The Charm of the Underdetermined in “Maiden in the Mor Lay”

Though glossed versions are readily available, I have appended the text of "Maiden in the Mor Lay." 

     If medieval English poetry had a hit parade, “Maiden in the mor lay” would be near the top.  Since it was first published in 1907 this mysterious poem has enjoyed great popularity and has been frequently reprinted and anthologized. [1]  It survived, as is often the case with such lyrics, by merest chance.  The poem was recorded in a manuscript containing miscellaneous works on a single rectangular vellum page glued into the flyleaf of a codex, one of twelve poems or fragments called the Rawlinson lyrics.  The exact number is uncertain because some verses are apparently first lines only, meant perhaps like a title to remind the reader of a song, or written in written in compressed style to save space.  Among these poems, recorded most likely by whimsical chance, is one of the most well-known and controversial of medieval English lyrics “Maiden in the mor lay.”  The poem’s obscurity, mentioned by virtually all commentators, has not limited its popularity; it is surely one of the most well-known lyrics of its time, and its interpretation has generated a considerable literature.

     The diversity of critical opinion indicates the poem’s beguiling underdetermination.   Often with substantial reason, the “maiden” has been identified with the Virgin Mary, with Mary Magdalene, with a human lover, a deity or water spirit, and ultimately with the Great Mother. [1]  The more polemical researchers claim an exclusive validity for a single interpretation, ignoring the characteristically poetic quality of polysemy.  My own favorite among the range of learned speculations is Peter Dronke’s which combines pre-Christian animism, the maiden a sort of “water-sprite,” and convincingly suggests that the verses were accompanied by a performative routine involving dance and mime.

     My receptivity to Dronke’s reading is primarily determined by my impression of the text and not by research, though it seems plausible.  Though spirits of the type called “nixies” were more common in Continental Germanic territories, pagan festivals were known to be centered at the sites of English wells. [3]  The poem itself, though, must be the most persuasive evidence.  The maiden is unquestionably supernatural.  Her enigmatic passivity and ethereal diet indicate her otherworldly character -- her simple being is represented as portentous.  She need take no action. 

     The question and answer form resembles a catechism as well as indicating the popular origin of the poem.  The speaker is inquiring into a mystery the bottom which may never be seen.  Yet it is unlikely to be the Christian myth operating here.  The Rawlinson lyrics written on the same page seem all to have been secular and this particular one was included in the Bishop of Ossory’s list of “lewd” songs whose lyrics he proposed replacing with more pious Latin verses of his own invention. [4]  Though images such as the rose and the lily certainly have Christian associations, no definitely Christian references or symbols appear in “Maiden in the mor lay.” 

     The mythic figure at the center of the poem is sufficiently underdetermined, in fact, that further details of the situation are unrecoverable.  The maiden is not described, as most romantic love-objects are, in terms of her beauty, nor is she said to be perfect or immaculate as Mary often is.  The reader is left with only a mystery, but it is one many find beguiling.  The cryptic woman at the well carries simultaneous associations woth a number of pre-Christian and Christian figures while never being wholly identified with any.  At the same time she represents far broader semantic territory: the other, the female, the uncontrollable, the marvelous.  In fact, a significant amount of the poem’s original appeal may have been its affording a visionary glimpse, an amazing sight enjoyable because so extraordinary.  If the experience is in part a theophany, it is also akin to the pleasure of a 1950s filmgoer watching aliens in a science fiction movie or a visitor to the curiosities of a carnival side-show. 

     In fact because of the minimal information the poem offers and its continued questioning signaling that the scene is enigmatic even to its narrator, the repetitions and the hypnotic rhymes make all the greater an impression.  The reader or listener is placed in the position of an initiate only part way through the ritual, moved more by wonder than understanding.  Information is lacking, just as it is in life.

     While the complex of woman, water, and welcome vegetation links these late medieval lines to the earth mother goddesses of the Neolithic Age, [5] the passage of time does not merely cause the initial significance to fade, instead, it becomes crowded with new and ever-richer connotations.  The field of meaning grows complex indeed, and its silences and absences can influence reception as much as its explicit content.  The scholarly intention to establish a unitary reading flows contrary to the artistic construction of a web of partial insight in which suggestivity matters more than any conclusion.  If such a problematic vision is then couched in melodious form, rhythmic and rhyming, and performed by skilled professionals to delight an idle hour, it reflects what is perhaps the deepest insight available to mortals.  When presented in an artful and diverting form, it accomplishes thereby the ends of art.  Exhaustive interpretation could only impoverish this song.

