SOURCE: George Clark, "Henryson and Aesop: The Fable Transformed," in English Literary History, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 1-18.

[In the following essay, Clark analyzes the significant differences between Robert Henryson's version and the more established version of Aesop's fables of "The Cock and the Jewel" and "The Swallow and the Other Birds."]

Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian have inspired his admirers to formulate radically differing explanations of the literary merit we recognize in these minor masterpieces. Older readings of these fables assumed that Henryson took up Aesop's plots but not his purposes, saw the excellence of the poems as the result of unAesopian "humor, realism, [and] compassion,"² and usually viewed the Aesopian moralizations as vestigial remnants of an earlier evolutionary stage.³ Newer readings treat Henryson's Fables as emphatically Aesopian and moralizing and therefore good. One such critic writes that "The very intensity of Henryson's religious views accounts for the quality of personal involvement which makes his Morall Fabillis the finest Aesop of the Middle Ages,"⁴ and complains that the older criticism dealt with agreeable aspects of Henryson's poems, but neglected them as literary wholes, particularly as perfect unions of story and moralization. In the most important exposition of this newer approach, Denton Fox⁵ chooses two of the fables for extended analysis aimed at showing that the "moralitas, at least in these two cases, is an integral part of a completely unified whole" (p. 338).

As Henryson recreates them, his Aesopian stories outgrow the artistic and intellectual limitations of their traditional form; comparing one of Henryson's fables to its probable source, the difference seems essentially stylistic, but the development of the style produces narratives whose implications compel our attention and go beyond the explicit moralizations conventionally attached to Aesopian fables. The simplicity of the Latin or French original excludes complex moral judgments; a narrative paradigm matches a moralizing aphorism. Henryson's complexer style creates a world whose greater realism makes easy black and white evaluations inadequate, a facile assumption of individual responsibility unconvincing. The rhetoric of Henryson's fables and their real sense of a setting indicate the disparity of styles; traditional Aesopian fables give no impression of time or place, and their teller's personality hardly becomes an integral part of the narrative, but Henryson's stories have dimensions of space and time, and have a narrator who is not Aesop and whose characterization becomes part of the fable's art and meaning.

Beginning with the prologue, Henryson maintains a clear distinction between Aesop and the narrator:⁶ "My author in his Fabillis" (43), "This Nobill Clerk, Esope, as I haif tauld…. And to begin, first of ane Cok he wrate" (57, 61); like the first, the second fable is labelled "Aesop's":

Esope, myne Authour, makes mentioun
Of twa myis, and thay wer Sisteris deir.
(162-63)

The narrator becomes at least a hearsay witness to the aftermath of the narrative and obliquely suggests that we have the story on his authority rather than Aesop's. The narrator remarks that he does not know how the country mouse fared after her return home—"I can not tell how weill thairefter scho fure" (357),

Bot I hard say scho passit to hir den,
Als warme as woll, suppose it wes not greit,
Fully beinly stuffit, baith but and ben,
Off Beinis, and Nuttis, peis, Ry, and Quheit.
(358-61)

Beginning the third fable, the story of "Chantecleer and the fox", the narrator announces his intention to report an interesting topical matter which he apparently knows at second hand:

… as now I purpose ffor to wryte
Ane cais I ffand, quhilk ffell this ather yeir,
Betwix ane Foxe and ane gentill Chantecleir.
(408-10)

The non-Aesopian "I" is not now a translator but a reporter whose subject is "Ane cais … quhilk ffell this ather yeir," and the contemporaneity of the story widens the separation between the ancient fabulist and the present narrator. In the sequel to the tale of Chantecleer, the storyteller's role grows from that of reporter to witness. The non-Aesopian "I" begins:

Leif we this wedow glaid, I you assure,
Off Chantecleir mair blyith than I can tell,
And speik we off the subtell aventure
And destenie that to this Foxe befell.
(614-17)

Subsequently the narrator authenticates matter in his story when he comes in direct contact with its personae—"as Lowrence leirnit me" (634)—or becomes a direct observer:

"Weill" (quod the Wolff), "sit doun upon thy kne."
And he doun bairheid sat full humilly,
And syne began with Benedicitie.
Quhen I this saw, I drew ane lytill by.
(691-94)

