This week I took the Eurostar to London for just 24 hours, to attend a few meetings and — of all things — a school reunion. Every time I go to England these days I find myself just a little farther removed from the country, just that tiniest bit more “French” (even though however fluent I become, I will never sound like a native speaker). On this trip, for the first time, I realised as I was talking to one friend that I had some vocabulary in French that I didn’t have in English: I didn’t know how to talk in English about working with an entrepreneur, someone who helps to plan and then oversee the refurbishment of a property. Our London house only ever needed quite basic redecorating, so this wasn’t something I dealt with in the UK. (I’m honestly still not sure how to say it, but I think perhaps you’d call this a contractor?)
Of course I read and write in English all the time, and I still speak more English than French because I always speak English to the children and I work mostly at home. So my experience of being distanced from English is a matter only of minute increments, and a much less dramatic process than it is for many people who move abroad at a different stage of life. All the same, it reminded me rather vividly of a passage of poetry I read at the start of this week, in which Clément Marot (1496-1544), writing in the later 1520s, describes how he lost one language and gained another:
Car une matinée,
N’ayant dix ans, en France fus mené;
Là où depuis me suis tant pourmené
Que j’oubliai ma langue maternelle
Et grossement appris la paternelle,
Langue Françoise ès grands Cours estimée,
Laquelle enfin quelque peu s’est limée,
Suivant le Roi François, premier du nom,
Dont le savoir excède le renom.For one morning,
Being not yet ten years old, I was taken to France;
Where I continued so long after
That I forgot my mother tongue
And roughly learned that of my father —
The French language, esteemed in great Courts,
And which eventually was refined
By following King Francis, the first of that name,
Whose knowledge exceeds even his renown.
Here Marot distinguishes between his ‘langue maternelle’ (his ‘mother tongue’ but also specifically his mother’s tongue), that is, the ‘langue d’oc’ spoken in the region of modern France (Quercy) where Marot was born, and his ‘langue paternelle’ (his father’s tongue) of French, spoken as it then was only in part of modern France, including Normandy, where his father, the poet Jean Marot, was originally from.
I have no training in French historical linguistics so I’m not sure, strictly speaking, what you would call the French in which Marot writes (late Middle French?), but it is really almost entirely comprehensible for any experienced reader of the modern language. (My edition contains a useful glossary explaining words a contemporary native speaker would not know, but in most cases the meaning of these is obvious if you have Latin.) I think this is more the case than for English verse of this period, of which, for a start, there is not a great deal. But here, for example, is the start of one of the best known poems by John Skelton (c.1463-1529), a court poet like Marot, who wrote for Henry VII and Henry VIII:
Mirry Margaret,
As mydsomer flowre;
Jentill as fawcoun
Or hawk of the towere:
With solace and gladness,
Moche mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maydenly,
So womanly
Her demenyng
In everythynge,
Far, far passynge
That I can endyght,
Or suffyce to wryghte,
Of mirry Margarete,
As mydsomer flowre,
Jentyll as fawcoun
Or hawke of the towre.1
Skelton’s English is, I think, farther removed from modern English than Marot’s French, but it is also that his literary forms and conventions feel more distant from us, the shape and taste of his rhetoric more alien. Marot’s verse is remarkably accomplished and varied but also — broadly speaking — much more easily readable today. It is also fascinating for the way in which the various styles and forms in which he wrote reflect the major cultural and religious changes his lifetime straddled.
Probably himself an early convert to Protestantism, Marot was briefly imprisoned several times, became a favourite at the French court of Francis I and Marguerite de Navarre for several years, and then was forced into exile in Italy before returning to Paris. (He had to leave again, for Geneva and then Turin, at the very end of his life.) He wrote a hugely popular set of psalm paraphrases — that most archetypal early-Protestant verse form, and the work for which he is most often still cited today. Equally, his later work contains a large number of remarkable verse epistles, a form redolent of the full-blown urbane classicism of the Renaissance, but one that, aside from a few trials of the form by Wyatt, we don’t really see brought successfully into English until the age of Jonson and Donne at the very end of the century. Similarly, he wrote many elegant verse epitaphs, one of the stock genres of Renaissance Latin verse (though Marot wrote them in French).
But Marot also wrote a substantial body of traditional lyric forms: rondeaux, chansons and ballades. These are the sorts of lyric forms associated with late medieval courtly poetry. Marot, the son of a court poet, had been trained in that style but made it his own: his mastery of these forms was such that he could use them for the most contemporary as well as for the most traditional of purposes. Here is his ‘rondeau parfait’ (a somewhat extended version of a traditional rondeau), titled ‘To his friends after his deliverance [from prison]’, written immediately after a brief but evidently formative spell in prison in the spring of 1526. If you look at the French you’ll see that this entire poem contains only two rhymes (mène/maine and oué/oé) and that the four lines of the first stanza reappear as the final lines of each consecutive stanza, before a last stanza which is capped off by a repetition of the opening phrase (‘En liberté’). (I would be very surprised if there is any successful example of this form in English, but do comment if you can think of any examples.)
À ses amis après sa délivrance
En liberté maintenant me pourmène,
Mais en prison pourtant je fus cloué:
Voilà comment Fortune me démène.
C'est bien, et mal. Dieu soit de tout loué.
Les envieux ont dit, que de Noé
N'en sortirais: que la mort les emmène!
Maulgré leurs dents le nœud est dénoué.
En liberté maintenant me pourmène.
