Plan: Introduction

III. The analysis of the syntactic stylistic devices and form of the poem
As one unravels the intricacies of Piers Plowman, it becomes clear that Langland's creative literary style and complex structure contribute significantly to the poem's rich tapestry of themes and allegorical elements. A deep understanding of both the style and structure of Piers Plowman provides readers with a unique perspective, enabling a more comprehensive appreciation of the poem's themes and impact.
Some key stylistic and structural features of Piers Plowman include:
• Its unique form, written in alliterative verse, where each line's backbone is built upon repeated consonant sounds, enhancing the poem's overall rhythmic quality
• The use of dream visions, which provides a framework for commentary and reflection on various aspects of medieval society and human experience
• The allegorical nature of the poem, in which characters and events stand for abstract concepts, ideas, and moral values
The complexity of Piers Plowman's structure can be seen in the division of the poem into three distinct versions known as A, B, and C. While the differences between these versions are primarily a matter of length and reorganisation of individual sections (called passus), they also reflect a progressive development and refinement of Langland's ideas and social critique. Langland's innovative literary techniques play a significant role in conveying the poem's central messages. By employing symbolism, satire, and allegorical representations, he manages to engage the reader with multifaceted layers of meaning.
A prime example can be found in the character Piers the Plowman, who represents the ideal Christian life. This figure stands for humility, hard work, and charity, while simultaneously taking on a Christ-like role throughout the poem.
Smith is surely right to emphasize the rhetorical importance of Piers Plowman’s Prologue and interludes as well as their inefficacy as the sort of explicit exordial moves recommended in medieval rhetorical treatises. Yet as Middleton has already in part demonstrated, these lyric moments that Smith faults are legitimate commencements in their own right, and what Langland seems to be doing here, as indeed he does throughout the entire poem, is combining a number of literary and discursive modes in order to create a hybrid text that moves repeatedly between lyric inceptions and narrative progression. It is a didactic, allegorical debate poem that proceeds tangentially like a lyric, and it declares that lyrical mode implicitly in its multiple inceptions, which are not repeated attempts to re-commence the poem correctly, but rather overt indications of the poem’s lyric, cyclical structure.
Nor is Piers Plowman’s lyricism confined to its Prologue and interludes. In its gross, cyclical structure, which moves repeatedly from interlude to dream, the poem reveals itself to be more reiterative than sequential, and thus more lyrical than narrative. The repetitive and discontinuous nature of the poem is embodied most clearly in the narrator Will. Isolated by his disruptive awakenings from his visions and his marked inability to put the knowledge he acquires into practice, Will’s experiences over the course of the poem are not progressive, but repetitive and reiterative. The type of discontinuous experience that the poem generates under these conditions is what Northrop Frye would consider an essentially lyrical characteristic. In lyric poetry, he suggests, “we turn away from our ordinary continuous experience in space or time, or rather from a verbal mimesis of it. . . . We are circling around a defined theme instead of having our attention thrown forward to see what comes next.” The lyric poet’s potential for progression is obstructed, his or her attempts to return to an ordinary, continuous experience of time rebuffed by “something that blocks normal activity, something a poet has to write poetry about instead of carrying on with ordinary experience.”
In this image of the frustrated lyricist we can detect a reflection of the narrator, Will, whose incessant search for Dowel and Piers the Plowman draws him repeatedly from normal, waking activity into a series of reiterative visions that he then (so the narrative fiction would have us believe) forms and shapes into the poem that we read. In this sense, Piers Plowman’s lyric form amplifies and reflects Will’s inability to quit the dream world; it is a poetic manifestation of his incessant need to slip from waking reality into visions where divine truth is exposed to view. In this sense, Piers Plowman is much like a long lyric, circling its main themes, contemplating them, giving voice to frustrations never dispelled. But it is also a narrative dream vision that, like so many other instances of the genre in medieval French, English, and Latin literature, is a hybrid encompassing a wide range of poetic registers. The goal of this course paper is to delve into Piers Plowman’s mixed form and expose its intersections with the rich and highly-developed traditions of medieval lyric poetry.
Some scholars argue for the existence of a lyric poetics in Piers Plowman that bears upon the poem’s voiced concerns regarding the moral efficacy of literary production. Lyric poetry, while comprising perhaps the most heavily-criticized literary form within the poem, nevertheless possesses an extraordinary capacity for moral significance on account of its ability to provide an experiential situation, as we shall see in later chapters. But more than merely modeling a moral poetics, Piers Plowman is, in many respects, a commentary on literature itself, and its use and critique of lyric poetry to these ends has received only cursory treatment by modern scholars. Perhaps the greatest difficulty inherent to a study of Piers Plowman and lyric is the definition of the lyric itself. The medieval European lyric genre as literary scholars conceive it is substantial, encompassing thousands of poems in Latin and the vernacular languages. But although the genre is well-attested, it is also poorly-defined, and this by necessity—for any attempt to define the medieval lyric according to its essential characteristics inevitably excludes a range of poems for which modern criticism has found no label more appropriate than “lyric.” The result is a genre more heterogeneous than any other in medieval literature, comprised of a diffuse assortment of poems varying in length, structure, subject, and tone. Some lyrics were obviously set to music while others were not. Some lyrics contain narratives while others are more meditative, dwelling on static images or fragmentary narratives rather than a sequence of events. Some adopt a first-person perspective, while others are in the third-. “We must accept,” Rosemary Greentree concedes in her recent bibliography of the Middle English lyric, “the diverse nature of the [lyric] poems and. . . question the worth of any idea of coherence in the genre.”
In order to address the typological difficulties inherent to any study of medieval lyricism, we need to focus on the idea of lyric as a literary form. “Appraisals of Lyric, Medieval and Modern,” deals with the question of the lyric in its most essential features: what is a lyric, and what constitutes lyricism? Can we analyze medieval lyrics with the same interpretative strategies employed in the critical traditions of other literary periods, or is the medieval lyric a thing apart? “Medieval Genre Theory and Lyric Hermeneutics,” approaches the question of genre from a more medieval perspective, examining rhetorical and commentary traditions to determine whether some developed notion of lyricism obtained in medieval poetics. It then uses these medieval commentaries to identify a lyric hermeneutics at work within Piers Plowman that dictates the manner in which the poem should be read.