Ekphrasis and the Polytemporal in Piers Plowman

Abstract

Piers Plowman is probably one of the most abstruse poems in our language. Its structure has been regarded as unwieldy, disjointed, confusing; readers have lamented how little they feel the text hangs together. The poem’s structure, far from a linear narrative, has been the subject of much critical surmising and debate. “It might be possible,” William Elford Rogers contends, “to write the history of criticism of Piers Plowman as a narrative of the quest for structure.”¹ The poem, excellent hybrid that it is, consists of the combination of many different literary genres, from the débat to beast fable to allegory to the dream vision. It employs the dream vision genre as its overarching framework, but it is a dream vision whose form has been pushed to its limits, for there is not only one sleep/awakening cycle but multiple cycles that progress to the point, most especially in the C-version of the text, where the reader can no longer tell the difference between reality and dream, nor can she ascertain the time sequence or duration of the poem’s action and event. The more time one spends with the text, the more one realizes that it is carefully woven together in a pattern that circles, comes back to the same ideas and principles over and over again, in new contexts and under different aspects. An ekphrastic reading—a reading predicated on the visual patterning of composition and how such composition is culturally fabricated—is equipped to make sense of these patternings and tensions that make Piers Plowman so difficult for readers.²