Medieval & Renaissance poetry: exploring time through text

“This literature – which to us can sometimes seem difficult, exotic, highbrow, remote – is the product of a certain sensibility and a particular context. The idea of these sessions is to find little doors through which to step into that world and find ways to relate to it through the poetry and human artefacts as representations of that time.”

Vivien Kogut

The eighth century English monk Bede wrote a famous parable in which man’s life is compared to the flight of a sparrow crossing a warm hall on a dark, wet night: the sparrow comes “from winter into winter again”, his time in light and warmth lasting but the “blink of an eye”. Eight hundred years later, English poets believed they could trick all-devouring time through the power of words.

And today, another five centuries later, what does poetry tell us about time? And what different ‘times’ do we find in poetry? Can Medieval and Renaissance literature speak to our own perception of time? And what can objects tell us about our relationship with words across time?

This study invites readers to dive into poems and objects from the past in search of dialogues around time and literature. Focusing on the experience of reading poetry from the 10^th to the 17^th century we will try to rethink our notions of brevity and eternity, of rush and delay, of beginnings and endings. 

Each of four sessions will focus on a different genre of poetry expressing ‘time’:

1.      Old English elegies

“Thus this middle-earth droops and decays every single day;
and so a man cannot become wise, before he has weathered
his share of winters in this world”

Anonymous, The Wanderer

2.     Old English riddles

“It was swift in its going:
Faster than birds it flew through the sky”

Anonymous, Riddle 51

3.     Medieval ballads

“O’er his white bones, when they are bare,
The wind shall blow for evermore.“

Anonymous, The Two Corbies

4.     Elizabethan poems

“Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.“

Edmund Spenser, Amoretti: LXXV

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four meeting study on Zoom led by Vivien Kogut
• Thursdays, 6.30 – 8.30 pm (UK)
• 13, 20, 27 February and 6 March
• £120 for four meetings, including notes and resources