Look up asterisked terms in Cuddon's and Preston's The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory or Holman-Harmon's Handbook to Literature and possibly a collegiate dictionary. Line numbers are cited in parentheses. Square brackets ([ ]) are used to indicate poems in NAEL6 but not NAEL7; angled brackets (< >) are used to indicate poems in NAEL7 but not NAEL6.

"Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale"

1. Because this poem is a dramatic* lyric*, a compressed dramatic monologue*, its meanings inhere in the portrait that emerges of its speaker in his or her relationship with the person addressed in the poem. Who is the speaker, and how is she deftly portrayed or characterized in the poem, along with her relationship to the addressee? Are people--men and women--still like this?

2. (a) How does the speaker's epithet* or epithetic name, in the title and refrain*, help convey any of her attributes? (b) Look up "clerk" in your collegiate dictionary. The addressee does not work in a store or office, but like Chaucer's "clerk" in the Canterbury Tales is basically what occupation or status? (c) How do 2a and 2b interrelate to suggest ideas about the couple's relationship?

3. What kinds of sentences (in one of the rhetorical classifications--declarative*, interrogative*, exclamatory*, interrogative*) predominate in the poem, and how do they help the poem define or describe the main characters' individual personality and situation, as well as express any general ideas about human nature and behavior?

4. How does the refrain, its repetitiveness, help characterize the speaker's personality and emotions, as well as suggest general ideas about human personality and behavior, or general themes?

5. In what subtle or oblique way does the poem accumulate a religious dimension that resonates in its secular subject and also comments about it and the characters (and humanity)?

6. How does Skelton's tumbling verse* (his skeltonics*!) help portray anything about the speaker's personality, emotional state, or relationship with the addressee? About human beings generally, by extension?

7. In prosody*, what rhythm* and meter* are the poem? What poetic foot* is used, how many feet to the line (dimeter*, trimeter*, tetrameter*, pentameter*, etc.), how many stresses? Do the consonants and consonance* in the poem produce euphony* or cacophony*? Along with question 5, above, how does the prosody help express or convey aspects of character, personality, emotional state, and situation in the poem?

["To Mistress Margaret Hussey" (found on the website for the Norton Anthology of English Literature -- www.wwnorton.com/nael )]

1. (a) How does the poem have a circular, cyclical structure? (b) How does the circular, cyclical structure help Skelton in his particular poetic genre* of encomium* or panegyric*? How does the poem's structure help the poet to praise?

2. How does the circular, cyclical structure of the poem help Skelton (both as poet and speaker) express ideas about his stance or position relative to the subject, Margaret, which in turn helps praise her? What ideas about human psychology in general are (correctly) conveyed here? How does this poem exemplify the genre of the wreath poem?

3. Besides the technical sense from falconry annotated in NAEL5, the word gentle has another, earlier and different, sense from ordinary twentieth-century (American) English, which you should discover in your collegiate dictionary. (It does not primarily mean "mild," "kindly," or "amiable"--hardly the attributes of a falcon, especially falcons depicted as acting as they do in the refrain*.) How does gentle help praise Margaret?

4. How does his even shorter line (in prosody*, what feet*, exactly?) than in "Mannery Margery Milk and Ale" help Skelton portray falcons, Margaret, or the speaker's emotional relationship to Margaret?

5. (a) How do the two primary similes*, repeated about Margaret, help describe or define any of her physical, mental, or emotional attributes? How are the two repeated similes similar in what they suggest about her, but also, paradoxically, contrasting or opposite? What oxymoronic* blend of attributes does Margaret contain? (b) Laurence Perrine in both his Sound and Sense and Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense textbooks classifies seven kinds of imagery*: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic (sense of motion), and organic (inner bodily sensations such as constriction, tightening of muscles). Which kinds of imagery are used in the poem, and how do they contribute to Skelton's encomiastic purpose?

6. The main verb, is, is conspicuously and elliptically omitted in each of the two overall main clauses of the poem (1-19 and 20-34). What effects does this ellipsis* have, and what attributes of the subject, or ideas, does it help to suggest? How might it relate to the circular, cyclical structure of the poem, as well as the poem's genre (encomium)?]

"Lullay, Lullay, Like a Child"

1. What ironic or satiric themes and effects does Skelton achieve through the discrepancy between the associations of the poem's nominal form (lullaby) and its content?

2. How are the refrain lines of the poem especially ironic, setting up a contrast between what they're supposed to do in a lullaby versus what they describe and are supposed to do in this poem (both for their speaker and Skelton standing behind the speaker)?

3. What ideas might the water imagery in the third stanza help express? Characterization of the wife? Freudian overtones? Connections with other liquid imagery in the poem?

4. How do alliteration* and consonance* contribute to the satiric presentation of action and personality in the poem?

5. Look up the word horn in your collegiate dictionary and find a specialized (archaic) sense pertaining to romantic or marital relationships. How is the husband horned in the poem, and how do lines 7, 12, and 27 allude to this standard Renaissance joke about husbands and boyfriends?

