Avian Agitation: "The Owl and the Nightingale"

Nicholas of Guildford's "The Owl and the Nightingale" is one of the earliest examples of "verse contest" poetry in English.  But don't expect nuance from these disputants!

Transcript

Welcome once again to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Thank you so much for stopping by.  Today, we’ve got a bit of a different episode, lest you think all medieval literature involves large hairy men shouting and slashing at each other.  Today, we’ll look at a very early English language example of what is called “debate poetry” or the “verse contest.”  It’s “The Owl and the Nightingale.”

I’ll warn you upfront – this is a pretty free-wheeling episode.  Really kind of a “notes from my head” thing.  Buckle up for some rather disorganized thinking.

We don’t really have any precise information about its composition date or its composer.  The poem makes reference to the death of a King Henry, but we are unsure whether that is Henry II or Henry III.  So a date anywhere from 1189 to 1275 is possible.  Traditionally, most scholars accept that the author is a man named Nicholas of Guildford, since he is mentioned a couple of times in the poem as a man “full of wit and subtlety. / In judging he is sharp and nice.”  Probably a bit of meta-self-promotion here, but that’s really the only reason we are cool with the idea of Nicholas’s authorship.  It could as easily be someone else, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going to go along with the crowd like the invertebrate sheep that I am.

Debate poetry was a popular genre in the Middle Ages, especially among the Anglo-Normans, and much of it was written in Norman French or Latin.  Debate or disputation played a major role in medieval civil life.  It was perhaps the way human beings arrived at truth in theology and in the sciences.  Highly formalized, strictly ruled – scholastic disputation relied on the careful citation of established authorities and a thorough understanding (on each debater’s part) of the arguments for each position.  Invaluable in law courts and whatever legislative bodies may obtain at a given time or place.  Universities and seminaries conducted classes and examinations via debate.  Masters often required advanced students to debate them. The trivium, one of the two major university curriculums of the time, included rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech, with instruction in grammar and logic.

A poem like ours, however, is something of a burlesque of the noble art of disputation.  I felt I had to state that clearly because debate in modern politics is already a perverse circus in which debaters ignore the put question and pivot to soundbite samples of stump speeches.  That “The Owl and the Nightingale” is written in Middle English and not French or Latin indicates that (1) English indeed persisted during the Norman period; and (2) that it was considered a fitting language for such low, popular verse.  The poem uses very earthy, colloquial language and iambic tetrameter (that is, eight-syllable, 4 beat) lines – rather sing-songy – a rudimentary and (perhaps here) rude  rhythm.

The poem records a debate held between an owl and a nightingale which is overheard by the passing narrator. He is privy to just another episode in a long-running squabble between the two birds, for, at the start of the poem, the Nightingale spies the owl, and lashes into her: “Monster!  Away now flee!  I am the worse for sight of thee!”  Rather rude, as I say.  But the owl responds, “Thou very often dost me blame / and causeth me both grief and shame.”  The “very often” means they’ve been here before, sniping back and forth, with no resolution.  And, at the risk of spoilers, this poem offers no resolutions or solutions either.  The interminable argument is also irresolvable, a commentary, I think, on the futility of such disputation.  The poem, for all its sturm und drang, get us no closer to any truth or understanding.

Throughout, the Owl seems melancholy and irascible, sitting on an “old stump.” The Nightingale, “upon a handsome bough . . . stood / Where blossoms had bedecked the wood,” comes across as superficial, though sanguine. They argue over a range of topics, often with ad hominem (that is, personal) attacks.  The nightingale accuses the owl of loving the darkness, that it has an ugly song, and that it is near blind.  The owl retorts that her song is beautiful and powerful and that it reminds men to pay due care to the condition of their souls.  The Nightingale attacks with what is called in rhetoric the “argument from analogy”: she accuses the Owl, all owls, of being “loathly and unclean”: a dirty bird.  She says an owl once squatted in the nest of an absent falcon and laid her foul egg in it.  When all the birds hatch and the falcon returns, he is shocked at the filthy state of the nest. “Tell me now, who has done this? ‘Tis not in your nature to act amiss.  ‘Twas done in a disgusting way!”  The young eyasses quickly grass on the young owlet: “Indeed, it was this our own brother / He yonder with so great a head!”  Finks.  The falcon tosses the owlet from the nest and it is subsequently torn apart by magpies and crows.  Poor little bugger. But it goes to show, says the Nightingale, that owls “come from a foul brood” and cannot join “with those of noble name.”  Ah, the idea that nobility is inborn again.