 

 

 

1.  Appearing first edited by Wilhelm Heuser in Anglia, the poem’s exposure grew immensely when it was included in Kenneth Sisam’s 1921 anthology Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose and in many anthologies and textbooks since.

2.   D. W.  Robertson in “Historical Criticism,” (English Institute Essays 1950, ed. A. S. Downer, 3-31) used the poem as an example of the value of “patristic exegesis” which emphasizes the importance of traditional Christian symbology in medieval literature.  E. Talbot Donaldson (in Speaking of Chaucer, 150-152) criticizes Robertson ‘s “patristic” reading, suggesting a more naturalistic interpretation.  E. M. W. Tillyard preferred to see her as Mary Magdalene, or alternatively as Mary of Egypt (The Secular Lyric in Middle English, 159) and Joseph C. Harris seconded the view in “'Maiden in the mor lay' and the medieval Magdalene tradition,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971): 59-87.  Associations with pagan practices, such as “sacred dances of the ancient nature tradition,” are emphasized by John Speirs in Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (62-64) and by Peter Dronke in The Medieval Lyric, 195-196 and R. A. Waldron, Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature, 226.

3.  See, for instance, Charles Read Baskervill, “Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Folk Festivals in England,”  Studies in Philology , Jan., 1920, Vol. 17, No. 1, 19-87.  Baskervill cites a monastic fifteenth century source that draws on earlier descriptions of celebrations for St. John's Eve at which “it was customary to feast and drink, to engage in dancing and in base ludi conducive to lechery, to build bonfires, to carry torches through the fields, and to roll flaming wheels down the hill.”  According to Baskervill “Well worship” “played an important part in Anglo-Saxon worship.”  He mentions as well church condemnation of quasi-pagan gatherings held “on the moor” in Durham. (68-69)

4.  See Richard L. Greene, “’The Maid of the Moor' in the Red Book of Ossory,” Speculum Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1952), 504-506.

5.  The literature includes the groundbreaking Mother Right (Mutterrecht) by Johann Jakob Bachofen, the Jungian Erich Neumann’s Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Die große Mutter. Der Archetyp des grossen Weiblichen) and Marija Gimbutas’ works.

 

In the mor lay,
Sevenyst fulle
Sevenist fulle.
Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Sevenistes fulle ant a day.
 
Welle was hire mete:
Wat was hire mete?
The primerole ant the,
The primerole ant the,
Welle was hire mete:
Wat was hire mete?
The primerole ant the violet.
 
Welle was hire dryng:
Wat was hire dryng?
The chelde water of the,
The chelde water of the,
Welle was hire dryng:
What was hire dryng?
The chelde water of the welle spring.
 
Welle was hire bour:
Wat was hire bour?
The red rose an te,
The red rose an te,
Welle was hire bour:
Wat was hire bour?
The rede rose an te lilie flour.

Conrad's Shadow-Line

Page references in parentheses are to the 1928 Doubleday Malay Edition in which The Shadow-Line is bound with A Personal Record and features “Decorations by William Kemp Starrett” including a chart of Conrad’s voyages as endpapers. Oddly, this edition sometimes uses the hyphen in "shadow-line" and sometimes does not.


