Encountering the Divine: Medieval Dream Vision Poetry

For us moderns, dreams are personal and interior, bubbling up from the deep chasms of experience, neurochemistry, and cultural symbolism.  But for the medievals, dreams were exterior: penetrative, intrusive -- they came from the outside, from beyond.  They perhaps were messages from God Himself.  On today's episode, we look at two poems about dream visions: the Old English "Dream of the Rood" and (a quick tour of) William Langland's Middle English "The Vision of Piers Plowman."

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Today’s episode: Encountering the Divine: Medieval Dream Vision Poetry.  To begin, I’d like to take you to church:

Today’s lesson is drawn from the Book of Job, chapter 33, verses 14-18:

God speaketh once, and the second time he rehearseth not the same thing. God speaketh by a dream in the vision of (the) night, when sleep falleth on men, and when they sleep in their bed. Then he openeth the ears of men, and he teacheth them, and teacheth prudence, or discipline; (so) that he turn away a man from these things which he made, and deliver him from pride; and that he deliver his soul from corruption, and his life, that it go not into sword. 

And from Numbers, chapter 12, verse 6:

 Hear ye my words; if any among you is a prophet of the Lord, I shall appear to him in revelation, either I shall speak to him by a dream.

These passages are from a modernized version of John Wycliffe’s translation of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) by Terence Noble.  It’s from about 1384-1395, so right about the time we’re talking about.  We call it Wycliffe’s Bible, but probably his associates, especially a fella named John Purvey, did most of the actual translating.  We’ll talk about Wycliffe and his controversial life in a later episode.  For now, let’s actually look at the verses read.

These passages explain how God reveals Himself to humanity: He speaks to us in dreams.  In this encounter with the Divine, God teaches us prudence and discipline, turns us away from pride to save not only our souls, but our lives.  God may send prophets to warn us of impending danger should we persist in our waywardness.

That’s what today’s poems are about – an encounter with the divine through the dreamworld.  Dream vision poetry was a popular genre in the Middle Ages, soaked as it was in Hebrew and Classical literature.  You’ve surely heard about the dreams of Pharaoh in Genesis or the prophet Ezekiel’s wheel in the sky, St. Paul’s vision on the Damascus Road, Plato’s Cave, Aeneas in the underworld, Constantine’s dream before Milvian Bridge, Boethius in his cell.  The medievals saw the dream world as, in some sense, as real as the waking world.  It was a place where the physical laws of nature are suspended in order that we may understand the Divine will – here we get guidance, prophecy, oracles, and sometimes nightmares.  Time and space get warped so we can discern the “really real.”

I’m going to bend a little time here in our podcast chronology and take us back to the Anglo-Saxon period for our first major dream vision poem called “The Dream of the Rood.”  From the mid 9th or early 10th centuries. There is an inscription of the Ruthwell Cross, a monument at Ruthwell Church in Dumfries, England, that contains several of the lines from this poem and was perhaps the inspiration for this more complete text.  The speaker of the poem tells us of a dream he had in which the Rood – that is, the cross upon which Christ was crucified – explains its complex feelings about its role in the crucifixion. 

The poem begins, in the grand Anglo-Saxon style, with the rousing “Hwaet!” like Beowulf – calling our attention to the poet.  In the translation I’m using, this is rendered as “Listen!”, which I like better than the somewhat stuffy “Lo” or “Attend.”  Seamus Heaney famously begins his Beowulf by translating the “Hwaet” into the very Irish, soft “So.”  That would work admirably well here, I think.  A beckoning, a hint of intimacy.

The speaker proceeds to tell us of the best of dreams which he dreamed last night: “It seemed I saw a wondrous tree / soaring into the air surrounded by light / the brightest of crosses.”  Five jewels – symbolizing the wounds of Christ – stud the crossbeam as all the angels guard it.

