Clerk of Oxford:

This is one of the earliest Middle English lyrics, which survives only in the thirteenth-century manuscript British Library, MS Egerton 613. It provides an early example of the 'Christ as knight' motif (of which I gave some more examples the other day), and it does so with a teasing misdirection which delays the identification of the knight until late in the poem: 'I am suffering for love,' the speaker says, 'for the sake of a wonderful knight who came and sought me through woods and forests, and rescued me from captivity' - not revealing until the fourth verse that the knight is Christ. The poem does this partly by playing on the different meanings of the word child, which means 'a young man training to be a knight' (think 'Childe Roland to the dark tower came') as well as the modern sense of the word.

The editor of the book where I found this poem entitles it 'A springtide song of the redemption', which is both a lovely and an apt title, for that is what it is. 'Somer' in the first line encompasses both spring and summer as we would think of it, the whole warm season of the year (the famous 'Sumer is icumen in', with its returning cuckoos, similarly seems more fitted for April than for June). Spring is the time in medieval literature when things start to happen - folk long to go on pilgrimages, the dreamer of Piers Plowman goes wandering in search of wonders, cuckoos sing, birds form parliaments, owls debate with nightingales - the list goes on. And it's not surprising that this convention is found in religious verse too: here's a nice example of an Annunciation poem in springtime mode, and think of the 'dew in April' in this famous lyric...(Read more.)