     Conrad’s The Shadow Line is at once a coming of age story, an existential tale of the sea, and a ghost thriller. Far from being mutually exclusive, these descriptions parallel people’s perception of lived reality, constructing in their multi-leveled focus a simulacrum of the human consciousness. Though it might seem a mere artifice, a senseless tour de force, the polysemy of literature mirrors daily experience; indeed, even the most complex art is a reductive simplification. Rather than competing, the various registers of value systems sketch out the many simultaneous overlaid patterns of a human life.
     On a simply realistic level the story recounts considerable elements of autobiography. The sea clearly tests people’s capacities in an unusually demanding environment where sudden death is always a threat. As a captain the narrator not only faces this challenge himself, but, in addition, must be responsible for the lives of others. When the drama thus generated is placed in an exotic locale, its appeal is further heightened. Conrad’s own life provided all of these elements. His concluding lines in the Author’s Note offers a heartfelt tribute to the men under his command in a tone convincingly sincere. The story’s subtitle “A Confession” reinforces the notion of a personal reminiscence.
     Yet Conrad generalizes through the namelessness of the protagonist, through his ironic reflection on his own youth, leading sometimes to overt moralizing, and through the insistent coming-of-age theme. The dedication to his son Borys and his reference to World War I as “the supreme trial of a whole generation” provides a historical locus though without specific political content. The text explicates its own title saying “one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth must be left behind, too.”
     The shipboard setting is a stage which well supports the rite of passage to adulthood since on board the terms of life are reduced to their simplest and most disturbing. The unnamed hero passes through a shadow which is at once his youth and the Oedipal threat of the deceased former captain. When Conrad objects in his Author’s Note that he lacked the imagination to feature the supernatural, he was simply insisting on the reality of metaphor. His insistence that “the world contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is,” surely assumes the inclusion of art among those fascinating wonders.
     The plot is generated when the narrator, halfway round the world from his home, resigns his position without being able to explain just why. “I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps nothing else than that special intensity of experience which is the quintessence of youthful aspirations.” (83) His captain understands, as seamen are generally unstable (though in this only a special case of the instability of all humankind). (6)
     The motive force of the narrative is the main character’s flight from meaninglessness. “that obscure feeling of life being but a waste of days, which, half unconsciously, had driven me out of a comfortable berth . . . to flee from the menace of emptiness.” (22-23) While yet lingering in the “twilight region between youth and maturity,” (26) he could simply take life as it came experiencing “the kicks and the halfpence” (3) without reflection. To him his first command, to prove so harrowing an experience, was a dream come true and his ship “an enchanted princess.” (40) At this point human pride swells within him, and he feels “that illusion of life and character that charms one in men’s finest handiwork radiated from her.” (49-50)
     It is, however, only an illusion, and the maturing hero must pass the shadow-line to emerge with an enriched, if more somber vision, an enhanced gravitas that signifies open-eyed acceptance of the terms of life.
     The rules by which one must abide are prescribed in part by loyalty to the group, one’s shipmates, one’s fellow-countrymen. Even the venal Harbour Master must acknowledge “the fellowship of seaman.” (33) Ransome’s unselfish personal loyalty in the face of his own vulnerability is proof of the mate’s early judgment of him as “the best seaman on the ship.” (68) The ship’s previous captain provides the contrary type: he had “wished all hands dead.” (70) Threatened by physical danger as well as by Angst, many resort to further prudential codes of conduct, among them what Giles refers to as “keeping white.” (14)
     This loyalty to a group, be it professional or tribal or national, defines respectability, what the Victorians might have termed “manliness,” the character that exemplifies the adult. The antitype of such a team player is the deceased former captain whose malevolent spirit Mr. Burns thinks haunts the vessel. A man of sensitivity, a violinist (50) and a lover (58), as well as a leader, this man yet wished all hands dead (69), the very opposite of his responsibility to his crew. His fault was isolation, “He had made up his mind to cut adrift from everything.” (62) He “hated everybody and everything, but I think he was afraid to die” (94) Such a monster inspires even in the rationalist Conrad theories of diabolic intervention: “It appeared that even at sea a man could be the victim of evil spirits.” (69) We develop a vocabulary that signifies in the first place that we seek to name something we don’t understand.
     By the time the narrator recoils from a suffering human body as, calling it a “Thing” (115), he is suffering from a Swiftian disgust with corporeality, the vulnerabilities of the body having become so monstrous as to be all-but-unfaceable. But he persists in spite of his overwhelming aversion, and he survives, and by the tales’ end, he is exchanging chipper chit-chat with the good Captain Giles. “There’s no rest for me,” he comments, “until she’s out in the Indian Sea and not much of it even then.” “Yes,” replies the captain pointedly, “that’s what it amounts to.” (132) Out of this restlessness arises both life and stories..
     The realistic, the psychological, the historical, the magical, and the philosophical function in this story side by side, in harmony just as in one’s individual life, these strains and others are all present. To one critic one element may dominate dramatically, but the next may hear it differently. As in a grand symphonic orchestra, there are times when the string leads and times when they are silent, ceding to horns and winds, but all are woven together in the texture of our days, and all are together in first-rate fictions.

Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy

     Instructors regret students’ use of crib-notes that seek to provide understanding of a text with a summary and a few formulas. Headnotes in textbooks are as bad. Of course, lazy scholars will use these as well as plot-summaries and instant internet précis to fend off encounters with literature. The damage in such a case is not as bad as for the reader who has, in fact, read the material, only to limit his insight to someone’s severely reductive version. If a poem, novel, or play could be adequately paraphrased in a line or two, there would be no need for literature beyond the apothegm.
     The literary text is polysemous; that is part of what distinguishes it from other discourses. This is sometimes figured by the naïve as a series of revelations: the words seem to mean X on the surface; the analyst will see beneath that to the deeper meaning Y; the more acute critic may sketch a more esoteric reading yet and call it triumphantly Z. In truth, all meanings which are encoded in the text operate simultaneously. Some are more potent than others; some more likely to strike the casual reader; some interpretations will be elicited by that reader’s prior interests and inclinations; some remain to be spotlighted by future students. Yet even at times when the text seems either to be simple and straightforward or to insist on a certain reading, it can be useful to explore alternatives.
     Mythic narrations are especially rich in theme. The stories evolved to bear an extraordinary burden of significance, and the old ones gain more with each reader. One of the richest myths in European tradition is that of Oedipus. Sophocles’ play (Οἰδίπους Τύραννος) makes an excellent case study for this claim. I propose here to set forth a list, by no means exhaustive, which can serve to demonstrate the truth of the claims about the aesthetic text’s unique support of multiple meanings and about myth’s particular semiotic richness. I will not here propose a hierarchy or more and less important resonances, nor will I provide evidence to justify any of these options or to privilege one over another (though I do begin with those heard more commonly). The list of approaches might itself be useful to readers wondering what to do with an entirely different text.

1. An initial view of the play might be simply as spectacle: the dance, the poetry, the costumes, Dionysos seated among the spectators. In this experience of the play the primary significance of the hero is that he is a big man, at viewing whom the common man may feel a vicarious pleasure as American do when reading about celebrities. Here the point of the drama is pleasure – Oedipus, whatever else is nay be, is an evening’s entertainment.

2. In the realistic reading, Oedipus is Everyman. His name, if it means swell-foot (as Shelley had it) is simply descriptive. The theme is explicit in the play’s final verse when the chorus declares that no man should be deemed happy “before he has passed out of life having never suffered pain.” Though the poet dances about the point elegantly, his view was proverbial in Greece even before this play (see Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 928 and Solon’s “No mortal is happy, rather all under the sun suffer.” (Edmonds, 14). Buddha began from a similar realization. Here fate is ethically random but inexorable.

3. In an ethical reading, Oedipus is the hubristic ego, seeking power beyond others, chastened for pride. Though the realistic reading would insist that all people suffer, this approach regards Oedipus as deserving his fate. What happens to him is an example of the sort of retributive justice of which Job’s friends felt so certain. His missing the mark, or ἁμαρτία (the very word used by scripture translators for sin) led to his suffering.

4. A related reading would be the social or historical in which the hero is primarily a bad king who must be expelled before justice is restored to the community. The harmonious kingdom as a philosophic ideal appears in Lau Dz and Confucius as well as in such modern Marxists as Christopher Caudwell and George Thomson. The critic adopting this view might look either at the conditions of the work’s production or the themes of its words.

5. In the ritual view the play may reenact an act of scapegoat magic in the banishment of the old year-spirit in the person of the aged and ineffectual king and his replacement by a more vigorous successor. Oedipus is, in fact, an important text for the Cambridge School anthropologists for whom drama regularly had a ritual origin. (of whom Frazer, Harrison, Cornford, were primarily classicists). The tragedy’s denouement is then a healing process for the community.

6. In the psychological reduction of theme, Oedipus is the stalled ego who has failed to grow up in the immediate sense of remaining in love with his mother (though he may stand as the type of any neurotic). In less psychoanalytic versions, this reading would approach the ethical one with the character flaw of pride regarded not as a sin but as a self-defeating behavioral habit.

7. To the aesthetic reader, Oedipus is simply an abstract pattern among other patterns. This reading is based on the conspicuous care lavished on metric play and other musical elements. Indeed, the chorus itself proclaims the principle, though in a negative formulation: if a wicked man prospers, they ask, “How can any man protect his soul from the blows of the gods? If such men are honored, there’s no point to choral dancing!” (893-6) (Thus, if the chorus is dancing, as it manifestly is during the performance, all must be well.)

     These clearly feature certain common elements. Apart from the pleasure-oriented first and last, they portray an extraordinary human individual colliding with the cosmos. Aristotle’s “pleasure” and “fear” and “catharsis” are consistent with all.
     Not every text is as susceptible to interpretation as Oedipus, and the close attention to Sophocles’ words during the millennia since its composition have only increased the rich potential of the play. Yet every text, no matter how insubstantial, will have not only the pleasure/entertainment reading (it was either a pleasure or it was not), but also historical readings (as every text is produced in certain social circumstances and nearly every text touches on the relations among humans), psychological readings (as every texts must be produced and consumed by the human consciousness), and aesthetic readings (as it must proclaim itself the right sort of writing and seek to displace what has come before). I have found that one may hit upon new insights while pursuing the most unlikely reading.