["Colin Clout" (lines 47-74 are found on the website for the Norton Anthology of English Literature -- www.wwnorton.com/nael)]

A. The first forty-six lines of this 1280-line poem are important, and should be added to lines 47-74, which given in NAEL6 and on the Norton Online Archive section, sixteenth century, of the norton/nael website:
 

What can it avail  To drive forth a snail,  Or to make a sail  Of an herring's tail?  To rhyme or to rail,  To write or to indict,  Either for delight  Or else for despite?  Or bookes to compile  Of divers manner style,  Vice to revile  And sin to Exile?  To teach or to preach,  As reason will reach?  Say this, and say that,  His head is so fat,  He wotteth never what  Nor whereof he speaketh;  He crieth and he creaketh, He prieth and he peeketh,  He chides and he chatters,  He prates and he patters,  He clitters and he clatters, He meddles and he smatters,

He gloses and he flatters; Or if he speak plain, Then he lacketh brain, He is but a fool; Let him go to school, On a three-footed stool That he may down sit For he lacketh wit! And if that he hit The nail on the head, It standeth in no stead. The Devil, they say, is dead. The Devil is dead! It may well so be, Or else they would see Otherwise, and flee From worldly vanity, And foul covetousness, And other wretchedness, Fickle falseness, Variableness, With unstableness.

1. After looking up in your college desk dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (see "dictionaries" in Holman-Harmon's A Handbook to Literature) the earliest meaning of the word clout, explain how the speaker-protagonist's name (including its forceful alliterativeness) suits his appearance, moral and social authority for what he does in the poem. (Cf. Amos in the Old Testament, e.g., 1:1, 7:10-17.) How does his alliterating name, and particularly surname, pertain to the very genre of the poem, satire*? (Look up the etymology of the word satire in your collegiate dictionary.)

2. How do Skelton's skeltonics* function thematically in this poem, help express any of its main ideas or themes, help characterize the speaker or his subjects and targets? How are lines 50-51 a thematic crux on this point?

3. How does Colin in lines 1-74 (as in later lines) accomplish a simultaneous attack on the "temporality" and "spirituality" while appearing to defend the latter against the former?

4. In contrast to Philip Sparrow and other of his poems, this one has a distinctively greater number of polysyllabic latinate words. Why is this diction appropriate for this poem, for Colin, for Colin's themes, and for Colin's subjects or targets?

5. What pronounced medieval elements or values, including feudalism* are there in the poem? (Compare Chaucer's concerns as evidenced in the Pardoner's Prologue of the Canterbury Tales.)

6. As implied in par. 5 of the NAEL introduction to Spenser, as well as line 21 of "April" and lines 85-90 of "October" of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (in NAEL), how was Spenser somewhat influenced by Skelton? What can be learned about the connotations of the name Colin from the passages in Spenser, and how are these thematic in Skelton's poem?

7. From Chaucer in Middle English literature through Swift and Pope in Restoration and Eighteenth century literature, the satirist has always had a problem in presenting his persona* in his literary works. What criticisms or complaints might the satirist be open to from the public and readers, and how can he forestall these by the persona he presents? How does Skelton's satiric persona Colin Clout deal with these problems of the satirist?

8. Diacritical marks*, such as those indicating that spared and halsed (in lines 22 and 24 of "Lullay, Lullay") and woulde (in line 73 of "Colin Clout") are disyllabic, have almost never been supplied by original authors of literary works but almost always by editors. How did the editors know that such marks needed to be supplied in the examples cited in the first sentence of this question?]
 

<"The Tunning of Elinour Rumming, Secundus Passus">

The whole poem is 623 lines, with a 90-line introduction and then seven sections ("passus" or "fit"). It contains some satire of medieval minstelry, as well as the genre of the paradoxical encomium (praise of the ugly, rather than beautiful, mistress; cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"). The introductory section describes Elinour physically; then the first passus describes her customers, and then indicates at the end some of the content of the next passus. Indentations indicate verse paragraphs*.
 

[Introductory Section of "The Tunning"]     Tell you I chill If that ye will A while be still, Of a comely Gill That dwelt on a hill: But she is not gryl, For she is somewhat sage And well worn in age. For her visage It would assuage A man's courage.     Her loathly lere Is nothing clear, Bug ugly of cheer, Droopy and drowsy, Scurvy and lowsy, Her face all bowsy,  Comely crinkled Wondrously wrinkled, Like a roast pig's ear, Bristled with hair.     Her lewd lippes twain They slaver, men sayne, Like a ropy rain, A gummy glair. She us ugly fair. Her nose somedele hooked, And camously crooked, Never stopping, But ever dropping; Her skin, loose and slack, Grained like a sack; With a crooked back.      Her eyen gowndy Are full unsowndy, For they are bleared; And she gray-haired, Jawed like a jetty; A man would have pity To see how she is gummed, Fingered and thumbed, Gently jointed, Greased and annointed Up to the knuckles; The bones of her huckles Like as they were with buckles Together made fast. Her youth is far past. Footed like a plane, Legged like a crane, And yet she will jet Like a jollivet, In her furred flocket, And gray russet rocket, With simper and cocket. Her hood of Lincoln green It had been hers, I ween, More than forty year; And so doth it appear, For the green bare threades Look like sere weedes, Withered like hay, The wool worn away. And yet, I dare say, She thinketh herself gay Upon the holy day When she doth her array And girdeth in her geets Stictched and pranked with pleats; Her kirtle Bristol-red, With clothes upon her head That weigh a sow of lead. Writhen in wondrous wise After the Saracen's guise, With a whim-wham Knit with a trim-tram Upon her brain-pan; Like an Egyptian Capped about. When whe goeth out Herself for to shew She driveth down the dew With a bair of heeles As broad as two wheeles; She hobbles as a goose With her blanket hose Over the fallow; Her shoon smeared with tallow, Greased upon dirt  That baudeth her skirt.

