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Fragments of Song: W. S. Merwin and the Troubadours

In his influential 1949 volume on the C-text ofPiers Plowman, E. T. Donaldson chooses to include a chapter entitled "The Poet: Biographical Material." He writes: "The reader ofPiers Plowman is almost inevitably seduced into making speculations about its author, so curiously provocative and attractive is the personality that casts its shadow upon every page of the poem" ( 1 99). Though this kind of sly, erotic metaphor is characteristic of Donaldson's prose, in this case the idea of the cantankerous Langlandian personality turned seducer ofthe hitherto innocent medievalist creates a comic but revelatory effect. There is an implied and, I would argue, artificial dichotomy here in which the mode ofpure, morally upright scholarship must guard against the illicit, séance-like fantasy of communing with the dead. Donaldson is well aware of the humor, and Langland, as Anne Bancroft to his Dustin Hoffman, refuses to leave him alone: