come to the end of his inspiration. We are constantly disillusioned in this way by most of the fifteenth-century poets.
Here is an example taken from the ballads of Christine de Pisan:
“Quant chacun s’en revient de l’ost
Pour quoy demeures tu derriere?
Et si scez que m’amour entiere
T’ay baillée en garde et depost.”[1]
One expects the motif of the dead lover who reappears. But we are deceived: after two more insignificant stanzas the poem finishes. What freshness there is in the first lines of Froissart’s Debat dou Cheval et dou Levrier:
“Froissart d’Escoce revenoit
Sus un cheval qui gris estoit,
Un blanc levrier menoit en lasse.
‘Las,’ dist le levrier, ‘je me lasse,
Grisel, quant nous reposerons?
Il est heure que nous mengons.’”[2]
After this the charm is lost; the author, in short, had no other inspiration than a moment’s vision of the two animals conversing.
The motifs are occasionally of incomparable grandeur and suggestive force, but the development remains most feeble. The theme of Pierre Michault in his Danse aux Aveugles was masterly; the everlasting dance of the human race about the thrones of the three blind deities, Love, Fortune, and Death. He only succeeded in working it up into very mediocre poetry. An anonymous poem, entitled Exclamacion des Os Sainct Innocent, begins by making the charnel-houses of the famous churchyard speak:
“Les os sommes des povres trespassez.
Cy amassez par monceaulx compassez,
Rompus, cassez, sans reigle ne compas.…”[3]
- ↑ When everybody comes back from the army Why do you stay behind? Yet you know that I pledged you My loyal love to keep.
- ↑ Froissart came back from Scotland On a horse which was grey, He led a white greyhound in a leash. “Alas,” said the greyhound, “I am tired, Grisel, when shall we rest? It is time we were feeding.”
- ↑ We are the bones of the poor dead, Here heaped up by measured mounds, Broken, fractured, without rule or measure.
