Four Hundred Years of Poetry: Now Goeth Sonne Under Wod

Starting a new series for summer...

Dear bookish friend,

I decided that I wanted to read more poetry this summer. As a way to keep myself accountable, I’ll be sharing a medieval or early modern poem with you on most Fridays. I plan on going roughly chronologically, so that you can see for yourself the slow and steady transformation of early Middle English into Middle English into Early Modern English. Let’s see how far we get!

Today’s poem first appears in manuscript around 1239-1240. As with so many Middle English poems, it lacks a title, so has gone by different names over the centuries, usually its starting line, “Nou goth sonne under wod.” Editor Carleton Brown tells us that the poem was found in the text of St Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum Ecclesie, a treatise dedicated to the monks at Pontigny in France. St. Edmund was the Archbishop of Canterbury, noted for his ascetism, his years of teaching at Oxford, and the paradox of his gentle personality and his fierce defense of the Magna Carta and rights of the people against Henry III. This English saint wrote the treatise mostly in French and Latin—this small poem entails the only English lines within.¹ They may have been written by St. Edmund himself, or may be older than the manuscript.