The Owl makes the only retort possible in such a situation.  She threateningly challenges the Nightingale: “Why not out in the open fly?”  The Nightingale, too clever to fall for such a ruse, opts for the high moral ground by offering reasoned debate instead of violence: “Fair words are better than a sword.” So, they decide to enlist Nicholas of Guildford to judge their debate for the sagacious qualities we noted a moment ago.

From here, they launch into some really good mud-slinging.  

The Nightingale argues that her song brings joy to men in sorrow; it heralds the renewal of the spring.  She disappears in the winter to keep her audience wanting more, so that her song will always be precious to humankind.

The Owl retorts that the Nightingale’s song only encourages lechery:

Thou say’st thou knowest well of men’s bowers,

Where flourish leaves and lovely flowers,

Where in one bed two lovers lie

Embracing, safe from prying eye.

Once thou sangest, I know the spot,

Nigh to a bower, and lewdly sought

To lead a lady’s heart astray,

And sangest high and low they lay

And taughtest her the way of shame,

Adultery, and evil fame.

In a cunning riposte, the Nightingale says that the only good owl is a dead owl, since its corpse can serve as a scarecrow in a farmer’s field.  And the owl’s song, she charges (returning to her perennial quibble) only foretells grief and sorrow: 

When thou hast cried throughout the night,

Justly may men be filled with fright.

Thou singest where some man will die;

Always thou bodice evil nigh.

Thou foretellest poverty,

Or some friend’s adversity.

And fires, battles, robbers, plague, poverty, marital strife, and so on and so on and so on.  The Nightingale just piles up the examples – a wall of prognosticated misery.

“That just makes me experienced and wise,” the Owl says, contrasting her sagacity to the Nightingale’s callowness. She lights by the church and learns from the wisdom taught there.

“Witchcraft!” snaps the Nightingale.

They go on like this at some length, frequently citing the proverbs of King Alfred (evidently a great generator of canned wisdom back in the day).  Finally, a wren convinces them to fly off to Nicholas and thus our eavesdropping ends.  

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Mark Twain said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”  Probably a fella named Maurice Switzer in 1907.  Anyroad, the sentiment works well for Nicholas of Guildford’s poetic “debate” (since this is audio only, please imagine that I have made the ‘scare quotes’ finger gesture here in my room) between the Owl and a Nightingale.  Guildford provides a satire of the formal scholastic disputation, a fable in “how not to argue.”  The birds employ all manner of logical fallacies: ad hominem attacks, tu quoque, ad metum, ad populum, ad ridiculum, adda adda adda.  What does the poem mean?  Well, no one can really agree.  Allegorical interpretations have dominated: the poem recasts some monastic or priestly dispute.  I think this one has fallen out of favor.  The other front-running interpretation is that the dispute concretizes the tension between humanity’s competing desires for both the spiritual and material lives.  The Nightingale seems to body forth the latter with its arguments in favor of beauty and pleasure.  The Owl, perhaps, represents the wisdom of spirituality.  But I don’t know – maybe.  That seems too heavy for such a vacillating lampoon.  Had the poem been more explicitly didactic the allegorical angle might have worked.  We’re not meant to glean any insight into some Platonic superiority of the mind and soul over the body.  The poem doesn’t arrive at a neat conclusion – it doesn’t arrive at a messy conclusion, even.  It doesn’t conclude – it just ends, heavily implying that somewhere beyond our ken the two avian adversaries continue their vain and perpetual squawking.  I confess that I see the poem as primarily parody and the ostensible allegorical structure as in service to the project of mockery.

To accomplish this project, Guildford exploits well-known tropes about his main characters.  Have you ever heard of the Bestiary?  It’s a compendium of animals,sometimes gorgeously illustrated, that served as a kind of natural history for the medieval mind.  Often heavily anthropomorphic, the bestiary also supplies a moral interpretation in addition to its physical description of the various beasts.

