Could you please offer your opinion on the poetics of Piers Plowman?
You are catching a glimpse into the makings of new AUT’s – yes, I will leave the question open for as long as the Oracle permits it. … For now, off to my interstellar game of Texas Hold ‘em. LOL
P.S. I have long savored a dreamlike candlelight dinner with Emily (with Beethoven’s moonlight sonata in the background) where I whisper sweet poetics in her soft gorgeous ears. Though, she always slaps me in the end – but oh so passionately! … Could it be Ludwig’s music that’s making her act so reticent! :-)
Sybaris – mostly cut and paste as it maybe, but still a wonderful answer! Thank You! … Do you like Emily Dickinson also, by any chance? :-)
Thank you MissC – I’ll be looking forward to it.
Sybaris – I stand corrected then. A wonderful answer, in any event. Thank You!
Best answer:
Answer by Marko F
Well this time you really stumped me. If you leave this question open for a week I’ll look into the subject and get back to you. If you’re lucky maybe mank will deem it a question worthy of an answer, but he likely won’t consider it until it’s been open 4-5 days. So don’t be in your usual rush to shut this one down. It’s not like you’re running an illegal crap game here! :-)
Late medieval political satire? Really? You AUTs are the most!
Meant to say “most sublime”! :-)
“*” I left some comments for you at
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061111134649AACqAAJ&r=w&show_comments=true&pa=FZB6NWHjDG3N56z6v_2zWCC1jTcGLaunurZ.msD0P.CHZS06eGZP8dfZ7xh3blqEDEnpR9nRvbruIq_DQ3MxtA–&paid=add_comment#openions
Yahoo! refused my final comment. They said I had too many comments already for the day. The final comment went like this:
P.S. – I think I’m about to have a screaming frenzy myself. (Not to steal your thunder of course, dear screaming frenzy.)
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What in bejeebers does all this have to do with the poetics of Piers Plowman anyway?” Well I was just getting to that.
Later:
BTW, thanks so much for the longer aleph. It goes really well with my 4 dreidels. Let’s see now…………how many letters in the Hebrew alphabet?……..Hmm……….that’s too many. I may have to arrange to kidnap Rubber Ducky and hold him for a modest ransom.
Much later:
What me worry? Time is running out. But time is just an illusion anyway. So why should I care? I’m more intent on Rubber Ducky than Piers Plowman anyway. Now how would the pros pull off this heist?
Much much later:
On Friday Nov. 17 I will have some comments for you here….
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AlzqXl5SbvKzlmMgUaNlj5Psy6IX?qid=20061109074241AAAvMIn
Although you may well have the best answer there I likely won’t choose it as such because even the part that addresses the question directly is so far beyond the beyond that it exists in a category all its own. So just take that as the compliment it is and look for me to choose a more conventional answer there.
And finally, at long last, here’s what I think of Piers Plowman and his poetics:
Well you did ask for my opinion. You got it, bub.
And when did you become a garden variety vanilla conventional scientist? I guess I must have blinked when that occurred. Left rebuttal to your objections you know where.
In sum then:
Piers Plowman….What a guy!….What a blast!
Who doesn’t love P.P.? How could anyone
resist the allure of such an one?
*
What do you think? Answer below!
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I wish I could answer based upon a recent reading – but it’s so many years ago! It’s a moral allegorical narrative written in Middle English by William Langland (or Longland), in unrhymed alliterative verse. I seem to remember that he wrote with a Shropshire accent. His imagination was essentially visual and dramatic; the fullness and variety of his picture of the Plain of the world with its crowded panoramas and ugly close-ups – we get a wide view and the intimate details.
“Allegory was for Langland a dynamic way of thinking or ‘making out’ the truth in pictorial and dramatic form, by intuition as well as by observation and logical argument.”
“To do this, he freely used all the resources of the vernacular language, and the potentialities of the dream form. He moved easily from brisk reportage to grotesque nightmare, or from angry theological disputation to the dream-within-a-dream that is close to mystical vision. There is no infallible key to such dramatic poetry – we must be constantly alert to changes in tone and direction…”
I’ve taken the above from an introduction by J F Goodridge; I hope it’s helpful for a start.
Here’s something that might be of help:
http://www.hermitary.com/lore/langland.html
Personally, though, I don’t know how to critique it in modern translation – I much preferred taking the time to read the original.
Edit: some more, with a note by Goodridge: “To discover all these riches, and many more, the reader must turn to the original text, for which a translation is no substitute.”
“Langland’s language and rhythm are colloquial and the length of line varies considerably.
It is to be read just as it would normally be spoken. The poet did not think so much in grammatical sentences, as in balanced … sequences of phrases. The effects nearly always appear spontaneous, even in the more laboured passages. Though he obeyed no formal pattern, Langland could build up his contrasted patterns of sound with the skill of a great dramatist. Sometimes the spate of his eloquence appears to flow on unchecked, running over from line to line and eddying hither and thither; but there comes a point of climax where the whole force of a speech is gathered together in a single transparent image, or breaks against an unexpected obstacle that gives an entirely new direction to the argument.
Langland’s art is strictly functional: his language is always shaped for a specific didactic or religious purpose – to bring home some spiritual truth, either to himself or his contemporaries…. [he has] a sharp feeling for physical things, whether loathsome or lovely; of the limpid simplicity of single lines and arresting images; of the broad comedy and the bold dramatic turns and contrasts; of the ironic juggling or words and meanings, and the elaborate rhetorical climaxes built up by insistent repetition and parallelism, that suddenly turn inward on the reader; and occasionally, the magnificent cadences that remind us of the language of the King James Bible.”
Edit:
This is not cut and paste, this is manually typed out from one of my editions of Piers Plowman – edited from the intro to fit (I hope) your question!!! It took a while to sift through 15 pages of erudition!
I will be cutting the limes. I will too look into this one………………
Since I wasn’t familiar with the poetics of Piers Plowman I had to do some research on the subject. I looked in different sites and read several opinions and reviews.
I came to this conclusion…
You guys who apparently already know about Piers and Plowman nitpick and discuss about who is right or wrong while I, who knew nothing of the particular poetics, am probably the only one who got something out of this question :-).
I am one bit wiser now because I found Piers Plowman quite interesting and thoroughly enjoyed reading about it on several links, even though I did not read the whole work. Maybe I will in the future.
Meanwhile, whoever pleases may read the following which I assure you, IT IS copy pasted :-).
Copy paste is not so bad after all as long as you come out a “winner” out of it as I have.
Piers Plowman
Douglas Jones
Then I wondered in my wits what woman it might be
Who could show from Holy Scripture such wise words,
And I conjured her in the high name, ere she went away,
To say who she really was that taught me so well.
“I am Holy Church,” she said, “you ought to know me:
I befriended you first and taught the faith to you.
You gave me gages to be guided by my teaching
And to love me loyally while your life lasts.” So begins one of the earliest scenes in Piers Plowman, that engaging medieval dream allegory (c. 1380 A.D.) attributed to William Langland. This now often neglected poem presents one of the best corridors into late medieval life. One commentator suggests that, “Piers Plowman is in many ways more representative of its time than Chaucer’s poetry. It is hard to think of any other work that so strikingly opens a window on the Middle Ages and offers such a record of what it felt like to live and work and think with the constraints, channels, and possibilities of the period.” As such, the poem also captures so many of the values which make up the vision of Medieval Protestantism expressed in this issue.
The poem is thoroughly medieval in its values and its mistakes, but like most medievalism it is a dialogue headed in the right direction, full of promise and beauty. It shares so many proto-Protestant concerns that it was read hundreds of years later in the Reformation as a prophecy of that time. And many of the poem’s hopes for change become those of the Reformers, especially its emphasis on social mercy and care for the poor.
The poem is a sequential collection of eight dream-visions of the narrator, a wandering pilgrim “watching for wonders” yet “weary of wandering.” The visions begin with an overview of England at that time with all its vitality and color and failures. The visions are also allegorical–the dominant medieval narrative form–and the narrator, Will, observes encounters between Reason, Mercy, Holy Church, Anger, and others. The mention of allegory usually makes moderns yawn, because we’ve seen so much bad allegory. But Langland’s personifications take on a depth and dimensionality so often lost in later works. These characters are not plain plates, like some of those in Pilgrim’s Progress; these personifications are very human in their self-contradictions, earthiness, and honesty. In fact, the poem is described by some commentators as one of the most complex portrayals of how the mind works. The poem is grappling with all the fundamental theological, economic, political, and personal questions of late medieval life. It requires many readings and meditations to start to fathom its treasures.
Though the narrator is the dominant eye and bearer of the visions, the contrasting character, Piers Plowman, plays mysteriously throughout as the goal, the one pursued in the visions. If we think in terms of a comparison with Dante, the narrator in Piers Plowman would be wandering alone through the inferno longing for a Vergil or a Beatrice. Piers Plowman himself is a sort of holy, earthy combination of Vergil and Beatrice, though never strictly a guide, more a savior sought. Piers begins as a quiet, unassuming farmer who knows the way to Truth, yet he becomes far more complex as the visions progress, until we see him as one identified with Christ’s human nature–regenerate, mature humanity moving through history amidst papal corruptions, clerical hypocrisy, political intrigue, and peasant vices.
In the narrator’s journey, we encounter the most fascinating details of medieval thinking. The narrator speaks to many themes, some directly, some in passing, and we encounter most of the values of the vision of Medieval Protestantism–beauty, antithesis, celebration, agrarianism, anti-papalism, family love, one holy Church, faith, loyalty, and a triumphant vision of the future.
In the prologue, the narrator sees and foresees, “friars there–all four orders–/ Preaching to the people for their own paunches welfare, / Making glosses of the Gospel that would look good for themselves;/ . . . . Unless Holy Church and friars’ orders hold together better, / The worst misfortune in the world will be welling up soon.” The immediate future is full of despair and gloom; at the end, the narrator sees “Antichrist and his followers will grieve the world, / and crush you, Conscience, unless Christ helps you. / . . . . And pride shall be Pope, Prince of Holy Church, Covetousness and Unkindness cardinal to lead him.” But in the long term, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares / . . . . There shall be no battles, and no man bear weapon, / And the middle of a moon shall make Jew convert, / And for that sight Saracens [Muslims] shall sing Gloria in excelsis.”
In a large part of the poem, the narrator is given an overview of biblical history, and when the account comes to the crucifixion, we read a fascinating argument between Righteousness/Truth and Mercy/Peace, an argument delving into the apparently inscrutable conflict between the demands of God’s holiness and His love. How can a holy God forgive, a question which fueled the Reformation. The crucifixion is the answer: “And as Adam and all died through a tree / Adam and all through a tree return to life, / . . . . Many hundreds of angels harped and sang, / Flesh sins, flesh redeems, flesh reigns as God of God. / . . . . Mercy and Truth have met together; / Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.”
Piers Plowman is a wonderful medieval friend to find. It won’t satisfy with just a quick skimming, but give it time and meditation. Treat it medievally.