Irony in Aucassin et Nicolette

 

 

 

     It may surprise the modern reader of Aucassin et Nicolette, the eight-hundred-year-old chantefable [1], to learn that it was long regarded as a straightforward story of two perfect partners, according to one scholar “the purest example imaginable of characters motivated by idyllic love” [2].  The modern age is admittedly suspicious of ideals and finds a particular appeal in paradox and irony.  Even those who would not label themselves post-structuralists are liable to see earlier authors burlesquing or otherwise undermining themselves.  Yet, quite apart from a modern taste for cynicism and iconoclasm, this particular tale of love’s overcoming obstacles seems at times explicit in its own self-satire [3].

     The episode of Torelore is the most undeniably comic passage.  In this up-side-down land, women fight by tossing foodstuffs while the king lies “en couvade,” as though in childbed.  There is surely caricature, too, in Aucassin’s declaration that he could never enjoy the afterlife without his beloved.  While the basic sentiment is more or less conventional, his depiction of heaven as boring, packed with tiresome old fogeys, in contrast to a hell populated by courtly sophisticates is certainly meant more to raise a smile at his silliness than to impress the reader with the depth of his devotion or to shock with his apparent irreligion. 

     Apart from these farcical passages, Aucassin is regularly presented as an incompetent hero.  Initially unwilling to fight at all, he is lost in a dream when he does enter the battlefield.  The reader sees him in  warrior mode only when he attacks the helpless Toreloreans including their feckless bed-ridden king.  Separated from his beloved, Aucassin makes no attempt to find her and he is, indeed, slow to recognize her in the end.  On the other hand, Nicolette is an unusually active heroine.  Her seeking out her lover while disguised is more often a man’s ploy (as in the case of Odysseus) than a woman’s.   

     Apart from the satirical comments on romance conventions and on the church, at the outset the poet makes an extravagant self-reflective claim. 

 

 

Nus hom n’est si esbahis,

Tant dolans ni entrepris,

de grant mal amaladis,

se il l’oit, ne soit garis,

et de joie resbaudis,

     tant par est douce.

 

There is no one so downcast, afflicted and in poor shape, so very ill that he would not, at hearing this [story] recover health, joy, and vigor, so sweet as it is.

(Lines 10-15)

 

     To what degree of irony is this assertion pitched?  Taking it as a direct assertion of truth may seem somewhat fanciful, but in fact the idea that poetry (or music or stories) might have healing power, though entirely magical, is widespread, indeed, all  but universal in human culture.  The Chinese character for medicine contains the sign for music (as well as a radical indicating herbs).  As it happens I can present more than one bit of contemporary evidence of this belief.  I was once acquainted with a Gnaoui musician from Marrakech who had not attended even a Koranic school.  He said that in his youth he was most often hired, not for weddings or parties, but to play by the bedside of sick people.  He had not the slightest doubt that his art was an agent of healing.  In modern American culture, my wife worked in an inpatient mental health unit that employed a full-time music therapist whose work was considered to contribute to effective treatment [4].    

     To most readers the author’s declaration of the healing powers of his composition seems satirical.  The primary object of the humor might be the literary conventions of the day, paralleling the lovers’ puffed-up professions of devotion, but it might also have seemed a burlesque of the spiritual rewards sometimes promised for the reading of religious texts like saints’ lives. 

     Those who wish to salvage some of the promised benefits of consuming such stories might respond to this ironic reading by insisting that while a poem cannot cure illness, it can improve life by heightening a person’s sensitivity.  Surely the catharsis Aristotle expected from tragedy was therapeutic.  The humanistic approach to literature, unfashionable in the twenty-first century, but dominant in various forms earlier, rests on the notion that literature in some way is “improving.”  

     The theoretical critic might answer that artists know no more than others about how properly to live the good life, that their particular skill lies instead on the artful arrangement of forms or words or sounds, and that it is thus futile to look to poets for wisdom. 

     This back-and-forth dialectic is generated by the special capacity of art to deal with ambiguities and contradictions.  Further elaboration is possible but would require ingenuity more than hermeneutics.  Fundamentally, the proposition is in a sense true and also false.  The oscillation between the possibilities creates a rich resonance and avoids reductive formulae.  This is one example of the transformation of convention characteristic of literature in which to employ a formula or repeat a phrase instantly enables variations and contradictions that render the idea more precise as well as thickening the plot of narrative.  Aucassin et Nicolette makes its parodic values clear to most contemporary readers, but the same phenomenon is traceable in less strident form in most aesthetic texts.

 

 

 

1.  While the combination of prose and verse exists elsewhere, under the name of prosimetrum in Latin literature (e.g. Petronius and Boethius) and (變) in Chinese tradition (e.g. Jiang Mo Bianwen [降魔變文], “Magical Combat”) as well as elsewhere, but Aucassin et Nicolette is unique among French narratives.  For a comparison of Aucassin et Nicolette with the biànwén form, see Li-Li Ch'en, “Wen Chantefable and Aucassin et Nicolette,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1971).

2.  Robert Harden, ‘"Aucassin et Nicolette’ as Parody,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1966). 

3.  Apart from the article already cited above, additional evidence is presented in Barbara Nelson Sargent, “Parody in Aucassin et Nicolette: Some Further Considerations,” The French Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Mar., 1970).

4.  In America this artist played with the likes of Don Cherry and Miles Davis and worked regularly here with three bands: one traditional, one jazz, and one rock.  Listening to his Arabic singing with the rock ensemble, I asked him to translate the lyrics.  They were all cliches of the Islamic shahada: Allah is great, there is one god, Allah determines all things.  “Of course,” he said, “music is always an offering to Allah.”  According to him, in Morocco they would often perform through the night, and generally found their patient better by daybreak. 

Towards a Typology of Collaborative Poetry

 

The poems by Marcabrun and Ugo Catola and the first verses of the Minase renga of Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho are appended in both the original and in translation.  

 

     The very idea of poems with more than one author radically challenges the Romantic notion of individual genius.  In spite of the fact that art has as often been shaped by the beliefs and values most members of a culture share, many readers remain Romantic enough to view proper poetry as the product of a single person’s vision.  The artist is often imagined as a hero, the possessor of a titanic sensibility, striking out alone, innovative, ignoring established norms, and such a concept seems inimical to the compromise and negotiation that collaboration would entail.  And yet one hears that the great mythic texts on which the Kalevala was based were regularly performed by two poets, taking turns (albeit one with a secondary role), often while facing each other astride a log.  Seventy-two scholars wrote the Septuagint and forty-seven the King James Bible.  Collaboration may, as these examples imply, be deeply traditional, but it is equally likely to appear radically innovative.  A good number of modern ventures in collaborative poetry have occurred more or less under the aegis of the avant-garde: the exquisite corpses of the Surrealists, Ralentir Travaux (1930) by André Breton, Paul Éluard and René Char, and the chainpoems of the Japanese Vou group and Charles Henri Ford [1]. 

     Practices can differ widely.  Sometimes two writers present debate, taking different sides of an issue; sometimes they reinforce each other.  Some seek to meld their imaginations so that a single text represents not either or both, but a unique synthetic writer, called into existence for the project.  In some the linkages are more complex; for instance, one contribution may relate only to contiguous passages or all contributors may follow a predetermined pattern. 

     The simplest relation between multiple authors is contention, either in the form of an insult war or a debate.  The first of these possibilities was formalized among Germanic and Celtic peoples as the flyting (in Irish immarbág or iomarbháigh).  In perhaps the best-known of such works “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” (ca. 1500) William Dunbar addresses his opponent with a veritable flood of invective, the direction of which is perfectly clear today on spite of archaic Scots dialect.

