Land of Cokaygne free essay sample

The poem that I will study is entitled the Land Of Cokaygne and it belongs to the â€Å"Kildare poems†. The Kildare poems are a group of sixteen poems written in an Irish dialect of Middle English and dated to the mid-14th century. Together with a second, shorter set of poems in the so-called Loscombe Manuscript, they constitute the first and most important linguistic document of the early development of Irish English in the centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. The poems have religious and satirical contents. They are preserved in a single manuscript in the British Library, where they are scattered between a number of Latin and Old French texts. The conventional modern designation Kildare poems refers both to the town of Kildare in Ireland, which has been proposed as their likely place of origin, and to the name of the author of at least one of the poems, who calls himself Michael (of) Kildare. We will write a custom essay sample on Land of Cokaygne or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The authors or compilers were probably Franciscan monks So what is a land of Cockaygne : it is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. So it’s actually a utopian world. t’s a theme or a world that belongs to the European folklore Some critics focused on its Irish provenance and according to them the poems have some relationship with the Old French Fabliau de Cocagne (1250) and the Middle Dutch Dit is van date dele Land van Cockaengen ( but in don’t have the date) This poem is seen as a satire, a parody and a burlesque text. We can actually say that his text is also content some element of Utopia because it deals with a sort of mythic world which is better than Heaven. This theme is not something new because according to Professor Bella Millet, it comes from three main traditions: * The classical tradition: and we can refer to True History by Lucian, a Greek work of the second century AD which deals with a comical paradise full of drinks, food and women * The Christian tradition: we can refer to Alexander the Great’s description of the Heaven and the Earthly Paradise * The Goliardic tradition too: one Latin poem of the twelfth century (Carmina Burana 222) is spoken an abbot of Cockaygne who presides over drinking and gambling, and the descriptions of the two abbeys in Cockaygne, which invert the usual norms of religious life, echo themes found elsewhere in Goliardic poetry According to Wim Tigges, who makes an interesting paper on the Land of Cokaygne ( that I used in order to do my presentation) the poem is based or develops some variants of the Other World which are : * the land of fair ease whose bliss consists in a superfluity of food an d drinks. This land is separated from the outside world by an unpleasant obstacle * the earthly Paradise of the Christian legend the Celtic myths of the blessed isles : a land, traditionally located near the place where the sun sets, to which the souls of the good were taken to enjoy a life of eternal bliss. OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY * There is also an echo to the fabulous western island described in the Old Irish Travelogues and it seems to be parodied in the text * Some account of the Golden Age : it echoes the Ovid’s Metamorphoses * It’s based also on the medieval tradition of the locus amoenus ( I will give a def. latter) * And , The notion of the cloister as a paradise We will know focus on the text which is composed of several parts and we will see that the poem is actually a folk-tall based on satire and irony. In this first part, the poem opens on the description of the Land of Cockaygne, a land that seems to be better that Heaven as we see line 3 to 6 : â€Å"no place on earth compares to this – for sheer delightfulness and bliss – thought paradise is fair and bright- cockaygne is finer sight†. The author gives us all the assets of this wonderful land but we quickly realized that there are not a lot of differences between the Land of Cockaygne and Heaven: as in Eden and in Cockaygne there is no care for labor (line 18) there is no nightfall (line 26) – no quarrel (line 27– no death (28) and no dangerous or harmful animals (line 31). But he excludes â€Å"common† animals from the land as horses or cows, which is a bit paradoxical because they are not harmful. So we may relate those exclusions with the absence of labour : people in that land do not have to take care of it. By then, we see that the author invites us to believe that every unpleasant things simply do not exist in that world : as the muck because there is no animal , or bad weather and even blindness. However one element is often repeated in the description of the land which is the elements of food and alcohol and this latter does not exist in Heaven, which is one of its defect : â€Å"no alcoholic drink at all l. 12†. According to me we can associate these references to gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins which is also one of the folkloric feature of the Cockaygne imagery. So first we only have a â€Å"classic† presentation of a â€Å"perfect† Utopia, of an unrealistic place but when we keep reading, we notice that the description of the rivers which are rivers of oil, milk, honey and wine ( which by the way echoes Paradise’s rivers) introduces this notion of absurd and satire that we will find all along the text. Indeed at first we can think that this description is only a metaphor in order to praise, to speak highly of the Land of Cockaygne, a kind of continuity