What Fire and Sword Cannot Unmake

The classical ancestors of medieval poetry.

We’re continuing our introduction to medieval poetry, and after exploring the nature of poetic art and the preeminence of the Psalms, we’re ready to consider the non-biblical ancient writers who inspired medieval poets.

This discussion is an essential prelude to studying medieval poetry itself, because it helps us to remember something crucial: poetry in the Middle Ages was not primarily about innovation, originality, or experimentation. These were not prominent medieval values in general, but one might think that poetry was an exception—since the poetic experience in modern and postmodern culture seems to revolve around an amorphous core composed largely of innovation, originality, and experimentation. We can ponder, as one of countless examples, the three final stanzas of “Morning Song” (published in 1960):

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

This was written by Sylvia Plath, whom Poetry Foundation describes as “one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century.” I pass no judgment on her verse or talents; the poor woman killed herself in disturbing fashion at age 30, so whatever fame she may have attained was unenviable in the extreme. I also am not highlighting this as an instance of wildly experimental modern poetry. In fact by twentieth-century standards it is rather traditional—it’s not completely incomprehensible, and the entire poem maintains a pleasantly regular pattern of three-line stanzas. We can find something a bit more “original” or “innovative” in the work of Ezra Pound, another famous twentieth-century poet:

The merits and demerits of modernist poetry are a topic for another day. My point here is to emphasize that the modern poetic ethos—preoccupied as it is with casting off the formal and thematic traditions of Western literature—was utterly foreign to medieval culture. This is not to say that medieval poets shunned creativity; the very word “poem” (poema in Latin) derives from Greek poiein, which means “to make” or “to create.” Long ago, English poets were called “makers,” and even the Old English word for “poet,” scop, may be related to the verb scieppan, meaning “to shape” or “to make.”

The poet as “shaper” is an apt analogy for medieval poesy; this old-fashioned but useful term suggests not so much poetry itself as the art of producing poetry. In the words of Ben Jonson, a seventeenth-century playwright whose renown was once second only to Shakespeare’s, “A poem … is the work of the poet, the end and fruit of his labour and study. Poesy is his skill or craft of making.”

The poets of the Middle Ages did not attempt to create ex nihilo, as God did. Nor did they indulge in literary experiments that are more likely to produce a monster than a masterpiece. Nor did they make verses by dismantling the artifacts of the past and reassembling them into something “unlike anything the world has ever seen,” to borrow one of modernity’s well-worn accolades. Rather, they received the works of the past and reshaped them into poems that resonated with the aesthetics, languages, ideals, experiences, and spirituality of a thoroughly feudal and Christian civilization. Medieval poesy was a marriage of creativity and respect for tradition. It balanced the powers of the imagination with reverence for the historical realities of Antiquity. It was “like unto a householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure, things both new and old.”