    

Mauch mutton, bit button, peeled glutton, heir to Hillhouse,

Rank beggar, oyster dredger, flay fleggar in the flet. flea                    catcher? in hall

Chitterling, rough rilling, lick shelling in the millhouse, rough            hide, husk-licker

Bard rehator, thief of nature, false traitor, fiend’s get,                         worthless poet

Filling of tauch, rak sauch, cry crauch, thou art o’erset! of                  tallow, stretched rope, surrender

Mutton driver, girnall ryver, yad swiver, foul fall thee! granary           robber, mare mounter

Heretic, lunatic, purspick, carling’s pett, old hag’s fart?

Rottin crok, dirtin dok, cry cok, or I shall quell thee! 

                                                                    (ll. 241-248)

 

Walter Kennedy responds in kind.

 

Dathan, devil’s son, and dragon despitous,

250 Abiron’s birth and bred with Belial,

Wod werewolf, worm, and scorpion venomous,

Lucifer’s lad, foul fiend’s face infernal,

Sodomite separate from saints celestial.

       (ll. 249-253)

 Very little distinguishes one stream of vituperation from the other.  Rather than an actual attack drawing attention to the opponent’s failings, the insults are generic, pure antagonistic energy, pyrotechnics, rhetoric for its own sake, enmity made recreation.  

     Though frequently scatological, such flytings amused the court of James IV.  Americans may well be reminded of the custom of playing the dozens. [2]  The game so permeated American culture that even in my benighted white suburb elementary school children used the line “your mother wears combat boots” with no suspicion of its origin or implications.  Like the flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the insults traded among dozens players have ordinarily no relation to actual weaknesses of the individuals involved; both contestants are indulging in a competitive verbal game, performed in a social setting and encouraged by onlookers.

     While the classic form of the dozens persists, other genres of Black vernacular insult wars have emerged.  Only a few weeks ago the New York Times Magazine [3] featured a story on “battle rap,” calling it “an art form and a sport, as well as an industry.”  One participant is given an extended opportunity for boasting and insults before the other responds, followed by further rounds.  Sexual themes remain common, including impugning the other’s masculinity and bragging of one’s own.  Here is a sample from Caustic vs. Rone, the latter speaking first.

  

Your baby mom looks like a drag queen, I'll get your queen             dragged

Rip his beard off, do his Adam's apple like a speed bag

I don't care if Soul's punch was softer than a fucking bean bag

You got slapped and just stood there just like that shit was             freeze tag

 

A portion of Caustic’s comeback.

 

You know, that's a hard thing to live up to

But he makes up for it with a strong back rub and a solid "I             love you."

He be kissing that bitch on the mouth like it's the love of his             life

But deep down he knows he just ain't fucking her right

She's got the Black Snake Moan she likes a little mud in her             pipes  [4]

 

     In  other genres the contention is more substantial, and actual views are exchanged as in a débat, called in Occitanian a tenso or partimen, like that between the twelfth century poets Marcabrun and Ugo Catola on the nature of love [5].  The discussion is highly organized.  First Ugo (also called Uc) states the topic -- ”un vers d’amor” -- to which Marcabrun answers with a condemnation of “false love” (“faus’amistat”) involving deceit citing the example of the Eve and the Fall.  Ugo will hear nothing negative about love since it is love alone that “bore him and nurtured him” (“que d’amor fui naz e noiriz”).  The argument continues until in the end Ugo presents his clinching image which bears the undeniable evidence of lived experience.  “Marcubrun, when I am worn out and feeling low and my good friend receives me and kisses me, and I undress, I go from her healthy and healed.” [6]  Unconvinced, Marcabrun calls him an addict, like a drunk or a spendthrift.

     They are both right.  The poem presents a three-dimensional ambivalent picture of love.  The vulnerability entailed in the commitment of oneself to the other means that love must always involve risk as well as pleasure.  The point that might be developed in another work through the modulation of a single relationship or through the contrast of two successive loves is here presented in two voices. 

     In another tenso weaving two points of view Giraut de Bornelh  and Raimbaut d”Aurenga argue whether the obscure style (trobar clus) or a more light and transparent treatment (trobar leu) is preferable.  Raimbaut defends difficult verse, saying that fools will never have the taste to appreciate fine things.   For his part Giraut cannot understand why anyone would write anything that is not “light and popular” (“levet e venersal”).  The contention collapses, though, as they both declare their helplessness in the face of love.  Both in the end note the utter confusion wrought by passionate love, for Raimbaut a natural and noble pleasure (“un fin joi natural”) that leaves him feeling “knocked about” (“torbatz”), for Giraut passion leads to his wishing to cry out “God help me” (“Qu'eu voill dir a Deu mi coman").  The poem concludes with their affection for each other, a fellow-feeling based on both experiencing the same tumult of love, though expressed in different styles.

     Whereas the flytings, dozens, and battle raps are displays of bravura fighting for the pleasure of making the sparks fly, the Occitanian poems actually present two sides of an issue.  Neither speaker is necessarily the winner, as both positions are in part correct.  The complex picture that might in a novel be represented by several characters or by a succession of time is here two authors.  The poem produced by juxtaposing two points of view has the liveliness that is characteristic of disputation. 

     Perhaps the most sophisticated and conventional collaborative form is the Japanese renga.  The practice arose of improvising or capping verses and developed into a collective writing technique with extremely elaborate rules. [7]  In the mature era of the renga, when organized competitions were common, a poet had perhaps three minutes to improvise a stanza appropriate to the preceding passage and well-integrated with the tradition. 

     Renga composition is shaped by system of intricate rules that here can only be suggested.  Indeed, an intimate acquaintance with Japanese poetry is required even to understand renga’s place.  The poets’ choice of words is restricted to the lexicon of the classical poetic tradition which stresses elegance and refinement (ga).  Thus each term carries significant literary associations, with the subtlest of variation and virtually no content arises directly from lived experience.  The genre is poetry about poetry. 

     The season must be established in the first verse while (In a hundred verse renga) one quarter of the following verses must have the word flower (hana) and one quarter the word moon (tsuki).  (In the flower verses writers often defer to their superiors.)  Topics are divided into seventeen categories (luminous things, living things, rising things, Buddhism, etc.) with some (such as mountains, shores, and dwellings) then further divided between essence (tai) and attribute (yū).  Certain words may be used only once in the hundred verses while others are restricted to a specific occurrence.  Usually, elements in common must be well separated; for instance, verses on human relations must be separated by two verses while those of reminiscences must have three.  Certain series, though, must be continued for three to five verses.   

     Of course, students of oral literature understand that such demanding requirements, while they seem to make the poet’s task more difficult, in fact enable improvisation.  The conventions are so rigorous that, even in the practice of experts, the verses are often imperfect and are edited by the poem’s recorder to conform to the rules.  The product is primarily structural in its appeal, rather like a Bach fugue, directing attention to the variegated play of the chain of verses, always unpredictable since each related only to the line immediately preceding and following.  Thus, with every new stanza a new linkage is established and an old one abandoned.

     According to Jin'Ichi this procedure renders the subject entirely irrelevant: “the essence of renga is the essentially meaningless pattern of images.” [8]  For one critic, this form is emptied of content and thus conveys a Buddhist sense of “impermanence” and “nonself.” [9]

     Among the most celebrated renga sequences is the fifteenth century Minase Sangin Hyakuin by Sogi, and his students Shohaku and Socho.  The master’s opening verses seem a sketch from nature, noting the early spring season with the mention of mist, while snow persists on the mountainside.   In fact even in this first few lines there is no solitary author; the entire project is bound in convention and intertextuality.  The poets are visiting the shrine for the twelfth century Emperor Gotoba and their renga is in fact an offering presented as part of the memorial observances on the anniversary of the death of this ruler who was also a poet. 

     The opening lines by Sogi quote one of Gotoba’s poems.

 

SogiI look over the misty base

of the mountain where

the Minase River runs through —

Why did they say the evening

was best in autumn?

 Sogi, then, was not merely describing the scene before his eyes.  Rather he was paying homage to a predecessor by assenting to Gotoba’s claim that nights are loveliest in autumn.  Even before the second voice the reader is in the midst of collaboration. 