So, the bestiary notes, the nightingale sings to relieve tedium, sings at the sun’s rising.  It compares the nightingale to a “poor mother” whose devotion to duty keeps her singing despite travails.  We get such citations from the great authorities: Pliny the Elder, St. Ambrose, and Isidore of Seville.

On a side note, the nightingale will star in many and much lyric poetry in the coming centuries.  The 19th century Romantics especially fondly evoked the bird and its Greek origin myth: the story of Philomela.   It’s actually a tough little story: according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela is raped by her brother in law Tereus, who cuts out her tongue to keep her from accusing him.  The gods then transform her into a nightingale so she could sing forever.  Brutal and beautiful.  

On a side note to the side note – a “B-side” note, if you will.  And even if you won’t.  Turns out only male nightingales sing, the female is mute.  So Ovid, Pliny, Ambrose, Isidore, and Nicholas botched that one.  Established authority takes the penalty.

Now the bestiary read of the Owl is a bit more complex.  The authorities note that the owl haunts ruins, is nocturnal, dirty, and lazy.  A harbinger of death.  Poor hootie.  On a more sinister side, these authorities also assign some antisemitic interpretations, but let’s pass that by.  No sense to give that any air time. On the other hand, there is the Aberdeen Bestiary from the 12th century which offers a more positive spin on the Owl.  It asserts that the Owl actually represents Jesus Christ, who loved sinners (just as the Owl lives in the darkness) and who fled from the light of earthly praise.  OK.

While I cannot argue that “The Owl and the Nightingale” is great poetry – a far better example of avian debate poetry is Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Parliament of Fowls” from the 1380s – but I love the fact that it deals with some significant concerns, ones that still vex our modern minds.

For example, the entire poem can be seen as an object lesson in the insufficiency of binary, either/or thinking.  We have the folk wisdom that “there are two sides to every story,” but upon examination we see that every story, every event, every belief is not simply mirrored by its opposite.  Yes, we think in terms of black and white, light and dark, high and low, male and female, gay and straight, prolife and prochoice, red and blue, etc. etc. etc.  But such crudely constructed categories hardly contain the ineffable complexity of our experience.  For the most part, these seemingly intransigent properties are predicated upon the speaker’s position.  “Up” is only above my head to me. Those clouds above me are “down” to the people in the jumbo jet. The Nightingale is optimistic, whereas the Owl is pessimistic.  The Nightingale irreverent, the Owl morose.  That these polarities never resolve their arguments, their contrasts, seems to point to the futility of such thought categories.  

I really tried to come up with a Twitter pun here, something about a tweeting bird and the crude, reductionist thinking in which social media revels, but nothing came to me in time.  If you can come up with a witty quip about Twitter, avian debate poetry, and underexercised intellects, please write it on the back of a $20 bill, tie it to the leg of a golden-egg-laying goose, and send it to me here in the Clubhouse.

There is another philosophical problem against which the poem makes only the slightest, most fleeting glance.  In fact, I’m quite prepared to admit that this is way more in my head than in the text. But, since this podcast is about my personal musings on literature, I feel quite entitled to indulge myself at the expense of strict academic authority.  Hmmm . . . . I sound dangerously like some of my students. . . . 

Anyway, when the Nightingale chastises the Owl for its supposedly prophetic powers, saying: 

Evil befall the messenger 

Who comes but when mishaps occur,

And only tales of misery brings, 

And always speaks of wretched things.

God almighty be with him wroth,

And with all wearing linen cloth!

the Owl absolves herself of the responsibility for the tragedy she foresees: “Thinkest thou, though I see it all, / Because of me it doth befall?”  That is, she questions the Nightingale’s implication that because the Owl foresees evil, the Owl thereby causes evil.  Kind of an inversion of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, when one concludes that because one thing followed another thing it was thereby caused by that thing.  Mistaking coincidence for causality like Malcolm Gladwell and nearly every unctuous TED-talker. The Owl offers a kind of a pre hoc ergo propter hoc.  Is that a thing? 

Anyway, what this little vignette reminded me of is what’s called the problem of divine foreknowledge.  Which is, briefly: if God is omniscient (that is, knows everything, including future events) how can we be said to possess free will?  How can we be free to make our own choices if God already knows what we will choose?

