The MIDDLE ENGLISH lyric beginning “Bitwene
March and Averil,” generally entitled Alysoun by
editors, is one of the best known and most often
anthologized of all Middle English poems. One of
several important poems known as the HARLEY
LYRICS because of their inclusion in the British
Museum Ms. Harley 2253, Alysoun consists of four
stanzas, each with eight lines of three or four metrical feet, rhyming ababbbbc. A refrain or “burden”
follows each stanza, rhyming dddc, where the last
word of the refrain is always “Alysoun”—thus the
c rhyme at the end of each stanza always rhymes
with the “Alysoun” that ends the refrain.
The poem describes a succession of the speaker’s
attitudes and responses to his love for the fair lady
Alysoun. The attitudes expressed by the speaker are
quite conventional in the COURTLY LOVE tradition,
but this particular lyric is admired for its fresh images and lyricism, particularly in the refrain:
An hendy hap ich habbe ihent!
Ichot from hevene it is me sent;
From alle wimmen my love is lent,
And light on Alisoun.
(Luria and Hoffman 1974, 23, ll. 9–12)
The alliteration, especially in the first line, contributes to the rhythmic musicality of the lines.
The “hendy hap” is a fortunate destiny, sent to the
lover, he believes, “from hevene” itself. His love has
been taken away from all other women and has settled on Alysoun alone.
In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker
places his love in the traditional season of spring,
and says he lives in “love-longinge” for the “semlokest” or fairest of all things. He becomes her servant and hopes she will bring him “blisse”—the
first of many religious terms in the poem that give
the lady a quasi-divine status.
After the refrain establishes the speaker’s joy in
his situation, the second stanza moves into a very
conventional description of the lady. The speaker
praises her hair, her eyes, her countenance, and her
figure in a manner similar to that prescribed by medieval rhetoricians like GEOFFREY OF VINSAUF.
Alysoun is depicted as cheerful and laughing—not
the disdainful and aloof lady more typical of the
courtly beloved. At the end of these lines of praise,
though, the speaker very predictably declares that he
will die of love if he cannot have Alysoun. But this is
followed, again, by the rhythmic, affirming refrain.
In the third and fourth stanzas, the speaker describes his sufferings, particularly his lack of sleep
and his tormented jealousy and fear of losing his
beloved to someone else. What is striking about
these stanzas is the speaker’s use of memorable,
somewhat colloquial alliterative images: Of his insomnia, he says he is “Wery so water in wore” (as
weary as water in a troubled pool) (l. 30). When
he addresses Alysoun directly, he calls her “Geynest
under gore” (kindest under petticoat) (l. 35), an
expression some have seen as highly suggestive but
that seems more likely to have simply been an
earthy expression for “kindest of women,” whom
he begs in the final stanza to hearken to his song.
One critical crux of the poem is how seriously
we are to take the speaker’s suffering, particularly
since every stanza ends with the upbeat refrain.
Some have suggested that the poem is a parody of
conventional love poems. It seems more likely that
the tone is playful: The speaker goes through the
conventional motions of the lover’s malady, but
cannot really restrain the joy of his love.
Bibliography
Brook, G. L. The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English
Lyrics of Ms. Harley 2253. 4th ed. Manchester,
U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1968.
Fein, Susanna, ed. Studies in the Harley Manuscript:
The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British
Library MS Harley 2253. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000.
Luria, Maxwell S., and Richard Hoffman. Middle English Lyrics. New York: Norton, 1974.
Ranson, Daniel J. Poets at Play: Irony and Parody in the
Harley Lyrics. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1985.
Reiss, Edmund. The Art of the Middle English Lyric:
Essays in Criticism. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1972.