     Shohaku’s lines abandon the allusion, but mention the river which Gotoba had not, and extend the reference of the world’s regreening by imagining the warmer downstream town where the plum blossoms are already blooming, again reinforcing the theme of springtime’s beauty. In the next link Socho picks up the reference to the river, adding the element of the willow branches stirred by the breeze.  Sogi’s next contribution adds the boat and the dawn of day; the evening with which the series opened is gone, as is the snow, the mountain, the village, and the plums.  

     Perhaps this superficial glance, founded on translations, can suggest something of the dynamism of the renga form.  Decentered, always shifting and changing, tracing the connections between all things while preserving the apparent randomness of phenomena, such poetry seems profoundly Buddhist.  For all its contrivance it reflects the elusiveness of mental life, the fluid characteristics of consciousness as experienced, and in this sense is more “realistic” than more straightforward utterances. 

     The permutations of authorship of collaborative works transform and proliferate as do all conventions.  The first authors in examples here cited, Dunbar, Kennedy, Caustic, and Rone followed a pattern of ludic mutual ridicule, a purely aesthetic simulation of a contest for dominance resembling the aggressive posturing of male sexual displays among many species. There followed Marcabrun and Ugo Catola who presented their topic dialectically, foregrounding the unique capacity of poetic discourse to accommodate ambiguity and self-contradiction.  Then in the renga of Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho a more complex use for collaboration emerged, the virtuoso construction of a tracery of cause and effect, the earlier portions of which fade to invisibility as each new link is added. 

     Numerous other possibilities exist either in fact or potentially.  The process of oral literature is particularly collective, but all literature has sources and influences.  Some modern authors have preferred to work as one with a unified product like Louis and Celia Zukowsky sometimes did or Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have done in Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000) and Little Novels (2002) [10].  The contributions can be entirely separate as when a group of poets write on a given theme. 

     The Romantic view of composition led Edward Young to argue in the eighteenth century that “originals can arise from Genius only,” and the genius is not essentially a scholar, but rather a “divinely-inspired Enthusiast,” who may provide readers access to his own consciousness, “a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual Spring.”  Young finds allusive or learned poetry to be of only secondary value as it necessarily dilutes the power of individual vision.  Yet no work is independent of its predecessors, nor is any work univocal except the briefest and simplest.  There is even then an irreducible second layer as the persona is shaped by the author.  Further, poetry excels at conveying ambiguity and ambivalence.  To W. E. B. DuBois the Black writer was not confused by  “double consciousness,” but rather was allowed more insight and precision.  Collaboration is simply a technical means to guarantee that the incongruities and self-contradictions that we experience daily find concrete form on the written page.  In the end the various sorts of ways that writers interact in collaborative forms only foreground the tensions inherent in any human interaction, indeed, even within a single mind.

 

  

1.  John Berryman’s review in the Kenyon Review III, 3 (Summer 1941) found the “chainpoems” entirely unsuccessful, “excruciating” and “painful.”

 

2.  The pioneering study of the dozens was published by John Dollard, “The Dozens: dialectic of insult,” American Imago, 1(1), 1939.  An excellent later survey with a good sample of collected verses is found in Roger D. Abrahams, "Playing the Dozens" The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 75, No. 297, Symposium on Obscenity in Folklore (Jul. - Sep., 1962).  Amuzie Chimezie provides a convincing link to African practice as well as critiquing his predecessors with some asperity in “The Dozens: An African-Heritage Theory,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 6, No. 4 (Jun., 1976).

 

3.  Ben Barzilai, “The Fierce, Flourishing World of Battle Rap,” New York Times Magazine, June 14, 2023.

 

4.  These and other lyrics are available at https://battlerap.com/lyrics/2016/09/28063-caustic-vs-rone.

 

5.  The poem acknowledges its genre by the use of the word tenson in l. 11, its occurrence presaged by the verb partiram in l. 3.

 

6.  Marcabrun, quant sui las e·m duoill,

E ma bon'amia m'acuoill

Ab un baisar, quant me despuoill,

M'en vau sans e saus e garitz. (ll. 49-52)

 

7.  Poetic improvisation has its own history.  Fude ( 賦得)or composition of poems on assigned topics was a recreation in China and became during the Tang Dynasty a part of the civil service examinations.

 

8.  See Konishi Jin'Ichi (tr. And introduced by Karen Brazell and Lewis Cook), “The Art of Renga,” The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975).  His exposition is the basis for this description. 

9.  David Landis Barnhill, “Renga: The Literary Embodiment of Impermanence and Nonself,” available at https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Literary-Embodiment-of-Impermanence-and-Nonself-Barnhill/4c618825d256d06d9a6a0685fc8aafc06565a6c0.

 

10.  See also the recent anthology edited by Dean Rader and Simone Muench They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing.  Parallels such as the work of Gilbert and George exist in visual art.

 

11.  Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759).

Amics Marchabrun, car digam

Un vers d'Amor, que per cor am

Q'a l'hora qe nos partiram

En sia loing lo chanz auziz.

 

Ugo Catola, er fazam,

Mas de faus' amistat me clam,

Q'anc pos la serps baisset lo ram

No foron tant enganairiz.                            8

 

Marcabrun, ço no m'es pas bon

Qe d'Amor digaz si ben non!

Per zo·us en mou e[u] la tenson,

Qe d'Amor fui naz e noiriz.

 

Catola, non entenz razon,

Non saps d'Amor cum trais Samson?

Vos cuidaz e'ill autre bricon

Qe tot sia vers quant vos diz.                    16

 

Marcabrun, no·s troban auctor

De Sanso·l fort e de sa'uxor

Q'ela n'avia ostat s'amor

A l'ora que ce fo deliz.

 

Catola, qar a sordejor

La det e la tolc al meillor,

Lo dia perdet sa valor,

Qe'l seus fo per l'estraing traiz.                 24

 

Marcabrun, si cum declinaz

Qu'Amors si' ab engan mesclaz,

Dunc es lo almosna pechaz,

La cima devers la raiz

 

Catola, l'Amors dont parlaz

Camja cubertament los daz,

Aprop lo bon lanz vos gardaz,

Co diz Salomons e Daviz.                             32

 

Marcabrun, amistaz dechai,

Car a trobat Joven savai!

Eu n'ai al cor ir' et esclai,

Qar l'en a levaz tan laiz criz.

 

Catola, Ovides mostra chai

E l'ambladura o retrai

Que non soana brun ni bai,

Anz se trai plus aus achaiz.                         40

 

Marchabrun, anc non cuit t'ames

L'Amors, ves cui es tant engres,

Ni no fo anc res meinz prezes

D'aitals joglars esbaluiz.

 

Catola, anc de ren non fo pres

Un pas, que tost no s'en loignes,

Et enquer s'en loingna ades,

E fera, tro seaz feniz.                                    44

 

Marcabrun, quant sui las e·m duoill,

E ma bon'amia m'acuoill

Ab un baisar, quant me despuoill,

M'en vau sans e saus e garitz.

 

Catola, per amor deu truoill

Tressaill l'avers al fol lo suoill,

E puois mostra la via a l'uoill

Aprop los autres escharniz.                           48

 

Marcabru, my friend, let's compose

a love poem, for I've set my heart to that,

by the time we part,

its tune be heard far away.

 

Uc Catola, let's do it

but I accuse you of false friendship

for, ever since the serpent lowered the branch [to Eve],

there haven't been as many deceitful women. 

 

Marcabru, it doesn't please me

that you say anything but good about Love!

I begin this tenso

because Love gave me life and raised me.

 

Catola, you don't listen to reason.

Don't you know how Love betrayed Samson?

You and the other suckers,

do you think that everything [love] tells you is true?

 

Marcabru, we do not find people who say,

about the strong Samson and his wife,

that she had removed her Love

at the time his life ran out.

