sir gawain and the green knight: the seasons wheeling, bodies that grow from the earth, time and space

spring starts and the seasons change

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This is part four of my Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translation and commentary project. You can read the first three parts (which cover all of book one of the poem) along with my introduction to my goals and limitations in this scrappy free verse translation in the first three parts. You can find these at:

• Part one

• Part two

• Part three

Now we’re through the beginning of the poem and we’ve seen the game, the Christmas game and the horror game, really begin. I’m fascinated by the ways in which gameplay demarcates time and space in this poem. When the Green Knight arrives in the court to declare the beginning of the beheading game with Gawain, he brackets off a year of everyone’s life to become ‘play time’ where we will venture into ‘play space’.

I hope you’ll allow me to do literary theory for a minute. Bear with me. I’m fascinated by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes, which links the way stories present time and space. Thinking about a story’s chronotope invites us to consider how it presents a single ‘spacetime’. That sounds very abstract but chronotopes are easy to sense — think about Frodo and Sam setting out from the Shire. At home in the Shire, space and time were described one way, but then we set out on an adventure and both change to suit the story. Suddenly we’re on an adventure, and both time and space bend in new ways. It’s a bit abstract and hard to condense down into a substack paragraph, but I love thinking about Gawain in terms of chronotope.

The Green Knight appears and announces a change that will affect both space and time. He enters King Arthur’s hall and changes the space around him, bringing a holly bough from the outside in, turning the castle hall inside out. His beheading (or fake beheading, or kinda beheading) starts a countdown. Gawain’s relationship with time and space changes. His life is now a journey and a countdown, and all of it is coloured green by the terms of the Green Knight’s game.

I had a professor at undergrad who talked a lot about reading Gawain as a dream vision. This way of reading really stuck with me — I like the idea of approaching dreaminess as a story about a passage into a strange place and out again. Anywhere can be a dreamworld if it’s odd enough, if you pass a threshold from the place you’re familiar with into somewhere ‘other’. The people in all my MA classes probably (definitely) got sick of me saying ‘but what if we read this as a dream?’ about almost every text we read. I’m not sorry. Everything is at risk of being a dream.

So here at the start of part 2 of Gawain our sense of time and the world around us has been coloured green. We live in the Green Knight’s world now. Everything that follows from here is a slow slide into the poem’s catastrophe. We’ve seen one beheading and now we’re waiting for the next one. Here at the start of book two, we definitely have a long while to wait until we hear the axe fall again.

You could view this long slow middle of the poem as a sort of literary fly-over state. I hope you don’t, though — not least because we’ll be here for a while and I’d like to imagine some sort of readership for the next two thousand lines of poetry. I like this slow crawl towards the undergrowth. I hope you’ll come along and I hope you don’t mind it taking a while.

This is another short section because I feel like book two of the poem contains very distinct emotional states and focuses — I’d rather split my sections in places that feel natural and suggested by the poem than be slavishly dedicated to doing a particular number of lines.

In this section, we turn away from the court to look at the natural world around us as the seasons wheel round. There are very few people in these stanzas. Even though the Green Knight doesn’t appear here, these are some of the greenest lines in the poem and (I think) some of the most beautiful writing about the passing of the seasons ever written in English.

Following this section, we’ll move on to another long (somewhat longing) description of Gawain’s body as he arms himself to set out on his journey. So we’re doing weather today and bodies next time. Though we may start to wonder how definite the lines between human body and vegetable body are.

Without further ado, let’s start crawling in that undergrowth.

So Arthur was given a strange Christmas gift
at new year, when he had asked to hear a strange tale.
He was missing the words he wanted when the banquet started,
but he got what he needed, more than he needed.
Gawain was happy when the games began in the hall,
but now we wonder if he’ll be happy at the end.
Because men feel light and bright when they’re drunk,
but a year goes round fast, won’t slow down for you,
and we can rarely recognise the beginning in the end.
So Yule passed, and the year that followed,
each season in sequence, like they always follow.
After Christmas, Lent was a cold season,
punishing for the flesh, with only fish to eat.
The world’s weather makes war on winter,
when cold sinks into the earth, stormclouds rise,
rain falls glittering and the showers are warm,
makes the fields fair and the flowers show.
The earth and the groves wear bright green.
Birds gather on the branches to build nests and sing
to the sweetness of the summer when it arrives
softly.
The blossoms rise and blow
in rich heath,
and glorious music
is heard in the woods.