Calling the cross a tree is not an uncommon move in medieval poetry, but here especially it calls the mind the Tree of Knowledge from the Genesis story, so the “tree” is both the fall and the rising of humankind.  The speaker notes that he was “stained by sin, stricken with guilt.”  Note the alliterative “s” sounds here – those sibilants.  Sounds to me like the hissing of a serpent, perhaps a sonic callback to the Eden story.  By line 20 or so,he says “through that gold I could see the agony . . . for it had bled down the right hand side.” So the cross, too, is “stained by sin.”  Then the Rood appears to change phantasmagorically: “I saw that sign often change its clothing and its hue, at times dewy with moisture, stained by flowing blood, at times adorned with treasure.”  There is a fluidity about the Rood, an ontological uncertainty, or plenitude.  Instrument of torture and instrument of salvation, stained and shimmering.  We’ll see this superfluity of meaning elsewhere in the poem.

Then the Rood itself speaks, recalling its memory of being itself cut down in its prime, “severed from my roots,” and fixed by cruel men upon a hill.  It recalls the events of the crucifixion, Christ’s death, and descent.

But it does so in a very curious way.  The Rood poet reconceives Old English heroic poetry for the Christian milieu.  Jesus Christ is portrayed as a hero, an agent.  The verbs used indicate Christ’s willingness to engage the battle with death.  The Rood says, “I saw the Lord of Mankind hasten with such courage to climb upon me.”  This is like Beowulf hastening to battle the dragon.  We don’t get the “Man of Sorrows” type of Christ so popular in later medieval and Renaissance portrayals.  We get a warrior.

Interesting sidenote about the kenning (remember those compound noun metaphors so popular with the scops?) in this line: Jesus is “the Lord of Mankind.”  The Old English word for lord - hlafweard - is itself a kenning – it literally means “loaf protector.”  So your lord is the guy who sees to it that you get fed, you get your “daily bread.”  So . . . if we remember that Christians celebrate communion by breaking bread, reciting Christ’s words at the Last Supper: “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.”  Boom!  Jesus is both the lord and the bread.  That’s just awesome.

Anyway, we get more lines in which Jesus is the active subject of the crucifixion, not the passive object: “Then the young warrior, God Almighty, stripped himself, firm and unflinching.  He climbed upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.  I quivered when the hero clasped me. . . He set his spirit free.”  Christ himself does the stripping, the climbing, the clasping, and the setting free.  None of this is done to him.  So one of the interesting facets of this poem’s portrayal of Christ is the paradox of his humanity and divinity.  This paradox exercised many a theologian and bishop in the early church.  The Rood poet obviates the Christological problems arising from this – how can God suffer? –  by focusing on the heroism rather than the pathos.

Now, since Christ is the Lord (both God and an Anglo-Saxon style heroic warlord) the Rood therefore posits itself as a thane – a follower bound to its lord by that bond of comitatus.  It must stand steadfast by its king.  In its brief recitation of the day’s terrible events, the Rood repeats four times that it “dared not” – it dared not bow or break, it dared not bow to the ground, it dared not stoop, it dared not injure.  Its steadfastness, though, is tinged with fear and regret.  As a thane and as the instrument of its lord’s death, the Rood is forced into disloyalty, into betraying the comitatus bond.  Like the speaker early in the poem, the Rood too then is “stricken with guilt” as well as being stained with sin.  There is a certain pathos, I feel, when the Rood remembers quivering when Christ mounts.

Christ’s disciples, similarly here denominated “warriors” and thus, for our purposes, thanes, seem to abandon the Rood – exile it – when they remove Christ’s body and lay it in the tomb: “The warriors left me standing there, stained with blood; sorely was I wounded by the sharpness of spear-shafts.”  The enemies (who remain anonymous in the poem) soon cut the Rood down and bury it. But the Rood is eventually discovered by other disciples, “followers of the Lord found me there and girded me with gold and shimmering silver . . . On me the Son of God suffered for a time; wherefore now I stand on high, glorious under heaven, and I can heal all those who stand in awe of me.”

You can see the parallels, can’t you?  The cross and the Christ are both betrayed, both felled, both resurrected.  Both occupy this paradoxical ontological space – neither one thing nor the other, neither man nor god, neither weapon nor cure – but both simultaneously and completely.  I get echoes of the riddle poetry we talked about in an earlier episode – the “What am I?” question that marks those brain teasers. A wonderful superabundant ambiguity.

