The Use and Abuse of Nature in Dunbar's Tretis (excerpt)

An objective assessment of the wedo in William Dunbar's Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, though the poem is couched in bawdiness and low humor, reveals her as the full embodiment of the "Venus turned monster" that Alain de Lille's personified goddess Nature dreads. Although critical opinion of the poem tends to accentuate its comic aspects, there is an acute seriousness about it that should not be ignored, belying the opinions of those who would deny that Dunbar could be effectively humorous and grave in the same poem. Certainly, none can deny Dunbar's poetic virtuosity. His relatively small oeuvre displays a mastery of verse forms spanning the entire range of poetic creation in his time. "The Thrissil and the Rose" and "The Golden Targe" demonstrate that he was as capable of writing a pure romance as "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie" displays his mastery of the satirical abuse tradition.

Thus when, as in the tretis, Dunbar chooses to combine the hautand and the mene, he brings together two disparate creative threads and merges them into a whole that reveals itself to be much more than what C. S. Lewis opines to be merely a practical joke on his courtly audience. The contrast between the romantic tableau with which the poem opens and the base conversation that ensues is enormous, but the behavior described by the three women, and most specifically the wedo, goes well beyond the comedic and into the realm of the pathological. Indeed, the matrimonial lifestyle that the wedo describes in her "sermon" is as exaggeratedly unrealistic as the fairy tale relationships of the romances. Dunbar deliberately creates a mutual antithesis between these two extremes that surrounds and offsets the more realistic tales told by the two wives.

The garden of pastoral perfection with which the poem opens is as familiar today as it must have been to Dunbar's auditors, with a recent history traceable back through Lydgate, Chaucer, and Jean de Meun, among others. Almost immediately, the first of many nature images is presented:

Quhairon ane bird on ane bransche so birst out hir notis

That never ane blythfullar bird was on the beuche hard.

This is the unsullied garden of the romance, "that nature [had] full nobillie annamalit with flouris," such as Dunbar presents without compromising the genre in the "The Thrissil and the Rois," and as the ladies are first described, they conform to the garden's standards of perfection to the extent that they seem conjoined in their depiction. When the narrator describes

thre gay ladies . . . in ane grein arbeir

All grathit in to garlandis of fresche gudlie flouris

either the arbeir or the ladies could be taken to be grathit, for the images tend to run together. In a like manner, nature reflects the beauty of the ladies in that "the gressis did gleme of the glaid hewes" of "thair glorius gilt tressis" and, while the description of "thair faceis meik" begins with a traditional comparison to lilies and roses, the flower imagery then proceeds to dominate the sentence and displaces the women, culminating with the figure of Nature, here mentioned specifically for the first time, occupying the ordinate position as creator of both.

Nature, at this early stage of the poem, is the personified goddess that Dunbar would have known from her appearances in several of Chaucer's earlier works, especially The Parlement of Foules, and in The Roman de la Rose, among other romances. Chaucer was one of the first English poets to personify 'Nature' in this manner, and Dunbar intimates here the stature that she enjoys in these works as "the vicaire of the almyghty Lord," charged with the creation and maintenance of all life on earth.

Yet, he does not directly portray her, as Chaucer does, or as he himself does in other poems, for the imminent transmogrification of the three wives from the stuff of romance to that of reality makes it impossible. The conflict implied at this point is one between the powers that affect men's actions, not between man and those powers, and such a confrontation directly portrayed would compromise both the incarnation of the ineffable and the realism of humanity as it is portrayed here. Once the ladies' debate begins, the word nature will no longer be used in this sense, for the poem will have ostensibly departed from the confines of the garden. In language, image and spirit, the emphasis of the poem, from that point on, will be in what more closely resembles the real world of sixteenth century Edinburgh.

Nature is an important word and a crucial concept in Dunbar's poetry, used in many of his works with variant meanings that encompass virtually all of its contemporary definitions. In the Tretis, it is particularly important, for many of the divergent meanings of the word are utilized in this one poem, and Dunbar demonstrates by this usage the conflict of Reason and Love, of Nature and Venus, that has become semantically inherent in the disparate senses of the word, a conflict recognized long before the time of the medieval poets, and adapted into the romances as a clash of personified deities.