When we think, as one does, of medieval motifs revived in the aesthetic of a later era, we naturally think first of the Victorians. What could be more emblematic of this aesthetic revival than, for example, Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” (unless it’s the Gothic-revival Anglo-Catholic flagship parish church, All Saints, Margaret Street, in London, built in the 1850s, at the height of the Tractarian Movement)? The English poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984), once described the church’s architect, William Butterfield (1814–1900), as having “picked up where the Middle Ages left off.”

The architectural shift in the nineteenth century, from the restrained classicism of the Regency era to later neo-Gothic extravagances, may seem abrupt to us, appearing out of nowhere. But the shift in the cultural imagination was almost a century in the making. It begins, in fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, with the Romantics, represented on the most popular level by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). Born in the reign of George III, dying a scant five years before the ascent of Victoria to the British throne, Scott straddled literary eras in much the same way that Thomas Hardy, whose “Darkling Thrush” ran as the Poem of the Day this past January, bridged the divide between the Victorian era and twentieth-century modernism. Such poems as “Lochinvar,” which Sun readers may recall as the poem marking Scott’s birthday last August, capture the Romantic fascination with a wild, Celtic-flavored heroic past even while they presage the all-out medieval revivalism of the Pre-Raphaelites. 

Today’s poem, “Proud Maisie,” though a more modest poem than “Lochinvar,” with its epic ambitions, also bears the stamp of Romantic nostalgia. At the same time, for us looking back, it calls to mind the early Yeats, whose “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and “Down by the Salley Gardens,” both of which featured in our Yeats Week last summer, have the feel of cultural artifacts, poems much older than they actually are.

Similarly, “Proud Maisie,” with its brevity and its rhymed quatrains of alternating  trimeter and dimeter lines, recalls the flavor of the medieval lyric with such an accurate ear that we might mistake Scott’s work for a far more ancient poem. At the same time, despite its lyric brevity, the poem’s narrative impulse channels the medieval ballad tradition. Either way, the story is simple: a proud woman, walking in the woods, asks the prophetic robin when her wedding shall be. The robin replies — echoed by the owl, that ominously symbolic fowl — by foretelling her death instead. 

Proud Maisie 
by Sir Walter Scott 
 
Proud Maisie is in the wood, 
Walking so early; 
Sweet Robin sits on the bush, 
Singing so rarely. 
 
“Tell me, thou bonny bird, 
When shall I marry me?”— 
“When six braw gentlemen 
Kirkward shall carry ye.” 
 
“Who makes the bridal bed, 
Birdie, say truly?” — 
“The gray-headed sexton 
That delves the grave duly. 
 
“The glowworm o’er grave and stone 
Shall light thee steady; 
The owl from the steeple sing, 
‘Welcome, proud lady.’” 

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.