And let’s not leave the dreamer out, the speaker of the poem.  He, too, begins in wretchedness, but is transformed by this dreamworld encounter with the divine.  In lines that recall “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer,” the Dreamer prays to the Rood :”I was alone with my own poor company, / My soul longed for a journey, great yearnings always tugged at me . . . These longings master my heart and mind, and my help comes from the holy cross itself.”

He’s an exile, wandering the earth looking for meaning, looking for purpose – this is the sin and guilt he mentions earlier, a lack of understanding of the right priorities – but now the dream of the Rood has transformed him.  And have you thought about the ambiguity of the poem’s title: “The Dream of the Rood”?  The prepositional phrase is wonderfully equivocal: is it the Rood’s dream (like an aspiration?) or is it a dream about the Rood?  Who’s dreaming here and what kind of dream?

The poem’s dynamic is something called compunctio, like the Latin for compunction, being compelled to do something.  Compunctio in this kind of religious poetry usually depicts an experience, then moves on to a reflection or a meditation on that experience, and then describes some kind of enlightenment for the speaker as a result – the person is better off for having been compelled to reflect upon what has happened to them. 

Pope Gregory the Great, from the turn of the seventh century, has a great quote in his “Dialogues.”  He says, “The penitent thirsting for God feels the compunction of fear at first; later on, he experiences the compunction of love. When he considers his sins he is overcome with weeping because he fears eternal punishment. Then when this fear subsides through prolonged sorrow and penance, a feeling of security emerges from an assurance of forgiveness, and the soul begins to burn with a love for heavenly joys.”  Transformation, redemption, salvation are the ends to which suffering leads.  A hopeful, but unsentimental, reading of the world.

That hopeful and unsentimental dualism features prominently in one of the best known dream vision poems of the later Middle Ages: William Langland’s 14th century allegorical “The Vision of Piers Plowman.”

William Langland was a bastard child and educated in the Church but never took ordination; he remained in minor orders.  Like St. Augustine of Hippo, he spent a reckless and extravagant youth, but repented and focused his mind on the complex relationship between vice and virtue, between man and God.  He felt a great sympathy for the poor and downtrodden in the world, and his writing often takes a stridently anti-clerical note, particularly targeting the hypocrisy and corruption of the Church.  But he was no firebrand.  The Peasant’s Rising of 1381 – primarily in protest against a flat poll tax – cited his “Piers Plowman” as one of its inspirational texts, and so he revised the poem.  He felt that humanity should focus its energies on cultivating the right relationship and true duty to God and not to changing governments.

It’s a very long, and quite complex poem.  Embarrassingly easy to get lost.  As I said, the poem takes the form of an allegory, which is a type of extended metaphor – often in a narrative form – in which truths about the real world are rendered in symbolic forms.  “Piers Plowman” – the title character – for example, is a universalized personification of rural English society.  The ideal everyman and (as the poem goes on) he becomes morphed into other abstract ideals, like the Giver of Charity or the Good Samaritan.  The narrating character is named Will, so not only the nickname for William, but also the personification of human desire or determination, maybe even stubbornness, you know, like a “willful child.”

The poem is crowded with these kinds of personified abstractions – we have Lady Church and Gluttony and Falsehood and Reason as characters.  The main throughline of the poem is Will’s quest to learn how to save his soul: what must he do to get to heaven?  He is told he must discover who Do Good, Do Better, and Do Best are and follow their examples.

As I said, quite a long and tangled work, so I’m only going to hit some highlights that I think touch upon issues germane to this idea of the encounter with the divine.  The poem begins with a prologue in which Will clad himself “in clothes as I’d become a sheep; / In the habit of a hermit unholy of works.”  So, he’s dressed like a country shepherd, in fact he looks like a sheep (surely we get the Jesus as Good Shepherd and the Lost Lamb vibes here).  Will is a sinner, the lost lamb, and he falls asleep on summer day in a field by the Malvern Hills.  In this dream he sees between a tall tower and a deep dungeon, “a fair field full of folk” – a wonderful, teeming cross-section of medieval English society: farmers, hermits, merchants, wastrels, pilgrims.  The whole lot.  They all bustle on in the field between the Tower (signifying Heaven) and the Dungeon (signifying Hell) until a king appears to order society and establish justice. 