There’s a reason Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is everyone’s go-to poem for discussing Middle English poetic thoughts on nature. This description is probably my favourite piece of nature poetry ever written in English. These long bob and wheel stanzas can feel over-long at times. I know in the last three parts of translations there have been times when I think ‘how am I still only halfway through a stanza, there’s nothing happening’. But in these big expansive verses the poetry really rises and sings. I love the vast scale of this verse. We start tightly focused on Arthur’s perspective on the strange banquet scene, consider Gawain and how he approaches the passing year with bravery that fades, and then we crash zoom out to look at the whole world as the seasons pass. Soil is in the foreground here. It accepts the winter cold and turns it into spring blossoms through its strange alchemy. We’re reminded here that Arthur and Gawain’s conversations matter a certain amount, but we’re only a shift in camera angle away from remembering the earth is the underpainting for everything we see on the page.

After the season of summer, with its soft breezes,
when Zephyr sighs over the seedlings and herbs,
the grass is delighted to grow in the good air
when the dew drops from the leaves at dawn,
catching the light of the glittering sun.
But the harvest comes fast to harden the world,
warning us the winter will wax to ripeness.
He drives with drought until the dust rises
up from the earth to fly in the air.
The wild wind rises too to wrestle with the sun.
The linden’s leaves alight on the ground,
and the grass that was green ages to grey.
Everything that rises must ripen and rot.
So the year dies slow in many yesterdays
and the world waits again for the cold
of winter winds.
Then the moon of Michaelmas
brings winter in,
and Gawain remembers
his promises.

In this short stanza, I love how Gawain remembering the promises he made to the Green Knight seem like something that grows directly out of the changing of the seasons. The dust rises from the earth to fly in the air and the leaves of the linden trees settle on the ground. Earth gives rise to many things here — and one of those natural processes is that thoughts about the Green Knight take root again in Gawain’s head. It’s like realising a dream he’s forgotten and finding himself in the dreamworld again, the promise reaching through the year like an invisible string.

So Gawain stayed at Arthur’s court until All Hallows’ Day.
On that day a a feast was held for him
and the Round Table partied richly.
The beautiful knights and beautiful ladies
felt piteous longing for Gawain, for his journey,
but they laughed all the same, and spoke lightly.
They joked though they did not feel it, for his sake.
After the meal, he spoke mournfully to Arthur,
his journey and the dangers that were coming, saying,
“Liege lord of my life, I must ask you to give me leave.
You know the promise I have to keep.
I do not need to tell you how it was made — you know —
all I can say is I must leave tomorrow
to seek Green Knight, and I hope God will guide me.”
All the great people of the city came together,
Yvain and Eric, and many, many others —
Sir Doddinel de Savage, the Duke of Clarence,
Lancelot, Lionel, Lucan the good,
Sir Bord and Sir Bedevere, great men,
and many others with Mador de la Porte.
The king came among all the court’s company,
all there to counsel his knight, with aching hearts.
All the hearts in the hall were mournful
that someone like Gawain should be sent on this journey
to suffer pitifully, perhaps never to return
to fight.
But his face was cheerful.
He said, “Why should I complain?
It is my destiny
and I have promised to go.”

I’d be lying if I said the long passage of names of knights was my favourite part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or any other Arthurian poem. It does have a function in this verse that I like though. We’re slowly bringing our gaze up from the soil through the vegetation to the world of the hall and people again. The lists of people echo the lists of parts of nature we read in the last few verses and they feel quite equivalent to me. These are both lists of types of species you might find in different ecosystems, the ecosystem of the woodland grove or the ecosystem of Arthur’s court.

At the end of this section of the poem, we have done a complete cycle of the year and ended up in the exact place we started, with Christmas-time speechmaking at Arthur’s court. The fact that Gawain is barely present is interesting to me too — we leave him completely behind while we focus on the world under his feet and the air above him. We can read whatever emotional state we like into Gawain’s hesitation. My personal feeling is that I don’t imagine him forgetting about the Green Knight during this year (much though he might have tried to). I see the Green Knight haunting his dreams in all these seasons, but you might read something else in it. I love how many gaps there are in this poem for us to make up our own minds.