Poetic justice

It is a pleasure to have The Owl and the Nightingale in Simon Armitage’s sprightly translation. As Nick Spencer points out (“Medieval twittering,” December), it belongs to a vibrant tradition of debate poems in both Latin and English.

It’s interesting that so many of these, like Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” contrast two fundamentally opposed attitudes toward life. Alcuin wrote “The Conflict between Spring and Winter,” and later debates pit water against wine, Carnival against Lent, and the body against the soul. Sober wisdom and joyful abandon will never agree, yet a balanced life requires both. The debate can never be resolved.

My favourite example is the French “Dispute Between God and His Mother” from 1450, in which Jesus Christ himself sues the Virgin Mary before the pope in Avignon. He claims that in spite of the opulent homes she owns all over the world (the Marian cathedrals), his mother has left him penniless. But Mary, taking the Owlish role, counters that her son is a feckless ne’er-do-well. Like the Nightingale, he squanders everything he has. In an outrageous satirical ending, the pope sides with Mary, sentencing Jesus to pay all the court costs and maintain his mother’s servants for as long as they live. Barbara Newman, Northwestern University