There is an amusing little vignette in which a collection of rats holds a conference to deal with the predations of the King’s cat.  They decide to put a collar round its neck with a tinkling bell to serve as warning.  Of course, no rat volunteers to actually affix the collar to the ferocious feline and so they suggest simply murdering the cat.  A mouse points out that the King would only get another cat and they’d be in the same pickle again.  They need the cat, the mouse says, to keep the rats in order: “For if you rats held the reins, you couldn’t rule yourselves . . . I foresee such trouble later.”  Clearly, Langland is giving us a little fable explaining the necessity of government to establish right behavior.  Rather anticipates the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ argument in his Leviathan following the English Civil Wars of the mid-17th century.

Anyway, I said I was focusing on the divine encounter stuff, not the socio-political discourse. But right behavior is essential (Do good, do better, do best) for getting your ticket punched to Paradise.

The poem is arranged in what Langland terms “passusses,” from the Latin for “step.”  The first three begin with Lady Church revealing to Will that Truth gave us worldly goods as a means of life, but that the Devil tempts us with them.  Here, Will asks, “How do I save my soul?” and Lady Church tells him to follow Truth and avoid Falsehood.  Then, in Passus 2, we get the proposed marriage of Lady Mead (mead meaning both reward and bribe), the daughter of Falsehood, to Fraud.  Langland describes her dress in ways that remind me of the Fairy Lady in Lanval.  Simony (the selling of Church offices) and Civil conduct the ceremony, but Theology objects.  So they all trundle to London to consult the king, who suggests Lady Mead marry Conscience, who objects as he feels she is inherently corrupt.  

Langland exploits the ambiguity in Lady Mead’s name to point to the ambiguous moral standing of the medieval church: bribery and reward are based on very different moral categories, but both involve gain, so to what intention?

In Passus 6, Langland offers his vision of proper social organization, and it implies a theory of justice that is probably quite foreign to us.  Piers Plowman offers to lead the people to Truth, but first he must plow his half-acre of land.  While they wait, Piers assigns duties to the people:

Some shall sow sacks to keep the wheat from spilling . . . .

Wives and widows, spin wool and flax, make cloth . . . . 

But a knight interrupts to say that he has not been trained in any domestic duties: “But truly, how to drive a team has never been taught me.  But show me . . . and I shall study plowing.”  

Piers replies:

By St. Paul . . . since you proffer help so humbly,

I shall sweat and strain and sow for us both,

And also labor for your love all my lifetime, 

In exchange for your championing Holy Church and me

Against wasters and wicked men who would destroy me.

And go hunt hardily hares and foxes,

Boars and bucks that break down my hedges,

And have falcons at hand to hunt down the birds 

That come to my croft and crop my wheat. 

To 21st century ears, and taken somewhat out of context, it sounds like Piers could be telling the Knight and all rich toffs to go intercourse themselves.  But I don’t think so: Piers defines duties appropriate to one’s state in a society ordered by Truth.  A plowman plows, a knight fights.  Even aristocratic pastimes like hunting and falconry serve, in some sense, to protect the plowman’s crops from marauding woodland creatures, thus enabling him to more completely fulfill his duty to feed God’s people.  In Piers’ vision, justice is not equality of opportunity or equality of outcomes.  It is not social levelling or protodemocracy or protocommunism.  No talk of equity. Justice is knowing your proper place in the divinely appointed Cosmos and fulfilling the requirements of that place.  I rather think the 1381 revolutionaries only skimmed this part of the reading.