The story of "The Lion and the Mouse," together with its prologue and moralitas, makes the separation between Henryson's narrator and Aesop absolute by confronting the "I" of the Fables and the Phrygian himself. The narrator falls asleep under a hawthorn one fair day, "In the middis of June, that sweit seasoun" (1321), and dreams an encounter with Aesop. The narrator has been reporter, hearsay witness, or eyewitness to four of the preceding six fables, but he immediately welcomes Aesop as the author "that all thir Fabillis wrate" (1379) and begs to hear a fable from the master: "'I grant' (quod he), and thus begouth ane taill' (1404). The dreaming narrator had entered into a disciple-master relationship with Aesop—

O Maister Esope, Poet Lawriate,
God wait, ye ar full deir welcum to me—
(1377-78)

and Aesop consistently refers to the narrator as "sone," but Aesop is the figure of the narrator's dream; hence the master-pupil relationship which Aesop dominates is also a creature-creator relationship. The dream encloses, encapsules, imprisons Aesop with the narrator's imagination. The meeting crystallizes the stylistic tension charging the prologue and the preceding tale; the form of the meeting, and its conclusion, reassert the narrator's presence, reality, and dominance. After the encounter and the fable of "The Lion and the Mouse," the narrator remains behind—

And with that word he vanist, and I woke;
Syne throw the Schow my Journey hamewart tuke—
(1620-21)

and whatever way the dream figure of Aesop took, the audience remains with the narrator.

Denton Fox correctly notes that the Prologue identifies Aesop's stories as "feinyeit fabils" and that the Scots phrase commonly meant "tall story" or "lie." Fox rightly observes that Henryson's prologue raises the conventional question "how can fictional and apparently frivolous verse be justified?" and duly provides the conventional answer: poetry gives pleasure, and besides it has a moral purpose. A conventional defence of "fictional … verse" clashes with the rhetoric of poems presented as the narrator's exact knowledge of current and reliable report—like the Chantecleer story which is "Ane cais … quhilk ffell this ather yeir" ("cais" and "ffeinyeit fabil" are antithetical)—or given out, like the story of "The Swallow and the Other Birds," as the narrator's report of his own direct observation.

The rhetoric of Henryson's Prologue sets up a contradiction running through the Fables; the narrator of this Aesopian collection is not Aesop; the poems are at once Aesop's "ffeinyeit fabils" and the narrator's truth, even his own experience. Moreover, the Prologue asserts general principles of interpretation for the fables which run counter to the common reader's view of them. The intention of the fables, their very origin—so far as the Prologue describes it—is simply, categorically, and exclusively to reprove man's depravity:

And als the caus that thay first began
Wes to repreif the haill misleving
Off man be figure of ane uther thing.
(5-7)

To accomplish this aim, the Prologue asserts, the animals of the fables simply represent man's "misleving"; Denton Fox remarks that the "whole basis of the fables" lies in the proposition that "mony men in operatioun / Ar like to beistis in conditioun" (48-49), a remark Fox renders "man often degrades himself to the level of animals" (pp. 339-41). The Prologue devotes a whole stanza to that process of degradation:

Na mervell is, ane man be lyke ane Beist,
Quhilk lufis ay carnall and foull delyte;
That schame can not him renye, nor arreist,
Bot takis all the lust and appetyte,
And that throw custum, and daylie ryte,
Syne in thair myndis sa fast is Radicate,
That thay in brutal beistis ar transformate.
(50-56)

Both men and mice might deplore the tenor of the Prologue's, dour identification of fabulistic animals as figures of man's corruption and—at least in the Prologue—nothing more, but few readers heretofore have indicated their acceptance of such a view. Even Fox, at the end of his essay, feels constrained to qualify the Prologue's—and his own—apparently unqualified harshness: "Henryson refuses to oversimplify the natural world into an easy target for invective, he describes his short-lived and suffering animals from a sympathetic viewpoint; the Fables are filled, for instance, with pathetic and occasionally valiant sheep and mice" (p. 356). Most readers of the Fables would approve the latter statement and might even add that Henryson's animals truly represent the character and predicament of mankind, not merely human vice and folly, but neither the Prologue nor Fox's reading of his two representative fables give any hint of that sympathy for fabulistic animals—or mankind. Fox sums up on the cock of "The Cock and the Jewel" and the birds of "The Swallow and the other Birds" in terms entirely consistent with the Prologue's darkest view of the animals: "The birds scratching busily in the dirt or chaff are powerful symbols for appetite, and ones which convey vividly its bestiality" (pp. 355-56).