 

Catola it's to the worst

she gave [her love] and took it away from the best

and lost her worth the day

her husband was betrayed for the foreigner.          

 

Marcabru, since you imply

that Love is mixed with deception,

is almsgiving sin

and the top below the root?

 

Catola, the Love you talk about

secretly changes the dice.

Stop after a good roll,

say Solomon and David.

 

Marcabru, Friendship decays

because it has found Youth uncouth!

I have anger and revulsion in my heart

because it has caused such ugly cries.

 

Catola, Ovid shows here,

and the look of things confirms it,

tha [Love] does not discriminate against brown or bay,

but appeals mostly to degenerates.

 

Marcabru, I do not think you ever loved

Love, towards which you are so vehement,

nor that it ever esteemed anything less

than certain brainless jesters.

 

Catola, Love never took

a step [towards me] without fleeing right away,

and it still tirelessly flees

and will do so till it is undone.

 

Marcabru when I'm tired and sad

and my good friend greets me

with a kiss while I take off my clothes,

I go away well, and safe, and cured.

 

Catola, out of love of the wine-press,

money makes the fool cross the threshold

and then shows the eye the way

towards the other laughable people.

 

 

  

The Minase Sangin Hyakuin by Sogi, Shohaku, and Socho

 

 

雪ながら山もとかすむ夕かな　　　　宗祇

Yuki nagara yama-moto kasumu yube kana

 

As it snows the base

of the mountain is misty

this evening (Sogi)

 

行く水とほく梅にほふ里　　　　　　肖柏

Yuku mizu toku ume niou sato

 

Far in the way the water goes

a plum-blossom-smelling hamlet (Shohaku)

 

川かぜに一むら柳春みえて　　　　　宗長

Kawakaze ni hitomura yanagi haru miete

 

The wind from the river

sways weeping willows

now it’s spring (Socho)

 

舟さすおとはしるき明がた　　　　　宗祇

Fune sasu oto wa shiruki akegata

 

The pole of a boat makes

a clear sound at dawn (Sogi)

The Transvestite Knight: Ulrich’s Frauendienst in Performance

Ulrich’s Frauendienst is odd and obscure enough that perhaps some general readers could learn something from a simple description. This fresh impression, recorded after a first reading, adds yet one more voice to the conversation among the work’s readers, a conversation which reveals, I think, as much about each critic’s sensibility as about Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s.


     The greatest medieval European epic-length narrative poems were composed in German around the turn of the twelfth century. The Nibelungenlied, Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde, and Wolfram’s Parzifal are encyclopedic, culture-defining works, illuminated by the ancient motifs of Celtic and Germanic paganism. Sophisticated narratives woven of masterful poetry, each has a broad array of thematic implications embracing politics, love, death, and the divine.
     Only a few years later Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst (Service of Women or the Woman) was rooted in the shallower soil of courtly love. That term has, of course, been questioned and indeed such ambiguity is Ulrich’s chief theme and mine. Before relating something of the reception history of the concept of courtly love and of Ulrich’s own version of it, though, a summary of his narrative, though it will have no value for those who have read it, may intrigue some who have never previously heard of it. The plot is nothing short of outlandish.
     Frauendienst is a first-person narrative in stanzas containing a number of interpolated poems in other forms. In his youth Ulrich, the persona, serves a noble lady and develops such a devotion to her that he drinks the water with which she washes. Later as a knight he dedicates his service to her despite her rejection of his love-messages. When she criticizes the appearance of his lip, he immediately seeks out a plastic surgeon. To honor his beloved and all women he disguises himself as Venus and, dressed as a woman, tours from Venice to Vienna, challenging all he meets to “break lances” in jousts. A lady in church sees through his costume (which could hardly be convincing to anyone) when she is to give him a “kiss of peace” only to kiss him anyway in the best of humor. An unknown admirer covers him with flower petals when he is in his bath (while pretending to be a woman). His lady convinces him to join the lepers who wait for alms outside her castle with the promise that she will eventually admit him. As he waits there the watchman urinates on him. He later undertakes another pilgrimage in the person of King Arthur serving a different, more obscure damsel who barely enters the story, but the latter part of the work abandons the more or less continuous narrative of these adventures and substitutes more poems and apothegms with a scattering of fragmentary narrative passages.
     This sketch is sufficient to make the absurdity of the story abundantly clear. Strange as it may seem to contemporary readers, the earlier scholars commenting on Ulrich’s work concurred in considering the work as essentially an authentic autobiography. For Tieck in 1812 the book was simply the “Geschichte und Liebe des Ritters und Sängers Ulrich von Liechtenstein von ihm selbst beschrieben.” For years readers assumed the story was factual. Reinhold Bechstein in his 1888 edition unreservedly calls it a “Selbstbiographie” [1] and goes yet further, declaring that “Ulrich’s narration makes such an impression of candor that we can have no doubt of his love of truth, indeed, all the less, since he reports many things that are in no way flattering to him.” [2] Based on the assumption of the text’s literal truth, it was studied for many years more as a historical than as a literary document.
     While modern readers smile at what seems the credulity of earlier generations, more recent readings of the text have ranged from the reasonable and productive to anachronistic and fanciful. The suggestion of Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler who consider the work “a sincere autobiographical romance,” an Ich-Roman that relays “the author’s psychological states, his unconscious or only semi-conscious fears, anxieties, and even obsessions,” is highly suggestive. [3] Albrecht Classen, denying significant autobiographical content, finds the poem an analysis of “the theatrical nature of courtliness,” revealing “the precariousness and thus the extreme value of courtly culture” and allowing performer and audience “self-confirmation” though he gives scant attention to its comic elements. [4]
     Ulrich’s translator and editor J. W. Thomas to whom the Frauendienst is a humorous “fiction” focuses on the poems relation to other poems, finding in it a catalogue of Minnesang conventions in the lyrics accompanied by a humorous parody of the same conventions in the narrative passages. [5] While this seems eminently reasonable it leaves open the questions of theme and reception.
     More suspicious are such conclusions as those of Ingrid Bennewitz to whom Ulrich’s cross-dressing represents his “insecurity with his male body” [6] or Lisa Perfetti for whom the poem “subverts the lyric genre’s conventional silencing of women” and exposes the “pretense of the male voice” which claims to be “dedicated to serving women as a sham.” [7] Andrea Moshövel’s characterization of cross-dressing as "a “misogynistic and homophobic expression of anxieties over the dissolving of gender boundaries.” [8] sounds like an exportation of contemporary attitudes backwards in time.
     The disputed terrain between those who take Ulrich’s quests in behalf of love as straightforward amatory heroism and those to whom his adventures are primarily comic, ironic, or subversive mirrors critical attitudes toward courtly love as a whole. Brought into common usage with Gaston Paris [9], the term had become generally accepted, particularly after C. S. Lewis’s popular The Allegory of Love. Courtly love seemed to have settled into the realm of received ideas until the sixties when D. W. Robertson declared it “an impediment to the understanding of medieval literature” [10] and a couple of years later E. Talbot Donaldson wrote of “The Myth of Courtly Love.” [11] J. J. Wilhelm argued for dropping the term entirely. Without surveying the vast bibliography on this topic, it is sufficient here to observe that the issue as a whole has been deeply contested.
     Even more broadly, on strictly formal grounds, every convention has the potential to bring to birth a panoply of variations in a process I name “transformation of convention.” [12] The establishment of a steady rhythm, for example, allows the listener to perceive the absence of a beat or a change on tempo. In this way the semantic density of the aesthetic work is greatly heightened. Conventions provide a dynamic technique for poetry’s exploration of ambiguities and contradictions.
     The performative aspects of medieval literature are often neglected as moderns read in library or study. Yet Frauendienst was in fact recited and its lyrics sung in a social situation, and the context of Ulrich’s poem shapes its substance. The poem offers ample opportunity for performative elements apart from the text. Many passages in which Ulrich comments with satisfaction on his feminine garments would almost inevitably be presented with mincing gestures. The repetitive description of jousting matches with specific opponents, often characterized in the most general terms, may bore modern readers, but in the original context, they likely represented “shout-outs” to individuals whose friends and relatives, if not they themselves, were in the audience. The comic aspect of the story, unnoticed for years, would have been explicit. Surely the singer’s sly glance around the room would accompany Ulrich’s sudden brief mention of interrupting his love-service for a few days to look in on his wife or his “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. [13]
     The reception of the narrative must be of a piece with that of the interspersed lyrics, despite apparent contradictions. Imagining this dramatic situation it is natural to take courtly love poems in general as sophisticated flirtatious courtly entertainments, celebrating the men of the nobility as warrior-lovers and the women as paragons of beauty, the more alluring for their discreet reserve. The courtly love paradigm regularly casts the he-man and the glamour girl in leading roles, but they are not always presented straightforwardly. The hefty measure of idealization does not foreclose possibilities such as irony, comedy, or obscenity, possibilities necessary to reflect the range of human responses to love.
     Ulrich is telling a tall tale, but his extravagances are far from arbitrary. For courtly love as a whole, the essential datum is the power of sexuality. The primary signification of the love-service is the lover’s feeling of helplessness in the experience of erotic desire at least from the male point of view. [14] He may experience such vulnerability even in a patriarchal society. To address the lady as “my lord” (Midons)as the Old Occitanian poets did, expresses an authentic emotional truth while not altering the balance of social, economic, or political rule in the least. All courtly poetic practice occurs within the complex ironies of this realization.
     Through poetry which enacts the dynamic contradictions of desire, the court became a theater of erotic play. Ulrich is telling a tall tale based in his own sexuality. His status as a supreme athlete for love is confirmed by his endurance of harsh treatment at the lady’s hands, his lying with lepers, his determination taken to the point of absurdity, all this accumulates to suggest that he is, in fact, the greatest lover the world has ever known. It is immaterial that in a realistic situation a man would surely either divert his attentions to a more welcoming quarter or, in some circumstances, force his will upon the woman.
     Thus Ulrich’s Frauendienst is realistic in depicting the coercive imperium of sexuality at the same time as it is recognizes the irony of this female power in a patriarchy through fantastic parody. An outright boast of sexual prowess might have found fewer listeners than Ulrich’s whimsical and self-mocking tale. Apart from increasing entertainment value, the two-sided meaning of the love epic is in fact more true to human nature than either half of its vision would be. Ulrich does not seek to dismantle the social order of feudal society; rather he performs the role of an artist by pointing toward its contradictions and tensions, the delights and the shackles of the world in which he lived, the most important of which are little changed in the three-quarters of a millennium since.



