One of the many anonymous MIDDLE ENGLISH
lyrics dating from the 14th century is “My lefe is
faren in londe” (that is, “My love has gone [traveled] far away [into the country]”). Like many
Middle English lyrics, the poem deals with a conventional love theme—that of the narrator’s longing caused by a separation from his beloved—but
does so in a simple, fresh, and spontaneous way.
The lyric is a single stanza of seven trimeter
(three-stress) lines, rhyming ababcbc. The speaker
says he is parted from his lover, and simply asks
“Why is she so?” (Davies 1964, l. 2). He is not able
to go to her because he is cruelly bound where he
is. But his heart, he says, is bound to her, wherever
she is (literally wherever she rides or walks). He
ends by saying he has true love for her, a “thousandfold” (l. 7). Like many such lyrics, it is generalized, with only the broad outlines of a situation
behind the emotion of the speaker, so that the
poem might be seen to have a universal application
to anyone separated from the one he or she loves.
Some Middle English lyrics were set to music,
and it is quite possible that “My lefe is faren in
londe” was sung as early as the 14th century. Although the text of the lyric survives in a late 15thcentury manuscript (Trinity College Cambridge,
MS. R. 3. 19), it is almost certainly older than that
document. Presumably it is the song that CHAUCER
has his cock and hen, Chaunticleer and Pertelote,
sing “in sweet accord” (i.e., harmony) in the NUN’S
PRIEST’S TALE. The song must have been popular
enough that Chaucer expected his audience to recognize it and possibly even know the melody.
Bibliography
Davies, R. T., ed. Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical
Anthology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964.