Fox has taken the Prologue's description of Aesop's fables as the program for Henryson's poems, but that introductory characterization becomes the contrastive base for Henryson's transformation of a genre usually sadly but wisely neglected. Whether he characterized "Aesop" fairly or not is beyond the scope of this paper, but Henryson's Prologue creates an image of Aesopian literature as harsh, almost misanthropic; his Fables transform that simplistic moralism into a deeper, more sympathetic, and finally more pessimistic view of the human condition. Henryson's Fables repeatedly suggest meanings quite inconsistent with their explicit moralizations; the meanings the stories suggest and the moralizations assert conflict, and the resolution of these contradictions completes Henryson's transformation of the fables; his animals do not simply represent a degraded mankind—the animals and their world become symbols for Henryson's view of man: more suffering than sinning, less a free agent with unambiguous moral choices than the victim of his inescapable environment.

I propose to deal with the same two fables, "The Cock and the Jewel" and "The Swallow and the other Birds," Fox treated, and in order to give a better indication of the meanings Henryson may have found in Aesop shall cite or characterize the probable sources of these two fables. As one might expect, the source stories take place in a suspended vacuum; one has no impression that the action occurs in real time or space, but Henryson has invested these fables with a sense of place ("The Cock and the Jewel") or time ("The Swallow and the other Birds") and these touches of reality open the way to a non-Aesopian reading of the fables. Awareness of real place in the cock's story sharpens our sense of the fable's hero as a real character, not a mere shadow of something else; in the story of the birds, the sense of time and its passing focusses our attention on the reality of the narrator's presence and his involvement in the events he relates. The story of "The Cock and the Jewel" occupies eight lines in Walter of England, twenty-two in the Isopet de Lyon,¹ and sixty-three in Henryson. The Latin version runs:

Dum rigido fodit ore fimum, dum quaeritat escam
Dum stupet inventa jaspide Gallus, ait:
"Res vili pretiosa loco natique decoris
Hac in sorde jaces, nil mihi messis habes.
Si tibi nunc esset qui debuit repertor,
Quem limus sepelit, viveret arte nitor
Nec tibi convenio, nee tu mihi; nee tibi prosum,
Nee mihi tu prodes; plus amo cara minus."

The power of Walter's version lies in its barrenness; no realistic details weaken the intended comparison of cock and fool, jewel and wisdom; nothing in the narration directs the reader's attention to any consideration of cocks or jewels beyond the identifications the moralitas imposes:

Tu Gallo stolidum, tu Jaspide dona sophiae
Pulchra notes; stolido nil sapit ista seges.

Walter ignores the logical pitfalls inherent in argument by analogy and does not endow the cock with any character at all, much less one strikingly inconsistent with the moral pronouncement. We are not made to see that the cock is a barnyard feathered biped or the "jasp" is a precious stone. Perhaps a trace of mockery colors the narrator's otherwise neutral tone: the repetition of Dum … dum … dum…, the rigido ore, and the stupet at the instant of discovery may briefly make the cock mechanically comic, but the fable hardly creates a sense of the narrator's attitude toward his subject. The Isopet de Lyon merely extends the cock's speech without adding any new dimensions to the narrative, but Henryson's additions give the cock a certain complexity of characterization, the action a real setting, and us an invitation to consider the cock and the "jasp" literally, that is as a real bird and a real jewel, not mere counters serving only to designate the realia under discussion.

Henryson's narrative concisely indicates the cock's physical, socio-economic, and moral reality and allows the bird a complex and sympathetic characterization. The cock has "feddram fresch & gay" (64) and his spirit appropriately matches his appearance for he is "Richt cant and crous, albeit he was bot pure" (65). The opposition between the cock's morale and status, his wholly commendable cheerfulness in the face of poverty, makes a favorable impression—if Chaucer's Pardoner who would not "Lyve in poverte wilfully" (VI, 441) and his "povre persoun" (I, 478) who would, and did, reliably indicate conventional medieval attitudes toward poverty. Indeed, the cock evidently agrees with the narrator that "blyithnes in hart, with small possessioun" (388, 396) is truly the "Best thing in eird" (387). The apparently unnecessary explanation that jewels are occasionally swept out with the dust when young servant girls rush through their work—"Peradventure, sa wes the samin stone" (77)—adds more than social realism to the context of the fable. The cock's early rising and diligence, "To get his dennar set was al his cure" (67), contrast with the idleness and indifference of the hypothetical girls, and the juxtaposition of the busy cock and careless servants helps define the narrator's, and our, attitude toward the story's central character. Modesty and decorum dictate the cock's proposed diet, and a medieval audience could hardly choose but admire a prospective diner who announces "Had I dry breid, I compt not for na cukis" (105), mentions "draf, or corne" twice (91, 94) and "corne" once more (99). In contrast the widow's sustenance in the Nun's Priest's Tale—