Pourtant si j'ai fâché la Cour romaine,
Entre méchants ne fus oncq alloué.
Des biens famés j'ai hanté le domaine;
Mais en prison pourtant je fus cloué.
Car aussitôt que fus désavoué
De celle‑là qui me fut tant humaine,
Bientôt après à saint Pris fus voué :
Voilà comment Fortune me démène.
J'eus à Paris prison fort inhumaine,
À Chartres fus doucement encloué;
Maintenant vais où mon plaisir me mène.
C'est bien, et mal. Dieu soit de tout loué.
Au fort, Amis, c'est à vous bien joué,
Quand votre main hors du pair me ramène.
Écrit et fait d'un cœur bien enjoué,
Le premier jour de la verte Semaine,
En liberté.2
I am working at the moment on a translation of this poem into English verse — quite a challenge because of the considerable formal constraints. But for now here is a more literal translation which still, I think, conveys something of the immediacy of a poem which makes of the intricate, even mannered form of the rondeau something like reportage:
Now in liberty I walk,
But in prison I was nailed:
So Fortune has her way with me:
For good, for bad. God be praised either way.The envious said that I would not
Get out before Christmas: death take them!
Despite their savagery the knot has been untied,
Now in liberty I walk.And even if I have angered the Roman court,
I have never been counted among the truly wicked [i.e. heretics];
I frequented the realm the renowned:
But in prison was I nailed.For as soon as I was disowned
By she who had been so kind3;
At once I was a votary of Saint Pris [an ironic way of referring to prison]:
So Fortune has her way with me:In Paris I had a most cruel prison;
In Chartres more gently was I nailed4.
Now I go wherever my whim leads me.
For good, for bad. God be praised either way.And now, my friends, well played.
When your hand leads me back.
I wrote this with a cheerful heart,
On the first day of Green Week [the start of May],
In liberty.
Marot is conscious of his mastery of French, and this is one of those moments where the two adjacent literary cultures of France and England seem most strikingly out of sync. Most of the things that Marot can do, apparently with ease, in French in the 1520s were still largely impossible in English. There are almost no elegant English epigrams or epitaphs at this period; very few successful classical translations; and when Thomas Wyatt starts to experiment with long-form satires and epistles in English around this time — modelled, like Marot’s, upon Latin hexameter verse, but also strongly influenced by contemporary French poetry — his attempts feel markedly experimental.5 Meanwhile, Thomas More’s English language works of this period, such as the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, have the scintillating immediacy of a language still making the transition from a primarily oral to a literary medium.6
That’s not to say that there isn’t English poetry of comparable sophistication at this period, but just that the great majority of it was still in Latin — Thomas More’s very popular Latin epigrams, for instance, were published as an appendix to Erasmus’s 1518 Basel edition of More’s Utopia. (There was no English translation of Utopia, now so often thought of as a foundational work of literature in English, until the 1550s.) In Italy, 1526 also saw the publication of Jacopo Sanazarro’s De Partu Virginis, a particularly beautiful piece of Renaissance Latin. That poem certainly deserves a post of its own, but like Marot and More, Sanazarro’s beautiful Virgilian poem, which he had been revising carefully for years, became part of the religious turmoil of the age, as it was championed by Pope Clement VII as a weapon against incipient Protestantism.
I left school in the summer of 1997, in that briefest of gaps between the Labour landslide in May and the death of Diana in August. That summer seems a very long time ago now, already a different world culturally and politically, and quite a few of my old teachers remarked on how different it was teaching language and literature in the mid-1990s compared to today. But reading Marot’s poetry from the 1520s has reminded me how different the same historical moment can be, too, even in places as geographically close to one another as England and France, facing very similar tensions and challenges. In the 1520s, you just couldn’t yet do in English poetry what you could in French.
This is the opening part of a long poem called ‘To Mistress Margaret Hussey’. The form here, though not original to Skelton, is so strongly associated with it that it is called ‘skeltonics’. These are short lines without a fixed metrical pattern (either of stresses or of syllables), though usually with two or three stresses each. As you see in this extract, they make use of end-rhyme, though again, not in a fixed pattern, as well as frequent alliteration.
This text is taken from the excellent little Gallimard paperback edition of L’Adolescence clémentine, edited and annotated by Frank Lestringant. Unfortunately, there seem to be relatively few texts and resources for reading Marot online, but there is a good edition of this poem with notes (in French) on this website. I have not found any good online English translations. Burl Horniachek, on Twitter, helpfully noted that there are some translations of Marot in Norman Shapiro, Lyrics of the French Renaissance, but I don’t know this book myself.
Marot says elsewhere that he was denounced as a heretic by a woman, whom he calls Ysabeau.
Marot was imprisoned first in Paris, and then at Chartres.
My favourite of Wyatt’s long poems of this kind is ‘Mine own John Poynz’, which you can read here. Wyatt, most of whose verse was published only posthumously during the 1550s, and who also ended up in prison in the 1530s — accused of an affair with Anne Boleyn — would make a very interesting comparative study with Marot. If anyone knows of such a thing, in either English or French, do let me know.
More uses this feature of the language to great effect in the Dialogue, which is to a large extent about the power (for good or ill) of the spoken word (and Word).
Wonderful poems and what a wonderful face he has--those eyebrows!
Wonderful! I don’t know Marot in the slightest. Thanks for the introduction.
Re English / French proximity, in the 1520s the Pale of Calais was still very much English. Wyatt was an official there for a year and also undertook diplomatic missions to the French court. I wonder if he and Marot ever met?