In my colleague’s immensely intimate and exciting “Beowulf to Milton” class of early literature in English, I found myself reading the first written English definitively authored by a woman (that we know of anyway—most previous authors wrote anonymously). After the hyper-masculine ethos of Beowulf, I read Marie de France’s lay “Chevrefoil” with delight. I was perhaps most enchanted with what I see as a particularly feminine art: The imbrication of concepts, objects, locales, and stanzas, in a “woven” pattern, the apotheosis of which is the plants that twine around one another. The honeysuckle and the hazel enmesh in a fatal embrace, as the lovers Tristram and The Queen are enmeshed in a fatal love. Feeling such femininity throughout was a balm after the hard edges of the previous text—with its strict adherence to community values and abstract concepts and heroes who must sacrifice all for the good of the community. In an almost cinematic flourish, the lay zooms in on two forbidden lovers without judgement about the love affair’s effect on the body politic. I enjoyed rollicking in this far softer and more personalized worldview, as I can imagine myself inhabiting this world (much as I love it, Beowulf feels foreign and at times overly grim). Again and again, de France’s poem connects the lovers across physical, temporal, and social barriers, representing it as a force of nature in which the lovers have no choice but to love. Nature weaves the “goat-leaf” with the hazel in the same way she weaves the lovers together: Love here is not a force that can (or should) be resisted, but one that, as any natural event, must be endured, though it can also be aesthetically enjoyed and celebrated in song.

The poem also seems to stylistically echo the organizing metaphor of plants snaking around each other: Each grouping of six- or eight-line clusters changes character, location, topic, or narrative style, as R. N. Illingworth notes in “Structural Interlace in the ‘Lai’ of ‘Chevrefoil:’” The poem “is composed in two discrete, interwoven strata, each with its own distinctive rhythm, style, and subject matter” (248), and that moreover, these sizains and huitains toggle between an archaic and a contemporary diction, suggesting that the author is engaging with earlier source material in an intertextual way (Illingworth 255). Thus, the theme of weaving pervades every aspect of the poem, its themes, style, narrative, and organizing metaphor all include imbrication that, to this reader, is even more suggestive of the interconnectedness of culture than a text like Beowulf that is so evidently anxious about maintaining social interconnection. I am wondering if Marie de France achieves this woven world through the poem’s insistence that nature calls the shots:

The two of them were similar
to honeysuckle, which must find
a hazel, and around it bind;
when it enlaces it all round,
both in each other are all wound.
Together they will surely thrive,
But split asunder, they’ll not live.
Quick is the hazel tree’s demise;
quickly the honeysuckle dies.

Where Beowulf needs to continuously guard against contaminating “Otherness” in the form of monsters, “Chevrefoil” allows the world to grow freely and greedily, even if that growth is deadly. The former is an Eden in which Adam has total dominion, and the latter is an Eden in which Eve assumes non-judgmental equality between living things. Love, like vegetation, grows where it will, and we can write about it, but we cannot (and should not) endeavor to control it: Only live with its consequences.

I am struck by the title’s translation, “goat-leaf,” and its evocation of Greek tragedy, a word that means “goat-song.” There is something delightfully absurd in linking darkness, tragedy, and fatal love with goats. Goats are sublimely ridiculous. Even the word in English is absurd, lacking the gravity of the Greek “tragos” and the French “chevre.” The poem, while tragic in its content, is nevertheless playful and joyous in its delivery, a “goat song” in every aspect of its Anglo-Saxon etymology (descended from Dutch geet and Old Saxon gēt), a romp through the ecstatic infidelity of an ancient Queen and her lover, whose threat to the social fabric is never the lay’s focus. No: The honeysuckle must find a holly, in this world. To deny it would be unnatural.

Works Cited

De France, Marie. “Chevrefoil.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1: Tenth Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 131-4.

Illingworth, R. N. “Structural Interlace in the ‘Lai’ of ‘Chevrefoil.’” Medium Ævum, Vol. 54, No. 2, 1985, pp. 248-58.