Milk and broun breed …
Seynd bacoun, and somtyme an ey or tweye—
(VII, 2844-45)

seems decidedly luxurious. Denton Fox believes that the cock's willingness to consume "small wormis, or snaillis" (94) would be "repulsive" to the audience,⁸ but both commonsense and decorum will allow the diet, and if the "snaillis" are true snails, so will the Larousse Gastronomique which observes that this delicacy "was highly prized as food as far back as Roman times," adding gratefully that the "art of fattening snails is said to have been discovered by a Roman named Lupinus."⁹ Lydgate's version of the fable too explicitly idealizes the cock, yet allows him to seek his dinner on a dunghill,¹⁰ an indication that the medieval audience could stomach the idea of a cock's eating "small wormis, or snaillis" or whatever one finds in the midden.

Like his Aesopian predecessor, Henryson's cock rejects the jewel in the dungheap, but within the context of Henryson's story, he rightly rejects it and has in fact no other choice to make. The story has created a cock who is both sympathetic and real; sympathy with the character predisposes us to accept his decision, and a sense of the cock's reality in a real setting makes us view his decision as inevitable. In sober fact, a real cock who carried a precious stone into a jeweller's shop or kept it about his person would more likely be stuffed with sage than sagacity. When the narrator observes that his cock "Flew furth upon ane dunghill sone be day" (66), the local and temporal details assure us that our cock acts as literary authority and common experience agree he should, and give the narrative a ring of factualness alien to its presumed sources. The local setting further realizes the narrative: the jewel "Wes castin furth in sweping of the hous" (70). The definite article in the phrase "of the hous" moves the narrative from the generality of "ane cok" (64) and "ane dunghill" (66) to an increasingly specific setting and thus individual reality, an impression strengthened by the distinction between lost jewelry in general and "the samin stone" (77) of this particular encounter. The careful distinction between this "real" event and the hypothetical servant girls similarly enhances the story's verisimilitude.

A pervasive sense of place strikingly distinguishes Henryson's story from the traditional fable of the cock and the jewel: Aesopian fables create no time or place, but the reality of Henryson's setting was apparent to his earliest publishers. Facing page five in H. Harvey Wood's edition (p. 7 in G. Gregory Smith, vol. II), we may see a reproduction of a drawing which, in the Harleian MS, introduces the text of the fable; the draw ing also appears in Thomas Bassandyne's print. This illustration puts the cock, jasp, a small tree or shrub, dunghill, the farmer's house, hills and horizon in perspective. Henryson's references place the action of the fable in a social order ranging from the cock who is "bot pure" (65) to the "Damisellis" who are "wantoun and Insolent" (71)—they do not know their proper place—to "grit Lordis" (89) and "Lord or King" (81); the narrative establishes a hierarchy of places beginning "upon ane dunghill" (66) or "in this mydding" (82)—the cock's proper place—to "the flure" (74) "of the hous" (70, 73) and thence to "ane Royall Tour" (107). The cock rejects the jewel, not because of "false intellectual pride,"¹¹ but because he realizes that he occupies a given place in an ordered world, a place inconsistent with the possession of gemstones. The cock's peroration identifies the place the jewel should, because of its nature, occupy:

"Quhar suld thow mak thy habitatioun?
Quhar suld thow dwell, bot in ane Royall Tour?
Quhar suld thow sit, bot on ane Kingis Croun,
Exaltit in worschip and in grit honour?
Rise, gentill Jasp, off all stanis the flour,
Out of this midding, and pas quhar thow suld be;
Thow ganis not for me, nor I for the."
(106-12)

The insistent reappearance of the verb "suld" in this stanza grounds the cock's rejection of the gem in his sense of propriety and place ("habitatioun," "dwell," "sit") and a realism which nicely complements the jaunty confidence attributed him from the first.