1. Page VIII.

2. Page IX. The translation is mine.

3. Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein,” in German Literature of the High Middle Ages edited by Will Hasty and James N. Hardin. Müller goes too far when he claims in another article that “Ulrich seine Rolle als Mann und Ritter nicht akzeptiert.” (“Ulrich von Liechtenstein und sein Männerphantasien; Mittelalterliche Literatur und modern Psychologie,” in Ich -- Ulrich von Liechtenstein, ed. Franz Viktor Spechtler).

4. Albrecht Classen, “Moriz, Tristan, and Ulrich as Master Disguise Artists: Deconstruction and Reenactment of Courtliness in ‘Moriz von Craû’, ‘Tristan als Mönch’, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 475-504.

5. See J. W. Thomas, “The Minnesong Structure of Ulrich von Liechtenstein's 'Frauendienst,'” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 102. Bd., H. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1973), pp. 195-203 and his introductory material in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Service of Ladies.

6. Ingrid Bennewitz, “Der Körper der Dame. Zur Konstruktion von ‘Weiblichkeit’in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in ‘Aufführung’ und’ Schrift’ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, 222-238.

7. “‘With them she had her playful game’ The Performance of Gender and Genre in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst,” in Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature, ed. Lisa Perfetti.

8. My translation. Andrea Moshövel, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein” Wîplich man. Formen und Funktionen von ‘Effemination’ in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten des 13. Jahrhunderts, Aventiuren Bd. 5.

9. In his "Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette" in Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde. The term not only described a set of conventions recognizable to any reader of medieval literature; it occurred only perhaps twice in Old Occitanian (“cortez amors” in Peire d'Alvernhe and “amor cortes” in Flamenca). Some prefer the term fin’amor because it and variations occur far more commonly, but poets often refer to love as essentially courtly. For Marcabrun “cortesia es d’amar” in “Cortesamen vuoill comenssar . . .” The opening phrase also identifies the court with artfulness.

10. In “Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love ,” in The Meaning of Courtly Love.

11. In Speaking of Chaucer. John A. Yunck, reviewing Donaldson’s book for Criticism : a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (Vol. 13, No. 4 [Fall 1971]) called courtly love a “scholarly figment” as though the issue was settled.

12. A number of articles on this site employ this term and offer fuller explanation of it. See, for instance, “Transformation of Convention ,” “William IX: A Study in Transformation of Convention,” “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Mule in Blues Imagery,” and others.

13. See, for instance, st. 989 in which the local noble jokes about Ulrich’s change from female to male or st. 134 in which bystanders laugh at the lady’s insulting him. His visit to his wife is st. 707. He also spend a “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. (994)

14. A particularly rich body of work survives by trobairitz, female Troubadours. Accessible anthologies include those by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner (Songs of the Women Troubadours) and Magda Bogin (The Women Troubadours). See also Peter Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages.

Der von Kürenberg

Little is known of the first of the Minnesingers, called the Kürenberger (der von Kurenberc) apart from an approximate date (fl. mid-twelfth century) and a general region along the Danube somewhere near Melk and Linz. His work survives only in the fourteenth century Codex Manesse (the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift). Unlike later lyricists, he uses the same strophic form as the Nibelungenlied. He and Dietmar von Aist are often said to be independent of influence from the Occitanian Troubadours, though this judgement rests on a rigid notion of courtly love. To me Kürenberg seems to play with the courtly conventions that some later poets simply reproduced.

I have not attempted to reproduce Kürenberg’s strophes exactly. The caesurae have all but vanished in my effort to make something readable in English, but I am no looser than my author in attention to form. Slant rhymes and errant syllables are not uncommon in the MHG, though of course they would have been less obtrusive, even imperceptible in musical performance. I have used iambic tetrameters and pentameters for the most part, rhyming abcb.


“Wîp vil schœne . . .”

O lovely lady, come with me,
and highs and lows I’ll share with you
my whole life long I’ll love just you
your loving a lesser I won’t allow.


“Aller wîbe wünne . . .”

Most marvelous of ladies, still a maid,
I send in loving notes the praise you’re due.
You know I’d be there, but I am discreet.
I doubt your mind, while mine is fixed on you.


Though the first of these quatrains is pared down to a largely timeless declaration of love with only a hint of rivalry, the second includes some aspects of the common conventions of the love poetry of the times, the extravagant praise of the beloved, the communication by messages, and the nosy figures hostile to love, while maintaining the lover’s total devotion.


“Ich stuont mir nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night alone I stood upon the tower.
I heard a knight whose voice rang out in song.
A song of Kurenberc’s rose from the crowd –
If he stays here he will be mine ere long!”

“So quick bring me my armor and my horse!
A lady forces me to ride away!
She wants me to submit to her and serve.
Without my love I swear she’ll have to stay.”


The critique of courtly manners is suggested first by the woman’s aggressive desire to dominate a man who has made no gesture in her direction. Seeking independence rather than love-service, he must depart, reversing the ordinary pattern of devotion to the female in conscious self-subordination .


“Jô stuont ich nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night I stood beside your bed,
but didn’t wish to break your rest.”
“For that may you be cursed!” she said.
“Am I a boar to gore your breast?”