OK, I’ve done a crap job at sticking to the “divine encounter” stuff.  Let me make amends, gentle listener, by taking you to Passus 18: The Harrowing of Hell.  Again, Will finds himself weary of the world and falls asleep.  He dreams of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  Interestingly, in the dream, Jesus looks like “the Samaritan and somewhat Piers the Plowman” – Christ is sort of an everyman, the compassionate and humble.  But Langland also presents him as a knight in a tournament, jousting the Devil.  Christ, the lowly, is also the most noble – the ideal of a type of chivalry we’ve glimpsed in the Lais of Marie de France.  Langland writes: “Because he was a knight and a king’s son, Nature had decreed / That no knave should have the hardiness to lay hand on him.”  You may remember from the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion that Jesus was pierced with a spear in his side to ensure he had died.  Langland takes that scene and makes the piercing a jousting wound.

But of course Jesus is ultimately victorious and the harrowing of hell is kind of the ransom, the prize purse, for his victory.  Do you not know what the harrowing of hell is?  Forgive me, patient listener.  Between Jesus’ death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, tradition has it that he descended into hell to free all the righteous souls that had been trapped there since Adam wore short pants.  It doesn’t appear in the New Testament at all, though, if you squint, you can see possible tenuous strained allusions to it in the first letter of Peter and Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  Mostly, it comes from an extra-biblical text called “The Gospel of Nicodemus” in a section named “The Acts of Pilate.”

Anyway, Jesus saves all the good condemned souls as his victory tribute.  But the allegorical characters Righteousness, Truth, Mercy, Peace, and others enter into a dispute about the appropriateness of this development.  Surely, it is not possible to reverse God’s judgment on Adam!  Peace suggests that this was always part of the scheme: “For had they known no woe, they’d not have known well-being, / For no one knows what well-being is who has never known woe,”  Ok, God is a stern Dad – I’m damning you for your own good.  Death is the joy of life – which might make some sense.  I’ve had students tell me that even if they could, they wouldn’t want to live forever, figuring that life’s brevity is what forces you to live it to the fullest.  There’s a certain wisdom there.  Not sure Tik-tokking is really seizing the day, but everybody likes their own flavor.

Now interestingly, Langland drops a line that seems to indicate that God – or God the Son, anyway – also needs to learn this lesson: “and now he heads for hell, to learn what all woe is like who has learned of all joy.”  Is God, then, not omniscient in Will’s vision, or is this an extreme example of participatory suffering – the Sacred partaking of the travails of the Profane?  I’m not sure, but Passus 18 certainly picks at some pretty sore theological scabs.  “Flesh sins, flesh redeems, flesh reigns as God of God.”  What?!  

The poem is rife with carefully constructed parallels: Reason caused the Fall of Humanity, and Reason raised it up again.  Guile, trickery, occurred first at the Tree of Knowledge and Christ tricks the Devil on the Tree of the Cross.  Right down to the poetic structure itself.  Langland was part of what scholar’s call the Alliterative Revival, a movement in 14th century literature to return to the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, relying upon alliteration and caesura to govern the line (as opposed to French meter and rhyme – perhaps the Hundred Years War between France and England contributed to this somewhat nativist feeling among the literati).  But each line rises to the caesura and then falls away again in its second half – there’s a push and pull, a balanced contrast that is very like a living language.  The verse is supple, the diction immediate and unadorned.  “Piers Plowman,” while perhaps not as sophisticated a poem as, say, those of Langland’s contemporary Chaucer, nonetheless excels at portraying direct personal emotion.  He uses a style derived from the sermons common folk would hear every week, full of popular wisdom and a proverbial style.  Just because it’s a bit rustic doesn’t mean that it isn’t great.

Let me leave you with the final lines of Passus 18, an admonition that I think wonderfully links the 14th century Vision of Piers Plowman to the 9th century Dream of the Rood:

Arise and go reverence God’s resurrection,

And creep to the cross on knees, and kiss it as a jewel,

For God’s blessed body it bore for our good,

And it frightens the Fiend, for such is its power

That no grisly ghost may glide in its shadow.

That is medieval dream theory, folks.  An encounter with the divine that belies the sapientia mundi, the “wisdom of the world.”  Dreams show you the way to go home, if you’re tired and you want to go to bed.

Thanks for listening.  I’ll talk to you next time.