Like his fabulistic ancestors, Henryson's cock rejects the jasp, but the context of the action and the terms the rejection is stated in make immediate and concrete the disparity between the jewel and the bird, a disparity which calls attention to the logical fallacy in the traditional moralization, the misleading analogy. When Henryson's cock turns his back on the useless gemstone, he does not behave foolishly, yet the moralitas asserts that the cock "may till ane fuie be peir" (142), and when we impose the identifications of the moralitas—the cock as foolish man, the jewel as "science and cunning" (148)—on Henryson's story, Aesopian contempt for "fools," complacently identified as that distant mass of other men, gives way to a somberer meaning. To equate our cock with foolish mankind is to recognize that mankind's apparent freedom to choose wisdom or folly is mere illusion; to see wisdom in this gemstone is to admit that the world we live in makes wisdom—

Quhilk makis men in honour for to Ring,
Happie, and stark to wyn the victorie
Of all vicis, and Spirituall enemie—
(131-33)

as inaccessible to mankind as a precious stone to a barnyard cock. The audience's awareness and anticipation of the traditional moralization, counterpointed against the developing apprehension of the fable's transformation, lends the story's essential pessimism enormous force. The traditional Aesopian tone, complacent, superior, sophomoric, scores fools off roundly in the additio to Walter of England's moralitas:

Stultorum numerus infinitus solet esse;
Stultus stultitiam monstrat ubique suam.

Henryson's involvement with the cock and with mankind gives his version of the fable a profounder and darker meaning than an expostulation against fools. If the cock does not reject the jewel out of arrogance or exclusive preoccupation with bestial appetite but because a real barnyard cock cannot pocket or possess a gemstone, the simplistic moral proposition that the free agent, man, wilfully disregards the wisdom that could secure him all the possible benefits of this and the next world gives place to a powerful impression that man, the prisoner of his inescapable limitations, has no plain and easy choice of wisdom and folly.

The birds of "The Swallow and the other Birds" illustrate still more darkly mankind's entrapment in a world where the supposedly obvious path to safety lies hidden in the gloom.

The text of "The Swallow and the other Birds" is defective in the Isopet de Lyon, but Walter's Latin will illustrate that Henryson's realism—a state of mind and sensitivity rather than a mere trick of style—transformed the complacent fable into an impressive, gloomy perception of the human condition:

Ut linum pariât lini de semine semen
Nutrit humus, sed Aves tangit Hirundo metu:
"Hic ager, hoc semen nobis mala vincla minatur,

Vellite pro nostris semina sparsa malis."
Turba fugit sanos monitus, vanosque timores
Arguit; exit humo semen et herba viret.
Rursus Hirundo monet instare pericula; rident
Rursus Aves; hominem placat Hirundo sibi,
Cumque viris habitans cantu blanditur amico
Nam praemissa minus laedere tela solent.
Jam linum metitur, jam fiunt retia, jam vir
Fallit Aves, jam se conscia culpat Avis.

Henryson suppresses one detail in the probable source: the swallow's defection to the fowler's party. He also adds a long philosophical prologue asserting the universal presence of a divine and beneficent order. The fable's prologue exhorts the hearer to remark the existence of this benevolent design, to embrace a philosophical optimism the fable disappoints. In "The Swal low and the other Birds" an ever-present sense of time becomes the chief instrument of pessimistic realism; as the seasons progress from spring to winter, the narrator seeks the benevolent order the prologue has described, but the fruit of his search is pain and sorrow, not that promised joy. The fable's action begins in spring or early summer with the narrator's out-of-doors walks, precisely the motifs which opened and closed the narrator's immediately preceding dream of Aesop. This seeming care to emphasize the juxtaposition of Aesop's fable within the dream and the narrator's direct experience highlights the contrast between the Aesopian stance and Henryson's. The fable itself re-echoes this conflict between the Aesopian vision and Henryson's: the events of the story appear inconsistently as Aesop's moralized fiction and the narrator's own experience. The onset of the moralitas demotes the narrator's truth to Aesop's yarning—unfavorably compared to his "mair autenik werk" (1890). As the story unfolds, it is insistently the record of the narrator's seeing, hearing, wondering, feeling, and finally sorrowing. The contradictions repeatedly built into the fable's authentication parallel the conflicting interpretations—tragic and moralizing—it generates.