Compare the opening words to those of the previous song. This lyric provides one of the clearest examples of the transformation of convention. In the very dawn-time of vernacular love poetry, the courtly tradition rises not alone but accompanied by a range of variations that may validate, extend, or emphasize the original convention, but also may twist or distort it, most commonly by denial, reversal, inversion, or parody. While the knight is decorous and respectful, as proper at any rate as one can be while slipping up on someone’s bedside, the woman is freer. Using colloquial language and a dramatic image, she expresses what can only be disappointed lust. The effect is surely comic.


“Swenne ich stân aleine . . .”

I stand in nightgown all alone
and think of you, my noble knight.
I blush the shade of rose mid thorns
and muse upon my lonely plight.


The lovely simplicity of this lyric resembles the fragment traditionally attributed to Sappho Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα. One thinks also of the Mughal miniatures showing lone women experiencing love-longing.


“Ich zôch mir einen valken . . .”

I trained my falcon longer than a year.
When I had tamed him well to suit just me
and gilded all his plumage tastefully,
he rose right up and flew to some far tree.

Since then I’ve seen that lovely bird in flight
with silken bonds still on his feet above.
His feathers shone so grand, so red and gold!
May God bring love to those who long to love!


The falcon is an appropriately aristocratic image, but again here, the lover/bird, though trained for a solid year, resists her control and flies away. His absence may be only temporary. Line four, in which I have jettisoned some information to seize a rhyme by translating “in anderiu lant” as “some far tree,” suggests service in war, perhaps a crusade, after which he may return to her. The gilded feathers have much the same implication of the expression “a bird in a gilded cage." The final line reminds me of the hauntingly lovely chorus of the Pervigilium Veneris “Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet” ("Let he who never has loved find love tomorrow, and let the lover love tomorrow").


“Wîp unde vederspil . . .”

All females and all falcons may be trained.
They come to one who knows how to entice.
A handsome knight did thus attract a dame.
My spirit soars with love to paradise.


In this quatrain the falcon has become the woman, a clear example of the early transformation of Minnesang convention.


“Der tunkele sterne . . .”

A faint star knows just how to hide.
Learn how my dear when I am near
to gaze upon another man.
No one must guess you are my dear.


Here the emphasis on “tougen minne” or hidden love allows Kürenberg to play with the widespread figure comparing the lady to a star. Reversing the usual implication that suggests her bright preeminence casting rivals into shadow, here she is advised to seek obscurity to conceal her relationship.

The Paraklausithyron Blues

     Paraklausithyron, a “lament by the door,” is a topos in classical Greek and Latin poetry. Though a great deal of variation is apparent even in ancient examples, the typical early paraklausithyron in Asclepiades, Callimachus, Tibullus, and Horace was the complaint of a would-be lover, shut out from his beloved, often garlanded and drunk from a komos earlier in the evening. [1] Shorn of these specific cultural details, the motif of the exclusus amator is universal. Most love poetry speaks of love-longing, not of fulfilled desire. The literal dramatic situation of a man lingering outside the door of his love-object occurs in fact, and the frustrated wish to enter vividly expresses is a wish for emotional or intimate access. The convention appears in medieval Occitan poetry and modern American popular song. A particularly rich vein of paraklausithroi emerges from the distinctly American love poetry of the blues.
     An analysis of the use of the paraklausithyron in blues lyrics has two significant implications. First, the wide distribution of the trope demonstrates the fact that many literary conventions from genre to specific devices such as rhetorical figures or images have arisen world-wide, even when no avenue of influence is plausible. People have hit upon the same verbal technologies to express the same human feelings.
     Secondly, like all literary conventions, the paraklausithyron is far from static. It is in fact highly dynamic, transforming instantly into a panoply of possibilities. Indeed, in the earliest recorded use of the word [2], it is used to challenge Greek gender assumptions by asking why a female lover might not demonstrate “the height of a passionate affection” with such a song no less than a man. Plutarch’s question might be followed by another asking why the voice might not come from within, and a third suggesting that the voice might be either accepting or rejecting the other’s love. With this simple schema, three bipolar oppositions generate eight possibilities [3] based on the male/female, inside/outside, acceptance/rejection dualities.
     As a matter of fact, virtually all of the theoretical possibilities in this array are found in early blues. [4] The locus classicus must be Perry Bradford’s 1928 “Keep A Knockin’ an You Can’t Get In” though enough earlier analogues exist to label the song traditional [5]. In this most popular group of versions the speaker is within, refusing access to the knocker. In several early versions including the popular recording by Louis Jordan (1939), the speaker refuses the caller admission due to being occupied with another lover. In Little Richard’s very popular 1957 cover, he therefore suggests “come back tomorrow night and try again.”
     This is hardly the only form the paraklausithyron assumes in the blues. The male speaker inside may, as in the instances cited above, reject the woman as he does also in Marshall Owens “Try Me One More Time” (1932), Kokomo Arnold’s “Busy Bootin’” (1935) or “Your Ways and Actions” (1938) or Big Bill Broonzy’s “Skoodle Do Do” (1930). On the other hand, he may receive the knocker with open arms as in Smoky Harrison’s “Iggly Oggly” (1929) or Sammy Hill’s “Needin’ My Woman Blues” (1929).
     The persona inside is female and may reject the man outside as in Anna Bell’s “Every Woman Blues” (1928). A woman in the same position may also welcome him as in Ethel Waters’ “Memphis Man” (1923) or Huddie Ledbetter’s “My Friend Blind Lemon” (1935). A woman outside is rejected in Lil Green’s “I’m Wasting My Time on You” (1942).
     Many other variations may arise from the same convention. In Lonnie Clark’s “Broke Down Engine” (1929) the speaker complains in spite of being with his lover as his “yellow woman” knocks, causing him to exhort his companion to greater efforts on his behalf. In Blind Willy McTell’s 1931 version of the same song the speaker is knocking and this is merely one of a series of details indicating his depression. In “Hurry and Bring It Back Home” by Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) 1928 the knock at the door brings him the news of his lover’s departure. The list of variations is limited only by how tightly one defines the convention.
     The blues use the same resources as other poetry and often resorts to similar conventions. The laments of a frustrated lover, excluded by his beloved have resounded around the globe and through the centuries. Just as language depends on a tension between what one has heard said by others and the unique content of every specific statement, poetry likewise is always a product of earlier poetry, though every utterance is new. The paraklausithyron was effectively employed by many artists who would have found nothing but mumbo-jumbo in the term just as Classicists would be unfamiliar with portions of the rural Southern vocabulary. Yet the early blues singers deployed the resources of language with a subtlety and expressive power equaling that of any Roman elegist, Provençal troubadour, or Elizabethan sonneteer.



1. See Asclepiades GP 11 HE = AP 564, Callimachus 64, Ovid Amores 1.6, Catallus 67, Horace Odes 3.10 and 3.26, Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, Ovid Amores 1.6.

2. Plutarch, Amatorius 8.

3. This is, of course, two to the third power.

4. For the most part I used again the excellent concordance of pre-war blues lyrics posted by Michael Taft at http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm.

5. This song, recorded by James “Boodle It” Wiggins enjoyed considerable popularity though other versions, including one by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band were recorded at about the same time. Earlier versions existed such as Miller and Lile’s “You Can’t Come in” (1921), Sylvester Weaver’s “I’m Busy and You Can’t Come In” (1924) and Irene Gibbons “You Can’t Come In” (1924). Stuart Berg Flexner cites a 1912 “Bawdyhouse Blues“ with the words “I hear you knockin', but you can't come in/ I got an all-night trick again.” (Listening To America, New York: Simon and Shuster: 1982, p. 454). Including the later variant titled “I Hear You Knockin’” attributed to Bartholomew and King, the song was recorded by many artists including Mississippi John Hurt, Louis Jordan, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and The Everly Brothers.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”

Skip James’ Blues Imagery

Texts of all songs discussed are appended to the essay.