Certainly a poser.  The sixth-century philosopher Boethius reasoned that foreknowledge does not prevent agency.  Besides, he says, time doesn’t mean the same thing to God as it does to us.  For us, time is sequential – one thing follows another because we are “in time.”  God, however, is eternal, that is, He exists “out of time” or “beyond time” and is not bound by temporal sequences.  Going back further, Aristotle resolved the problem by saying that statements of future events have no truth-value (that is, when we make such a statement, there is no way to measure its veracity at the moment and so the statement is essentially meaningless or nonsensical).  The Owl concludes: “Now it may clearly be perceived that thou art thoroughly deceived.”  Indeed.  Hard to say. I imagine most of us have wondered at one time or another whether our lives are guided by fate, free will, chance.  We often say,”Everything happens for a reason” but rarely do we examine who or what is in charge of the reason, or what purpose the reason serves. Chapter 47 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick in which the sailors aboard the Pequod are weaving mats and he turns this into a metaphor for the warp, woof, and sword of fate, free will, and chance.  Just awesome.  Despite its being American literature, it is one of, if not the, greatest novel ever written.  Highly recommended.

On a less abstract note, the poem also touches on the relationship between art and behavior, or how art can influence behavior.  I already mentioned how the Owl accuses the Nightingale’s sweet song of persuading people to sexual immorality.  Here, we get a little jab at what’s called the courtly love tradition, which was all the rage at the time.  Briefly, courtly love was a bit of an aesthetic game, in which a knight pledged his undying love to a married lady.  It grew out of the medieval “Cult of the Virgin,” the near-worship of the Virgin Mary.  In courtly love poetry (and whatever real life behaviors it fostered – there is some debate about this) the spiritual purity of absolute love (as for Mary) is supplemented by an unconsummated erotic desire.  This is key: the lover knight never sleeps with the married lady.  He merely pines away for her, and such pure love was thought to be ennobling.  

Now, in “The Owl and the Nightingale,” the Owl calls BS on that and is sure that the Nightingale’s song teaches people  ‘the way of shame, /Adultery, and evil fame.”  The medieval Church did in fact raise the hairy eyeball at courtly love poetry because it violated the utilitarian purpose of love and sex, ie children.  Furthermore, it encouraged lust and adultery and whether physically consummated or not, as the Gospel of Matthew has Jesus say: “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  

Always wondered about that.  Well, I know what he means – don’t treat people as mere objects for the satisfaction of your desires.  But, if you’re already guilty . . . . 

Anyway, I am reminded of the perennial panics that flare up, particularly around some new media or art trend indulged in by the young.  When I was a kid in the 1980s, I was very into the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, but then my Mom heard news reports that it induced kids into devil-worship and demon-possession, so she bought me a Christian version of the game, sans wizards and spells and demons.  Indeed, sans dungeons and dragons.

At the same time, people worried about heavy metal music, performers such as Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest, luring listeners into suicide.  Or by playing Led Zeppelin backwards (really, who ever did that in real life?) you could hear a prayer to Satan.

We’ve the same panics now about rap music and violence, about video games and violence.  As I understand it, there is no real evidence to link any of these artistic expressions to an increase in violent behavior.  I think the American Psychological Association has found that there may be an increase in aggression for some, but no real uptick in actual violent behavior.

Despite that, the MPAA movie rating system exists, at least in part, to check behavior. There is an increasing concern about the effect internet pornography has on romantic or sexual relationships.  That, especially for young adults, their understanding of a healthy physical relationship may be skewed by the sometimes extreme portrayals online.  

We do assume that art in fact does affect behavior when it is behavior we desire.  Note the discussions around gender or racial representation in the movies and TV.  If more diverse peoples are visible in the media we consume, the thinking goes, we will be more tolerant and embracing of diversity in our communities.  

Look, we all put on romantic music for date night and hard rock or rap to get psyched up for the big game.  We are creatures of art, I think.  

OK, this has been a wide-ranging (if you’re generous) or shambolic (if you’re honest) episode.  I’ve really indulged my mind’s tendency to flitter about, taking the nectar and pollinating a number of ideas.  I hope you don’t mind.  Have a wonderful couple of weeks until we meet again.  Please take a moment to review or support the show.  Thanks so much for listening.  Talk to you soon.