The Knot of Dialectic in “Bryd one brere”

 

The Middle English poem and a version in modern English follow the essay.

 

     In a typical example of the chance survival of such poems, around the turn of the fourteenth century the three stanzas of “Bryd one brere” (“Bird on a Briar”) were written on the back of a papal bull.  The words of Innocent III had been promulgated a century earlier and the document archived since then.  What might the writer have been thinking?  The circumstance associates an appropriate quality of immediacy with the lyric.  It may be that a zephyr had reminded a monk in his cell at the Priory of St. James near Exeter of a song he had heard in the marketplace.  Perhaps writing it was meant as an aid to memory or, on the other hand, the writer may have meant to banish it from his meditations by leaving it on the parchment page.  These circumstances nicely spotlight the poem’s polysemy, poised between heaven and earth, suspended in the tensions inherent in the human condition, caught in a tight knot of dialectic.     

     “Bryd one brere” is as well an excellent example, though only one among many, of the fruitful ambiguity cultivated by the poets of the period.  The opening phrase invites multiple readings.  Joined phonetically by alliteration, its terms are semantically opposed.  A bird and its song, especially appearing in lyric poetry, are associated with grace and beauty, while a briar or thorn has a threatening, potentially painful aspect.  The complex affective fluctuations of human experience, ranging from bliss to misery, might be figured as “between the bird and the briar.”  

     Yet the opening word is ambiguous even in isolation.  In fact, nothing that follows requires that it refer to an animal.  As the lyric was originally sung, the bird would certainly suggest the poet.  “Bryd” also can mean a woman or a bride, and, with only a slight phonetic stretch of the sort routine in the era, it might be read as the past participle “buried” or as a reference to St. Brigid. In this way the poem opens by confronting the reader with a series of dualities: pain and pleasure, life and death, earth and heaven.  The image cast by the first three words constitutes a balanced mandala-like concept characterizing the contradictions out of which the phenomenal world is generated.  One knows the joy of a songbird by contrast with the pain of an injury, the pleasures of life are the more acute with the sight of the grave just beyond the horizon ahead.

     The next phrase “kynd is come of love” makes the point explicit with another emphatic alliteration.  It is through the separation and attraction of opposites that nature, the most common meaning of “kynd,” has arisen, both in the biological sense of sexual reproduction and in the grand sense in Genesis of things coming into being through the generation of dualities like light and dark or land and sea.  “Kynd” may also mean something close to what the word means today, “beneficence” or “good will,” implying, as courtly love does, the derivation of moral nobility through love.  In the loose semantic web of these verses, associations with kindling a flame (in some forms “kinde”) and children (“kindle”) are also relevant, as erotic heat and thus children are the consequence of love. 

     Bu the general principle upon which the world moves forward, whether figured as fire, love, reproduction, or birdsong, is deficient in the case of the speaker.  The phrase “love to crave” indicates a state of love-longing, of unsatisfied desire that contrasts with the full-throated bird on the briar.  The bird is blithe (the consonantal music never stops) either because it is so beautiful, which is to say so in tune with its world, a harmony signaled by the fecundity of nature.

     The bird is, in fact, so joyful that it seems supernatural.  Addressing the animal as though it were a god, the persona poses another opposition, in prayer-like supplication asking the bird either to have pity on him or to “dig him his grave.”  The most archaic associations accompany the name of St. Brigid (spelled in a variety of ways, including Brid); indeed, the very existence of Brigid of Kildare is open to question.  What is certain is that a good many of the Christian saint’s characteristics duplicate those of her pagan predecessor.  Her feast-day is on February 1, the day of the pre-Christian Imbolc holiday marking the beginning of spring, so the connotations of both saint and goddess include the fertility of the earth.    

     Without love, there is no life, so the speaker asks directly that his grave be dug if lovelessness is to be his portion.  Though mortality had been hovering in the background in earlier lines, death is evoked here directly in the double mention of digging (evoking successive shovelfuls of earth) and then of the grave itself, all beginning with the growling sound gr-. 

     With the opening words of the second stanza, the poet leaps from the burying ground to the sublime empyrean when the persona recalls a glimpse of his human beloved, now distinguished from her bird-totem. [1]  This visitation enables his own soul to be called “blithe” just as the bird had been.  The appearance of the beloved is little short of a theophany.  She appears numinous, perfect, purely white, so “fair” she is “the flower of all.” [2] The language and the emotion might equally apply to an observer wonderstruck with the beauty of nature, a lover enthralled by a woman’s charms, or a spiritual seeker who has experienced an access to what feels like the divine.

     Yet the delight in merely seeing the beloved is short-lived.  The persona must have her love in return, and his anxiety about achieving this goal leads him to possessive rhetoric.  “Might she only do as I want” the third stanza begins, and prove “steadfast, lovely, and true.”  The speaker might then be “saved” from sorrow as sinners are from Hell, and be instead renewed and clothed in angelic “joy and bliss.”  

     The poem is an extraordinary incantation expressing the deepest human needs for pleasure, sex, love, and the divine, in its first portion a medieval version of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” but ending in an ecstatic vision of possibility, though the speaker’s reward of love remains conditional: she “may” save him.  The last line is subjunctive.  So the poem relates only a potential deliverance from the suffering of desire; the persona remains subject to the ordinary pains of life just as the reader is.  The construction of an image of totally satisfying love only highlights how far short of that ideal his lived experience remains.