     During the summer of 1964 I traveled with a friend east from Chicago without stopping until we reached Greenwich Village where we attended a show at the Gaslight hard by Izzy Young’s Folklore Center and the Kettle of Fish. Sleeping in his parents’ car, we toured the Northeast visiting folk clubs as we went. In a coffee house one evening in Cambridge Massachusetts with perhaps a half dozen people in the audience we heard Skip James perform, his wife by his side. As reluctant a performer at the end of his life as he had been when young, [1] James has nonetheless produced a powerful oeuvre which has exercised a strong influence through the fifty years since I heard him including versions by Jimi Hendrix, the Cream, and others.
     His distinctive fingerpicking with open D minor tuning (which he called “cross-note”) to accompany his falsetto voice produced a unique sound often described as spooky, otherworldly, or ethereal. His repertoire helped shape the expressive and beautiful system of images in the Delta blues. Quintessentially poetic in that their significations provide rich detailed information that could not be encoded without metaphor, they shed light on the techniques of all poetry. The body of classic blues songs, like the comparable systems in Troubadour lyric or the Elizabethan sonnet, is particularly revealing about convention. Frequently misunderstood as clichéd or automatized expressions characteristic of second-rate writers, convention is, in fact, a dynamic process in which every occurrence is unique and the meaning of which deepens and transforms through intertextuality. The understanding of American readers of Chinese poetry is often limited by their lack of familiarity with the image conventions of Chinese poetry. The blues aficionado, however, is in a position to see the often complex and revealing interrelations of text to text.
     As a rural Southern genre, the blues made use of the imagery people knew best including the barnyard rooster, the catfish, and the cow. As a source of milk cows are female (as authors of children’s books know) and singers developed a complex of ideas in which the beloved is represented as a cow. [2] A milk cow was a relatively expensive investment and require substantial care, yet she might provide rich cream and butter, a striking analogy for the delights of love. The most common use of such bovine imagery is to signify the longing the owner feels when a cow has been lost. [3] Among the more familiar lines in the blues are the following.


If you see my milk cow, please, drive her on home
'Cause I ain't had no milk and butter
Since my cow's been gone.


     In James’ “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” (see song 1 appended) James is primarily the cow itself, searching for love as the animal whose offspring is missing would devote all her efforts to “just tryin' to find, my calf, again,” paralleling his own search for his “used-to-be.” With the same poignant attachment of so much ancient Greek poetry to love and sex, only heightened by recognition of the evanescence of pleasure, James notes that all potential affective relationships are conditioned by mortality. “Every cow and calf, I believe was born to die,” and “I ain't gonna be here long.” Thus the listener to his song, if competent in the signifying codes of the blues, will respond first at the mere mention of a cow with a train of associations with the elements of voluptuous pleasure and well-being which simultaneously involves the opposite, the fear of painful loss. Since the speaker would ordinarily be the cow’s owner, the altered perspective here, the trope or twisting of the convention adds wit and ingenuity while recalling to the mind the costly loss of livestock, lovers, money, happiness, and health, and life itself. By loving one always puts oneself at risk of suffering. The entire figure resembles the Wheel of Fortune in which success prefigures failure.
     Another term that recurs repeatedly in the blues is the “killing floor.” Though the popularity of the expression has been identified with the slaughterhouses of Chicago’s stockyards, [4] James used it in his 1931 “Hard Time Killing Floor,” (see song 2) one of the rare blues songs that directly comments on politics. The song, which often burst through intelligibility into moans and sighs, depicts life itself as enacted on a killing floor. The Depression is the immediate cause of suffering (“Hard time's is here.”) so great as to be all but lethal (“these hard times gon' kill you”), but the song’s continuous appeal suggests that life itself is a killing floor. The infernal stink and blood and suffering that characterizes the abattoir might serve a medieval monk as an apt picture of life here below and it seems equally apposite to the Southern sharecropper or farm laborer. The suggestions of joy and fulfilment, even luxury, inherent in the dairy cow image is absent; the vision could hardly be bleaker.
     James’ “Devil Got my Woman”(song 3) is a complaint against the woman’s fickleness. Surely the devil has led her, after she had left another to be with the singer, to then change her mind and returned to the original lover. In the approximate center of this straightforward, if mellifluous and eloquent, lament is a striking image, placed like a jewel on a necklace. “But my mind got to rambling/ Like a wild geese from the west.” It is not the woman who “rambles,” though this particular word is often used for free-wheeling sexual habits; it is the speaker’s own unruly mind. The image of wild geese is common in Chinese poetry where it connotes sadness, exile, loss, and separation, [5] though James’ listeners would hardly have known this. It occurs only rarely in blues songs and with different associations. [6] The restless wandering character of the birds and their piercing cries are parallel to a train in the distance with its “lonely” whistle. Perhaps they are “from the west” primarily for the sake of the rhyme, but the phrase can only contribute to their air of wildness as they appear over a bleak landscape. The goose image is an example of the growth of the inventory of images available to the singer, as some are added and others fall away over the years.
     James may seem to deliver a dubious compliment when he says of his woman in “Lorenzo Blues,” (song 4) “You know, she's stutters in her speech/ An she wiggle and she wobble,” but the image has many precedents both out and in the blues idiom. The scintillating movement of a body in motion ravishes the singer just as it had dazzled Robert Herrick (who in “Upon Julia’s Clothes” had noted the “liquefaction” and “brave vibration, each way free”) and Theodore Roethke (who wrote “I'm martyr to a motion not my own “ in “I knew a woman lovely in her bones”). The classic statement in the blues is


I got a big fat woman, meat shakin' on her bone
I say, hey, hey, meat shakin' on her bone [7]


     The whole poem in fact is a systematically constructed string of compliments rather like the convention of the blason, common in the Middle Ages but never thereafter vanishing altogether. The woman oddly named Lorenzo has a Coke bottle shape and “a likeness” that’s “outta this world,” and apparently her speech impediment only intensifies the dizzying impact of her charm.
     In a song titled “Forty Four” included in Thomas W. Talley's 1922 collection Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise & Otherwise the number refers first to a handgun and then to a Bible verse. Roosevelt Sykes' popular “.44 Blues" in 1929 elaborates this process of wit by cleverly using the same number to refer first to a gun, then to a train, and finally to a home address (presumably in prison). James, however, in his 1931 “22-20 Blues” (song 5) accompanied by his excellent piano playing ignores such ingenuity and focuses (as Robert Johnson was later to do in his “32-20 Blues”) on pure aggression. The weapon, and such shocking lines as “I cut that woman half in two,” express in the strongest terms the speaker’s distress at his “unruly” lover.
     Simple though the situation may seem, it is presented with considerable ambiguity. Who is the mysterious “Mr. Crest” who appears at the outset? Has violence been done, or is it merely threatened? At the end the singer pictures himself out on the highway, on the pilgrimage of this life, as one might say, holding the gun that he has said is “burnin’ hell,” but declaring that he has harmed no one yet, though he says he means to “raise some sand” (start a fight) before heading on down the line. Experts seem to disagree on just what gun is meant, but the speaker makes it clear that he is weighing all options and selecting the one that reflects his despair. This indeterminacy contrasts sharply with the fatalistic directness in murder ballads such as “Little Sadie,” for James’ song is not narrative, but is primarily lyrical, defining through concrete terms the persona’s state of mind. The audience would here the song, even in its earliest versions, in a context of others’ use of similar imagery, against which the singer/poet seeks to define a new turn to the familiar convention.
     In each of these cases the listener responds to a whole complex of images. I have elsewhere explained [8] that every recognizable convention immediately spawns a host of variations which require competence in the tradition to perceive. In Skip James’ beautiful and expressive lyrics the strands of intertextuality may take a number of forms. In “Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues” the singer provides an original twist to a familiar image, keeping the word fresh and the meaning original. In “Hard Time Killing Floor” a formula is used in a very standardized way, but signifying an intense and upsetting reality. The goose image in “Devil Got my Woman” is nonetheless suggestive for being innovative, but neither is it for that reason superior. Though the song concerns a missing lover, the image on which I focused in “Lorenzo Blues” celebrates women’s beauty. Equally intense, the weapon image of “22-20 Blues” takes its place among a lineage of songs referring to specific models.
     One may note significant patterns in the artist’s oeuvre as his reality is organized in a set of ever-changing symbolic forms. For Skip James the texts surveyed here emphasize the delights of love (in the cow and the wiggling), the feeling of love-longing (in the geese), and the terrible truths of aggression and suffering (in the killing floor and the gun). In every case the only amelioration or (temporary) elimination of pain is through fulfilled love. The images themselves portray a world-view more accurately (including emotional tone) than prose would be likely to do. These rural American songs deploy the stratagems of image usage in ways as artful (and artificial) as any sonneteer or mandarin.