The philosophical prologue asserts that man cannot perceive "God as he is, nor thingis Celestiall" (1632) but calls on mankind to see God's benevolence in visible nature: "Luke weill … Luke weill … Syne luke," and "As day lie by experience we may see" (1664, 1665, 1668, 1677). Denton Fox described the prologue as follows: "Structurally, there is a steady progression towards the natural world of the birds in the fable: the movement is from God to nature, from eternal stability to seasonal mutability, from abstract general philosophy to concrete specific experience. But throughout this whole introductory section there is the same view of the world. God is wise and generous, and the world that he has made is good both in its conceptual scheme and as man experiences it" (p. 350). The story proper begins with the narrator's response to spring and his determination to see and experience the joys of the season and its activities. The prologue admonishes us to look carefully and understand; the fable records what the narrator saw, unfolds his developing response, and discovers the difficulty in understanding a divine and benevolent order from experience. The fable begins with a search for direct experience of beauty and order:

… in to ane soft morning
Rycht blyth that bitter blastis wer ago,
Into the wod, to se the flouris spring,
And heir the Mavis sing and birdis mo,
I passit ffurth …
(1713-17)

Renewed joy and optimism dominate the narrator's mood; the season's bustle inspires him with hope and happiness:

Moving thusgait, grit myrth I tuke in mynd,
Off lauboraris to se the besines,

…..

It wes grit Joy to him that luifit corne,
To se thame laubour, baith at evin and morne.
(1720-21, 1725-26)

The first episode in the action of the story emphasizes the narrator's perception and feeling, two leading themes in a poem repeatedly characterized as the account of an engaged observer: "I passit ffurth, syne lukit to and fro, / To se the Soill …" (1717-18), "And as I baid … / In hart gritlie rejoicit of that sicht" (1717-28). The narrator's initial reaction to what he sees is exactly congruent with the tone of the fable's prologue, and as he looks and sees and responds, the narrator in the fable precisely follows the admonition laid down in the prologue. Denton Fox identifies the narrator as "a figure who has appeared in many earlier poems," a "stock figure" who allusively indicates that "an allegorical vision which will probably be connected, in some way, with the mysteries of spring" (p. 351) will follow, but Henryson's observer is also familiar from the preceding fables and a vital part of the narrative. As the narrator experiences the world he finds it includes evil, however benevolent its conceptual scheme, and his experience reveals that the problem of accounting for its evil cannot be satisfactorily solved by simply referring it back to the failures of bird or man.

The reality of Henryson's narrator and his emotions—his joy at spring, his wonder at the Swallow's preaching, his shock and sorrow at the death of the birds—and the reality of the world of his experience transform the discursive Aesopian paradigm into presentational narrative and create the tension between Henryson's and Aesop's fable. The pinched Latin text creates only a simple, uni-dimensional world for which a bare aphorism becomes an adequate analysis, but Henryson's poem reveals a world which an Aesopian aphorism cannot epitomize. A comparison of the representation of time in "The Swallow and the other Birds" and in its presumed sources will indicate the impression of a complex reality Henryson intends.

Steady emphasis on time connects the prologue and the narrative, but starkly contrasting characterizations of time oppose the prologue's philosophical optimism and the narrative's empirical pessimism. The prologue devotes five stanzas to a description of the seasons of the year; the movement is from summer to spring, but winter occupies two stanzas and thus outranks the other seasons even as it forebodes the outcome of the story to follow:

Than [in winter] flouris fair faidit with froist man fall,
And birdis blyith changit thair noitis sweit
In styll murning, neir slane with snaw and sleit.
(1696-98)

This darkly prophetic hint is swallowed up in the prologue's view of the order of nature as an illustration of God's benevolence. Denton Fox remarks that "Even Henryson's year runs from summer to spring, and not from spring to winter, from youth to death" (p. 350). But in the story proper, the progress of a specific year provides the time-scheme of the narrative and its most realistic details, and this year runs from a given spring to a given, fateful winter, from the foreboding of evil to its fulfilment. Henryson sharpens the conflict between optimistic dogma and tragic experience when he makes the abstract year end in spring and joy, his real one in winter, sorrow, and death.