of the previous description. But when we reach the second part of the poem we understand that we should take this description seriously because there is in this land an abbey which is completely made of food : as we can see from line 51 to 62 =gt; the author here introduces a folkloric imagery which obviously makes us smile and we can help to imagine that building made of food. And once again, line 61-62, there is another invitation to gluttony: in this wonderful world we can eat everything we want and when you want as well. So here, the author clearly underlines that the monks are living in idealistic and surrealistic world and we may be question the credibility of the monks because at the end of the Middle Ages there was a sort of â€Å" anti-monastic† criticism. The monastery was seen at that time as a place secluded from the world in which monks could play and do their task. This satire may be directed against the Cistercian abbey. As I found on the website of Millet, the Cistercian were a reformed order who followed a stricter and more ascetic way of life than the ordinary black Benedictine monks In our text, the monastery fit with the tradition of Cockaygne ( line 54 to 66) and indeed George Ellis published in his novel In Specimens of Early English Poets ( 1790) a 13th century French poem called â€Å"the Land of Cockaign† where I quote the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing. And it’s also a mixture of LOCUS AMOENUS of medieval romance, as I aid previously in the introduction. A definition of the LOCUS AMOENUS (that I found on the internet) : it’s a literary term which refers to an idealized place of safety or comfort. It is often a beautiful, shady lawn or open woodland with connotation of Eden. There are 3 recurrent patterns in a LOCUS AMOENUS : water; grass and trees and we find an accumulation of all of these elements in our text and it give us the impression that the author is exaggerating, that is a parody of the LOCUS AMOENUS Then, in a new episode, we are asked to believe that roasted geese and larks fly in the sky into the abbey and that they announced themselves with a kind of cry I QUOTE line 114 : â€Å" geese all hot, all hot†. It is obviously an absurd scene that invites us to picture the whole scene and there is even a kind of contrast we the previous passage with the birds which are sweetly singing. Obviously the author’s purpose is to amuse the reader, to distract him from the real life. Then, the poet finally tells us the lifestyle of the monks of the abbey. They are young (l. 121) and they are able to flight and no birds can compete them because they have â€Å" Fluttering sleeves and hoods† (l. 126). We know also that they do not obey their Abbot so in order to make them land, he has to beat a maiden’s rear as if he was, actually, giving them the hour in order that they start working again. Once they land, they start to â€Å"dance† around the girl giving her a pat on her rear as well. The poet records us the scene as if it was a common event, a kind of ritual that they do every day. In this episode is a mixture of both absurd and satire. Indeed the author gives us a completely different image, aspect of the monastery’s life, we have a caricature of the monks: they do not respect their vow of obedience and in the next part we will see that they did not respect their vow of chastely as well. In the last part of the poem, we are invited to see another â€Å"side† of the religion: it’s the description of a nunnery. As the monks, the nuns are young (l. 152) and during the hot days of summer they swim naked in one of the fourth river of the Land. As I read in T. D Hill’s explication: the sweet milk, the boating and the naked swimming are supposed to underline their innocence and even their chastity. But obviously the monks see them and they â€Å"instruct† the nuns. It’s a new aspect of the folkloristic Cokaygne which is the sexuality. The act of intercourse in the medieval text, is always â€Å"subtle†, is always paraphrased and here in terms of prayers and dancing. It’s a criticism and a satire of the clerical life, the vows of chastity is not respected. And eventually, the poem closes on another folkloric feature of Cockaygne: the one who will sleep the much will be rewarded and, I QUOTE : â€Å" and the monk who sleep the best – and gives himself a thorough rest- may if he cultivates the habit- hope to end up as Father Abbot. It’s a reference to sloth one of the deadly sins. It’s completely absurd because even now days we will never be rewarded is we do nothing, it will be great if it was true = the aim here is again to make us dream. Then, the end of the text gives us the key to enter into the Land of Cockaygne : we have for seven years, I QUOTE â€Å" wade through pigshit to his chin – the pleasure of Cockaygne to win†. We may interpret it by the fact that we have endured a harsh life in order to have the right to enjoy such bliss. We have to experience a penance to access the land but once again the penance is quite absurd, which is aligned with the tone of the entire poem. Moreover the end of the poem can be considered as a parody of a moral that we found at the end of tall tales To conclude we easily understand that of course this kind of text does not have a serious purpose. The aim of the poem is to allow the reader to enter into a world where all the restrictions of the society are defies, were sexual liberty is open and where food is plentiful. Moreover it is also a kind of text that mix all sort of genres in order to be accessible to everyone.