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.
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.