To develop the Aesopian conception of the fable, that the evil which is visited upon the birds depends purely upon their obstinate refusal to heed the good advice of the Swallow, no specific description of the passage of time is required, and in the Latin of Walter of England only the sparest indications of real time appear; flax is sown and the seed grows, but the seasons are not mentioned at all. In place of Henryson's concrete vocabulary describing the passage of time and seasons, Walter relies simply on the adverb rursus to indicate the birds' repeated refusal to heed the Swallow: Rursus Hirundo monent instare per icula; rident / Rursus aves, and the colorless jam, not a detailed description of the season, marks the arrival of the catastrophe: Jam linum metitur, jam fiunt retia, jam vir / Fallit Aves, jam se conscia culpat Avis. Henryson, however, links every step in the unfolding tragedy to a specific moment in the progress of the year; the springtime plowing and sowing which assures the joyful narrator of yet another life-giving harvest threatens the birds with death as the Swallow warns:

Se ye yone Churll … Beyond yone pleuch,
Fast sawand hemp, and gude linget seid?
Yone lint will grow in lytill tyme in deid,
And theiroff will yone Churll his Nettis mak,
Under the quhilk he thinkis us to tak.
(1743-47)

The narrator turns homeward, his original mood of satisfaction and joy converted to wonder and doubt:

I tuke my club, and hamewart couth I carie,
Swa ferliand, as I had sene ane farie.
(1774-75)

What he has seen in fact, though not what he purposed to see, has challenged the validity of his initial response to experience. Time passes and the seed sown in the spring grows; the narrator returns and again he relishes, though less emphatically, the time of the year:

Thus passit furth quhill June, that Jolie tyde,
And seidis that wer sawin off beforne
Wer growin hie, …
I movit furth, betwix midday and morne,
Unto the hedge under the Hawthorne grene,
Quhair I befoir the said birdis had sene.
(1776-78, 1780-82)

June, "that Jolie tyde" of promising growth, forebodes disaster as the Swallow cries:

Luke to the Lint that growis on yone le;
Yone is the thing I bad forsuith that we,
Quhill it wes seid, suld rute furth off the eird;
Now it is Lint, now is it hie on breird.
(1793-96)

The Swallow's horror at the prospect of evil vividly contrasts with the narrator's reaction to spring and summer:

My flesche growis, my bodie quaikis all,
Thinkand on it I may not sleip in peis.
(1799-80)

The flax is duly harvested, prepared, and converted into nets, but before the birds are netted, the year turns to winter whose harshness drives them irresistibly within reach of the fowler:

The wynter come, the wickit wind can blaw,
The woddis grene were wallowit with the weit,
Baith firth and fell with froistys were maid faw,
Sloniis and slaik maid slidderie with the sleit;

The foulis ffair ffor fait thay ffell off feit;
On bewis bair it wes na bute to byde,
But hyit unto housis thame to hyde.
(1832-38)

For a third time the birds do not heed the Swallow's prudent advice, and this time the unregarded warning goes unanswered as the starving birds flock to the fowler's net:

Thir small birdis ffor hunger famischit neir,
Full besie scraipand ffor to seik thair fude,
The counsall off the Swallow wald not heir.
(1867-69)

The birds have become birds only—the Swallow excepted—devoid of speech and totally at the mercy of the environment, victims of famine, winter, and death, in brief, subject to time; to claim that the "birds scratching busily in the … chaff are powerful symbols for appetite, and ones which convey vividly its bestiality"¹² is to ignore the real situation Henryson so carefully created and dismiss that grim and inescapable winter as window-dressing. The winter in which the birds suffer recalls the prologue's two somber stanzas describing winter as hostile to bird and beast:

And birdis blyith changit thair notis sweit
In styll murning, neir slane with snaw and sleit

…..

All wyld beistis than ffrom the bentis bair
Drawis ffor dreid unto thair dennis deip,
Coucheand ffor cauld in coifis thame to keip.
(1697-98, 1703-05)

Time remains in the audience's mind throughout the narrative. The prologue's detailed and realistic set piece describes a year's progress season by season; seasons and seasonal activities, plowing, sowing, and reaping become the temporal context of the action; and until the catastrophe, the narrator's experiences come at a definite time of day. The narrator lives in time as do the birds themselves. Hence his first observation of the Swallow's preaching takes place in the morning—"in to ane soft morning" (1713)—but his second experience begins later in the day—"betwix midday and morne" (1780)—and ends with "it drew neir the none" (1824). The Latin version aims only at making clear the sequence and repetition of events; the representation of time is irrelevant to the Aesopian meaning of the story; only the fact, the birds' failure to heed the swallow's advice, and their stubborn persistence in unwisdom, is relevant.

When Henryson added the dimension of time to the fable he did more than embellish the plain tale or make a more interesting version of the story. To see the narrative, the birds, and the narrator himself in the constant flux of time, and to see time moving from spring to winter, from life to death, subverts the basic assumptions of the Aesopian fable: the real possibility of another outcome, the substantial freedom of the birds to choose wisely and avoid their fate, the exclusive origin of evil in the failure of the individual. The birds could indeed have picked up the seeds or rooted up the young flax-plants, but at the end it is winter which drives them in reach of the fowler's nets and famine which impells them to scratch vainly at the chaff set out as bait. In Henryson's poem, time becomes a symbol for fate, winter a token of unaccountable evil in the real world. This treatment of time and the pure grief of the narrator's response to the catastrophe—

Allace! It wes grit hart sair for to se
That bludie Bowcheour beit thay birdis doun,
And for till heir, quhen they wist weill to de,
Thair cairfull sang and lamentatioun
(1874-77)—

validates the tension between the Aesopian and the tragic conceptions of the fable. Taking the prologue and fable together, "The Swallow and the other Birds" includes competing impulses toward an Aesopian or moralistic reading based on philosophical optimism and a tragic interpretation rooted in philosophical pessimism; appropriately two voices respond to the catastrophe, but neither strikes the pure Aesopian note. The Aesopian attitude is almost cool and indifferent:

Utile consilium qui vitat, inutile sumit;
Qui nimis est tutus, retia jure subit.

Nothing unites the Aesopian narrator and the personae he casually dismisses; even the disapproval is unimpassioned. The Swallow begins with the Aesopian distance implied in "I told you so"—

Lo … thus it happinnis mony syis

…..

This grit perrell I tauld thame mair than thryis—
(1882, 1885)

but her conclusion, "Now ar thay deid, and wo is me thairfoir" (1886), tempers the moralist's censure with compassion and unites the moralist and truant. Grief is the narrator's single response—"it wes grit hart sair for to se" (1874)—to his vision of the human condition in the real world. Though the Prologue asserted that Aesop's fables arose from a desire to reprove man's misbehavior, the Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian, fables transformed, aim at fairly representing rather than harshly reproving mankind. Pity, not contempt, scorn and aloof disapproval, dominates Henryson's view of mortal man.

Notes

¹ Talks given at the Conference on Mediaeval Studies (Kalamazoo, 1968) and the Medieval Section of the MLA Conference (New York, 1968) included early versions of the matter presented in this paper.

² See Florence H. Ridley's review of John MacQueen's Robert Henryson (JEGP, 67 [1968], 299); cf. Denton Fox's remark that older criticism prized the fables because of "their detailed realism, their humor, and the slightly naive goodness that Henryson displays in them," ("Henryson's Fables," ELH 29 [1962], 337).

³ Thus J. A. W. Bennett remarks that Henryson kept "'lust' and 'lore' formally distinct" (The Parlement of Foules, 2nd ed. [Oxford, 1965], p. 15) and G. Gregory Smith approves Henryson's segregation of moralization and story especially since it renders the moralization expendable: "If he [Henryson] is sometimes tedious in his 'moralizations,' he keeps these, as the Latin fabulists did, at the end and at the will of the reader, not mingling them with the story …" (The Poems of Robert Henryson [Edinburgh, 1914], I, xvi); Edwin Muir hints (Essays on Literature and Society, 2nd ed. [London, 1965], pp. 13-14) that on occasion at least the moralizations are deliberately and comically inappropriate, and Kurt Wittig observes with something like surprise that "The moralities of 'The Wolf and the Lamb' … or of 'The Sheip and the Doig' … are a certain exception in their close integration with the tale" (The Scottish Tradition in Literature [Edinburgh, 1958], p. 40).

⁴ John Block Friedman, "Henryson, The Friars, and the Confessio Reynardi," JEGP, 66 (1967), 550.

⁵ELH (note 2 above), 337-56.

⁶ H. Harvey Wood, ed., The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1958) is cited throughout.

⁷ John MacQueen has shown that these are Henryson's chief sources (Robert Henryson: A Study of the Major Narrative Poems [Oxford, 1967], pp. 96, 200-07); for the French and Latin texts see Julia Bastin, ed., Recueil Générale des Isopets (Paris, 1930), II.

⁸ Fox, 345; MacQueen finds the cock's diet "repulsive" but "appropriate," p. 108.

⁹Larousse Gastronomique, edd. Nina Froud and Charlotte Turgeon (London, 1961), p. 882.

¹⁰The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, II (London, 1934), "Isopes Fabules," 11. 106-09.

¹¹ MacQueen, p. 107.

¹² Fox, 356.