I Sing of a Maiden that Is Makeless (Matchless, Mateless)

DESCRIPTION: "I sing of a maiden that is matchless/mateless, King of all kings To her son she chose." Jesus arrives as still as dew in April to his mother's bower. "Mother and mayden Was never none but she. Well may such a lady God's mother be."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: c. 1430 (British Library -- Sloane MS. 2593)
KEYWORDS: religious Jesus nonballad childbirth MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (15 citations):
Hirsh-MedievalLyric-MiddleEnglishLyricsBalladsCarols #12, "(I syng of a mayden)" (1 text); there is a photo of the manuscript on p. 39
Rickert-AncientEnglishChristmasCarols, p. 6, "As Dew in April" (1 text)
Sidgwick/Chambers-EarlyEnglishLyrics LIV, p. 107, "(no title)" (1 text)
Stevick-OneHundredMiddleEnglishLyrics 38, "(no title)" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #1367
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #2281
ADDITIONAL: E. K. Chambers, _English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages_, Oxford, 1945, 1947, p. 91 (no title)
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #188, pp. 432-433, "I Sing of a Maiden" (1 text)
Douglas Gray, _The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose_, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 161, "I SIng of a Maiden" (1 text)
Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, _Middle English Lyrics_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974, p. 170, #170 (no title) (1 text)
Karen Saupe, editor, _Middle English Marian Lyrics_, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1998, #13, p. 61, "(I syng of a myden)" (1 text)
R. T. Davies, editor, _Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology_, 1963, #66, p. 155, "I Sing of a Maiden" (1 text)
Karin Boklund-Lagopolou, _I have a yong suster: Popular song and Middle English lyric_, Four Courts Press, 2002, p. 67, "(I syng of a maiden)" (1 text)
Carleton Brown, editor, _Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century_, Oxford University Press, 1939, #81, p. 119,"The Maiden Makeles" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: {MSSloane2593}, London, British Library, MS. Sloane 2593, folio 10
NOTES [930 words]: When I started adding Middle English texts to the Index, I for a very long time resisted including this -- although it is found in the extremely important MS. Sloane 2593, that is the only full text, which is not much attestation, and to me it looks like a church piece, not folk.
However, it is extremely well-known and liked -- e.g. Hirsh-MedievalLyric-MiddleEnglishLyricsBalladsCarols, p. 47, declares it "Quite possibly the greatest of all Middle English lyrics, a sophisticated, allusive, and engaging poem, which is both simple yet complex, affecting yet detached, reflective yet celebratory. Just as poems about the Nativity often encode Christ's passion, so this poem, so ostensibly about the Annunciation, encodes Christ's birth, which it identifies both in natural and scriptural imagery, and as a lover coming to his beloved." Many college English courses include it in their texts.
And there is a brief citation in a sermon of the period, which it has been claimed is evidence that it was widely known. I am far from sure I agree, but when in doubt, I index. The citation, according to the DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, is from Oxford, Bodleian Library Barlow 24, folio 188: "Mayde wyff and moder whas neuer but ye, Well may suche a Lady Goddys modyr be" -- an English text within a Latin sermon.
Also, the great scholar W. W. Greg saw similarities to a poem, "Nu þis fules singet hand maket hure blisse," which is found in MSCambridgeTrinity323: Cambridge University, Trinity College MS. 323, the manuscript which contains "Judas" [Child 23] (Boklund-Lagopolou, p. 67).
The full text of the Trinity MS. text can be found in Brown, #31 ("I Sing of One That is Matchless"), p. 55; it begins
Exemplum de beata virgine & gaudiis eius
Nu þis fules singet hand maket hure blisse
and þat gret up þringet and leued þe ris;
of on ic wille singen þat is makeles,
þe king of halle kinges to moder he hire ches. (5 additional stanzas.)
The crucial lines are the third and fourth of the above:
"Of one I will sing that is makeless/matchless,
The king of all kings to be his mother he chose."
The connection between the two pieces is affirmed by Fowler, p. 57, but he adds that this differs from that "in important ways. For example, the earlier lyric relates that the king of all king chose the Virgin as his mother, whereas this song represents Mary as choosing him to be her son, thus emphasizing the Virgi's vluntary acceptance of her role as mother of the Redeemer."
Obviously the mention of a matchless maiden is the same. Literary dependence seems likely to me, too, although I don't think it absolutely certain. Also, it is possible that both could get the image from a third source.
Fowler also calls it "an excellent illustration of the difficulty of classifying Middle English lyrics as either 'secular' or 'religious,'" pointing out on p. 58 that "We are told that He who approaches is her Son, and yet his approach is also that of a lover, as is delicately suggested by the dew imagery, which has amorous meaning in secular song [as in "The Foggy Dew'], as well as redemptive significance in biblical texts such as Isaiah 45:8." Fowler goes on to compare the structure of this to the "purely amorous" piece "I Have a Gentle Cock" (a piece I'd call just plain dirty; for discussion of it, see the notes to "The Grey Cock, or, Saw You My Father" [Child 248]).
In addition to printing the text, Luria and Hoffman inlude four papers about this piece (only a tiny fraction of the critical literature) by Thomas Jemielity and Stephen Manning, D. G. Halliburton, and Leo Spitzer (pp. 325-349).
Hirsh (following various others) suggests that the stillness mentioned repeatedly in this song is derived from Wisdom of Solomon (the supposed source of a lot of Christmas material that bears only the faintest relation to the claimed source). In this case, the allusion is to Wisdom 18:13-15, given in the New Revised Standard Version as:
[13] ...God's child [the Greek says "son"].
[14] For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half-gone,
[15] your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne...
Hirsh also mentions Isaiah 26:19 ("For your dew is a radiant dew") and Hosea 14:6 (actually 14:5, "I will be like the dew to Israel") as "a symbol for renewal and joy." One might perhaps add Judges 6:36-40, where Gideon asks God for two signs involving dew on a sheepskin.
(The link to Gideon came to me independently, but it apparently is old. John Lydgate's Marian poetry refers to Gideon's fleece, so the imagery is apparently well-known; Pearsall, p. 271, cites the lines of this poem that (when modernized) read "He came al so still There his mother was, As dew in April, That falleth on the grass" and says "The bush burnt with the fire of the Holy Ghost but was not consumed or touched; Gideon's fleece was wet with the dew of the Hoy Ghost... while the threshing floor of [Mary's] virginity remained dry and inviolate; Aaron's rod blossomed, though dry when it was put in the tabernacle.")
According to InterpretersDict, volume I, p. 839, "As a figure of speech, 'dew' represents abundant fruitfulness (Gen. 27:28), refreshment and renewing (Ps. 110:3, Hos. 145-H[ebrew] 14:6), what is beyond man's powers (Mic. 5:7-H[ebrew] 5:6), a silent coming (II Sam. 17:2), impermanence (Hos. 13:3), and exposure (Song of S. 5:2)." Obviously all but the last two fit with this poem.
The piece was set to music by Benjamin Britten.
For more on manuscript Sloane 2593, see the notes to "Robyn and Gandeleyn" [Child 115]. - RBW
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