     Frustration, however, only exacerbates appetite.  The longing for sexual satisfaction and for truly fulfilling love, the pursuit of a closer relationship with the divine may neither be extinguished nor entirely satisfied.  In the contemplation of the figure of the bird, the most commonplace of sights, seen and heard daily, the poet has expressed the tensions of the human condition.  The poem ends, as life does, in uncertainty.

 

 1.  See the works of Marija Gimbutas for the widespread early European bird-goddesses.

 

2.  A figure of great antiquity, popular in the Middle Ages.  Cf. Anacreon 55.  See the excellent “Excursus” on the topic by Peter Dronke in Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-lyric I, 181-192.

 

 

Bryd one brere, brid, brid one brere,
Kynd is come of love, love to crave
Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe
Or greyth, lef, greith thu me my grave.

Hic am so blithe, so bryhit, brid on brere,
Quan I se that hende in halle:
Yhe is whit of lime, loveli, trewe
Yhe is fayr and flur of alle.
 

Mikte ic hire at wille haven,
Stedefast of love, loveli, trewe,
Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven
Ioye and blisse were were me newe.
 

 

modernization:
 

Bird on a briar, bird, bird on a briar,
We come from love, and love we crave,
Blissful bird, have pity on me,
Or dig, love, dig for me my grave. 

I am so blithe, so bright, bird on briar
When I see that handmaid in the hall:
She is white-limbed, lovely, true,
She is fair, and the flower of all.

Might I have her at my will,
Steadfast of love, lovely, true,
She may save me from my sorrow;
Joy and bliss would wear me new.

Chaucer's Version of the Myth of a Golden Age

     Chaucer's short poem “The Former Age” states a commonplace theme, that of a golden age from which mankind has fallen, and it recognizes its own dependence on tradition by recalling classical precedents with references to Jupiter and Diogenes. Moreover, the poem is directly derivative of several works (the most important being Chaucer’s own Boethius). But the use of literary convention is often a highly dynamic process, and this particular restatement is fully effective in both exploiting the potent resources of the archetype and freely yet harmoniously creating new details, new tones. The poem’s implications are enriched not only by its sources, but also by analogous stories whose images parallel its own.
     Golden age myths are, of course, current world-wide. The Hindu concept of the satya yuga and the Daoist vision of a primal utopia are two essentially similar variations. The most fundamental import of such stories is to complain against suffering, mortality, and wickedness. Lamenting the fall provides an etiology and a type for any specific lament of the limitations of this life.
     But in Chaucer's poem moral corruption associated with the fall is not unspecified. He defines it largely in economic terms. The coming of technological innovation and a cash economy has poisoned relations between men and created an undesirable selfish “delicacye” within individuals. The prior perfection represents a reminiscence comparable to Engels’ primitive communists, [1] or their more modern incarnation -- Gary Snyder’s neolithic communard ecstatics. [2] The present-day failing is described in terms similar to those of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” as the duplicity resulting when men prey upon men prompted by “the anguysschous love of havyinge.”
     The second system of corruption the poet suggests is sexual. Though punishment for sexuality is heavily suggested in the Biblical story of Eden it is not explicit here. The ambiguity of line 28 is heightened by line 29. Though the explicit topic is the covetous pursuit of jewels and precious metals, the combination of “swety bysinesse,” “lurkinge,” and “derkesse” in a story of the fall cannot fail to have sexual meaning. (The term “swety” alone is often used by Chaucer in a sexual context — in the "Miller's Tale" and. in Troilus and Criseyde, for instance. ) ln addition, the sexual associations of caves are explicated not only by Freud but also by countless others (e.g. the Memphis Jug Band in their “Cave Man Blues”). Finally, the second stanza’s description of the crime of wounding the earth with a plow to sow seed more efficiently (objectifying and exploiting the earth) is suggestive enough to drag half The Golden Bough behind it.
     Thus, Chaucer attributes to deranged or unhealthy, “fallen,” economic and sexual relations the aggressive content in human society. While the primary stream of meaning in “The Former Age,” this is not the only one. I believe a contrary value system also resonates within the same narrative images. Frequently in fairy tales underground caves are said to contain a treasure guarded by a powerful and malevolent being. The hero proves himself by gaining a victory over the guardian (as in Beowulf). One might generalize such a successful quest as representing adaptation to the world and characterize the dreamer after a golden age as solipsistic and infantile. Further, the very wealth of detail in Chaucer's poem's picture of our degenerate age, the piling up of parallel phrases suggests a delight in the plenitude of the world. Just as Christians speak of that felix culpa that made movement and action possible, that made oneself possible, so here the fall has “thickened the plot.” The final list of crimes (“poyson, manslautre, mordre”) is so extreme as to remove the application from one”s every day to the realm of moralizing about others, as when suburbanites speak of “crime in the cities.”
     Finally, one must regard the author himself as to some extent dwelling in the golden age since his values are those of the original creation. As a virtuous man he partakes of the nature of that earlier world and proves that it is not wholly lost. All these factors combine with the rather spartan character of life in the golden age as it is portrayed to generate a sort of ambivalent complexity of a sort that would, have been foreign to those who had, as Chaucer says, “no fantasye to debate.” Poignant and vigorous though the lament is, it contains currents of meaning running contrary to the explicit content, which, by their opposition, render the poetry more accurate and more effective.


1. From Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: "There can be no poor and needy – the communistic household and the gens know their responsibility towards the aged, the sick and those disabled in war. All are free and equal, including the women. There is as yet no room for slaves nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of alien tribes."

2. From Snyder “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution”: "In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks."