Four Hundred Years of Poetry: The Divine Paradox

On Fifteenth-Century Poetry

Dear bookish friend,

I have been submerged in the deep waters of writing on lust and chastity, which has been quite the demanding task. So I thought I’d choose two anonymous short poems for us today that often stick in my brain. Both offer a little needed space from relying too much on my own wit.

The fifteenth century is an interesting place, poetically speaking (really, in all ways speaking, in my opinion). The major highlights of English poetry in the Middle Ages have already, for the most part, occurred. We are entering what C.S. Lewis called “The Drab Age” as we proceed to the end of the century and into the sixteenth-century. Until Thomas Wyatt adopts the Italian sonnet and kickstarts English poetry back up while singing songs in praise of Anne Boleyn, there won't be poet superstars for quite a while.

However, I still really enjoy fifteenth-century poetry. Its pleasures are just more hidden, less based on the wonders of meter and startling image and wordplay, more based on the joy of charm, antiquity, and occasional truth-telling, which are less appealing devices to most modern-day editors and English majors (for good reason). In other words, I don’t necessarily love these for their poetic merit or cleverness—but I do love them for their ideas, for their ancient strangeness, and even, at times, their otherworldly glimpses into divine things that refresh my own way of looking. Note too, for your own pleasure, how the English slowly draws closer to our modern English.