Malory's work, rather than Layamon's Brut, has been the storehouse to which later poets have turned. Many nineteenth-century poets are indebted to Malory. Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Matthew Arnold's Death of Tristram, Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, and William Morris's Defense of Guinevere were inspired by the Morte d'Arthur. Few English prose works have had more influence on the poetry of the Victorian age.
Scottish Poetry.—The best poetry of the fifteenth century was written in the Northern dialect, which was spoken north of the river Humber. This language was just as much English as the Midland tongue in which Chaucer wrote. Not until the sixteenth century was this dialect called Scotch.
James I. of Scotland (1406-1437) spent nineteen years of his youth as a prisoner in England. During his captivity in Windsor Castle, he fell in love with a maiden, seen at her orisons in the garden, and wrote a poem, called the King's Quair, to tell the story of his love. Although the King's Quair is suggestive of The Knightes Tale, and indeed owes much to Chaucer, it is a poetic record of genuine and successful love. These four lines from the spring song show real feeling for nature:—
"Worshippe, ye that lovers be, this May,
For of your bliss the kalends are begun,
And sing with us, 'Away, Winter, away,
Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!'"
Much of this Scotch poetry is remarkable for showing in that early age a genuine love of nature. Changes are not rung on some typical landscape, copied from an Italian versifier. The Northern poet had his eye fixed on the scenery and the sky of Scotland. About the middle of the century, Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote.—
"The northin wind had purifyit the air
And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky."[2]
This may lack the magic of Shelley's rhythm, but the feeling for nature is as genuine as in the later poet's lines:—
"For after the rain when, with never a stain
The pavilion of heaven is bare."[3]
William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who lived in the last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving student of the nature that greeted him in his northland. No Italian poet, as he wandered beside a brook, would have thought of a simile like this:—
"The stonés clear as stars in frosty night."[4]