1. James (born Nehemiah Curtis) had refused to record for Okeh in 1927, perhaps because his illegal activities, notably dealing in moonshine, seemed at once more lucrative and a good reason not to draw attention to himself. After he began performing again after his rediscovery by John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine he felt constrained both by failing health and his commitment to church music. James told a biographer that, while he was willing to play blues with his “thinkin' faculties,” he refused to “put my heart in it.” See Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues.

2. Compare the standard Homeric epithet “ox-eyed Hera.” My wife tells me that, while growing up in North Carolina, her sister was told by a high school boyfriend that she “had pretty eyes, like a cow.”

3. Among the very numerous occurrences of this topos in work by Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Kokomo Arnold, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley and others, two are of particular, if passing interest here. In Sara Martin’s 1928 recording “Mean Tight Mama” she sings “the cow that black and ugly has often got the sweetest milk.” In Sleepy John Estes 1930 “Milk Cow Blues” the convention is well enough established that a cow is never mentioned except in the title. The tone of yearning loneliness is evoked in a narrative of fleeing love snatched while the “slow consumption” does her in “by degrees.”

4. Hubert Sumlin says that for Howlin’ Wolf the term had particular reference to an incident in which he was shot by a jealous woman and, when downed, saw himself as on the killing floor according to Debra Devi. See her The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.

5. As far back as the Confucian Classic of Poetry (the Shijing) geese symbolize the suffering people in the poem Hong Yan. Geese appear prominently as emblems of what might be called the blues often connoting longing for an absent friend or lover in many later poets including Du Fu and Su Shi.

6. See “Wild Goose Blues” and “Blue Goose Blues.” “Cry of the Wild Goose” by the folk-style singer/composer Terry Gilkyson who recorded with the Weavers was a hit for first Frankie Laine and then Tennessee Ernie Ford.

7. From Blind Boy Fuller “Meat Shakin’ Woman,” but see many others including Ida Cox’s “Four Day Creep” and Tommy Johnson’s “Big Fat Mama Blues.”

8. See my “Transformation of Convention” article posted in August of 2013 for the most general statement of this idea.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


Song 1

Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die

I'm a-milk my heifer, milk her in a churn
I'll milk my heifer, I'll milk her in a churn
If you see my rider, tell her it ain't a darn thing doin'

I wringed my hands, baby, and I wanted to scream
I wringed my hands, honey, and I wanted to scream
And when I woke up I thought it was all a dream

Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey...
And every cow and calf, I believe was born to die
Hey hey-hey, I ain't gonna be here long
Hey hey-hey, pretty mama, I ain't gonna be here long
That's the reason why you hear me singin' my old lonesome song

Hey, hey-hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey
Hey hey-hey-hey-hey, hey hey hey hey hey
And every cow's calf, honey, got to be dyin'

I walked the levee from end to end
I walked the levee, honey, from end to end
I was just tryin' to find, my calf, again

I'm feelin' back to my used-to...
I feel a notion, back to my used-to-be
I have a pretty mama, she don't care for me


Song 2

Hard Time Killing Floor

Hard time's is here
An ev'rywhere you go
Times are harder
Than th'ever been befo'

Um, hm-hm
Um-hm
Um, hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

You know that people
They are driftin' from do' to do'
But they can't find no heaven
I don't care where they go

Um, hm-hm
Um-uh-hm
Mm-hm-hm
Um, hm-hm-hm

People, if I ever can get up
Off a-this old hard killin' flo'
Lord, I'll never get down
This low no mo'

Um, hm-hm-hm
Hm, um-hm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Well, you hear me singin'
This old lonesome song
People, you know these hard times
Can't last us so long

Hm, hm-hm
Hmm, hmm
Hm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm, oh Lord

You know, you'll say you had money
You better be sho'
But these hard times gon' kill you
Just drive a lonely soul

Um, hm-hm
Umm, hmm
Umm, hm-hm
Hm, hm-hm-hm

Umm-hm
Hmm-hm-hm
Umm-hm
Hm-hm-hm
Hmm, hm-hm-hm


Song 3

Devil Got my Woman

You know, I'd rather be the ol' devil
Well, I'd rather be the devil
Then to be that woman' man
You know, rather be the devil
Than to be that woman' man
You know, I'm so sorry
You know, so sorry
That I ever fell in love wit' you-ooo-hoo-oo
Because you know you don't treat me
Baby, like you used ta do-hoo
You know, I laid down last night
You know, I laid down last night
And I thought to take me some rest
But my mind got to rambling
Like a wild geese from the west
You know the woman that I love
The woman that I love
I stol't her from my best friend
But you know he done got lucky
An he done got her back, again
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
You know, I used to cut your kindleing
Baby, then I made you some fire
Then I would tote all your water
Way, way, way, from the bogy brier
You know, my baby she don't drink whiskey
My baby, she don't drink no whiskey
An I know she ain't crazy about wine
Now, it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done changed my baby's mind
You know, I could be right
You know, I could be right
Then again, I could be wrong
But it was nothin' but the ol' devil
He done got my baby
Now he done gone


Song 4

Lorenzo Blues

I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
I wonder has anybody here
Seen my lovin' Lorenzo, today?
You know, we had a nice time Christmas
But she left me on New Year's Day

Oh, you got to know her
When you see her
'Cause she's so different
From any other girl
Oh, you've got to know her
When you see her
From any other girl
Because she's made up
Like a Coke-Cola bottle
An she got a likeness
It's outta this world, alright

You know, she's stutters in her speech
An she wiggle and she wobble
When she walk
She's stuttered in her speech
An she wiggle an a-wobble
When she walk
Yes, an she got three gold teeth
An she got deep dimples in her jaw, yeah

I say, 'Hello, Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
I say, 'Lorenzo, Lorenzo
How in the world come you treat me this-a-way?'
Darling, you know that you was gonna leave me
But you didn't tell me you was goin' to stay

Now, if I can make a half a million
I declare, I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
I declare, if I can make a half a million
I'm 'on give it all, to the hoodoo man
Just after he promise me that he will
Bring my lovin' Lorenzo, back home to me, again
An I want her back ho-oh-ome, to me again.


Song 5

22-20 Blues

Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
Oh, Mr. Crest, Mr. Crest
How in the world you
Expect for me to rest?
You've got my 22-20
Layin' up across my breast

Oh, if I send for my baby
An she act a fool
An she don't never come
If I send for my baby
She act a fool
An she don't never come
All the doctors in New York City
I declare, they can't help her none

You know, sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two

Oh, your.38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
Your .38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev'rything, alright

Ah-or, your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
Your .44-40
Buddy, it'll do very well
But my .22-20
I declare you, it's a-burnin' hell

I was stranded on the highway-hi
With my 22-20 in my
I was standin' on the highway
With my 22-20 in my
They got me 'cused for murder
I declare, I never have harmed a man

Lord, oh I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right arm
I measured my gun
An it's just a-long as my right
I'm gon' raise me some sand
And back down the road, I declare.