Primus Passus      And this comely dame, I understand, her name Is Elinour Rumming, At home in her wonning; And as men say She dwelt in Surrey, In a certain stead Beside Leatherhead. She is a tonnish gib, The devil and she be sib.      But to make up my tale, She breweth nappy ale, And maketh thereof pot-sale To travellers, to tinkers, To sweaters, to swinkers, And all good ale-drinkers, That will nothing spare But drink till they stare And bring themselves bare, With "Now away the mare! And let us slay care."      Come whoso will To Elinour on the hill With "fill the cup, fill!" And sit there by still, Early and late. Thither cometh Kate, Cisly and Sarah, With their legs bare, And also their feet Hardely full unsweet; With their heeles dagged, Their kirtles all to-jagged, Their smockes all to-ragged,  With titters and tatters, Bring dishes and platters, With all their might running To Elinour Rumming To have of her tunning. She lendeth them on the same, And thus beginneth the game.      Some wenches come unlaced, Some housewives come unbraced, With their naked pappes, That flippes and flappes, That wigges and wagges Like tawny saffron bagges; A sort of foul drabbes All scurvy with scabbes. Some be flybitten, Some skewed as a kitten; Some with a shoe-clout Bind their heades about; Some have no hair-lace, Their locks about their face, Their tresses untrussed All full of unlust; Some look strawry, Some cawry-mawry; Full untidy tegges, Like rotten egges. Such a lewd sort To Elinour Resort From tide to tide. Abide, abide! And to you shall be told How her ale is sold To Maud and to Mold.

The last lines or verse paragraph of the "Secundus Passus" ([John Skelton: The Complete Poems, ed. John Scattergood, New Haven and London: Penguin Books and Yale UP, 1983; pp. 214-230]; also so named in [John Skelton: Poems, ed. Robert Kinsman, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969; pp.53-70]) or "Second Fit" (The Complete Poems of John Skelton, Laureate, ed. Philip Henderson; 4th ed., 1931, 1948, 1959, London and New York: J.M. Dent & E.P. Dutton, , 1964; pp. 112-130), are misleading in the NAEL7 excerpt, since Skelton is far from completing this poem: he has five more sections ("Passus," "Fit") and about 380 lines to go.

This first reading brings up the issue in textual criticism* and bibliography* of how literary texts are printed in modern books.  Literary works from Old English through the nineteenth century are frequently modernized and sometimes brought into conformity with modern American punctuation and usage, in contrast to how they were printed originally.  Some authoritative editions of writers -- e.g., the Scattergood, Kinsman, or Henderson editions of Skelton's poetry, referred to above -- print the texts either in modernized form (Henderson) or old-spelling form (Scattergood, Kinsman); the latter editions are sometimes called "diplomatic editions" rather than "old-spelling editions."

Compare the modernized text of "To Mistress Margaret Hussey," on the Norton Online Archive, with the old-spelling version in both the Kinsman and Scattergood "diplomatic editions":
 
 

"To Maystres Margaret Hussey"      Mirry Margaret, As mydsomer flowre, Jentill as fawcoun Or hawke of the towre;      With solace and gladnes, Moche mirthe and no madnes, All good and no badnes; So joyously So maydenly, So womanly Her demenyng; In every thynge Far, far passynge That I can endyght Or suffyce to wryght Of mirry Margarete, As mydsomer flowre, Jentyll as fawcoun Or hawke of the towre.      As pacient and as styll And as full of good wyll As fayre Isaphill; Colyaunder, Swete pomaunder, Good Cassaunder; Stedfast of thought, Wele-made, wele-wrought; Far may be sought Erst that ye can fynde So corteise, so kynde As mirry Margarete, This midsomer flowre, Jentyll as fawcoun Or hawke of the towre.

Although Shakespeare's English and texts strike most students as very old, usually these are actually presented in modernized form, including the Americanization of spelling and punctuation.  Some old-spelling editions of various of Shakespeare's texts exist and present much the same difference in appearance as the old-spelling versus modernized texts of Skelton's poetry.