Italicized parts from James Simpson’s modernization of Caxton’s Medieval English translation of Reynard the Fox.
Inspired by the modernist style of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, this is a free verse meditation on the childhood, life, condemnation, and the enduring hope of Reynard, the archetype of the clever anti-hero. He is an anthropomorphic fox that waged a war of wits and stratagems against his fellow animals, told in a multitude of medieval stories, with differing amounts of sympathy, sometimes as a mere amoral trickster, other times as a somewhat darker Robin Hood figure. I mix elements of one of his classic legends with my own invention.
I
She said: “Remember, too, that when you were seven years old you were already clever enough to move at night without lantern or moonlight….
When we are still young, we are already older than the circling stars,
Reynard thought.
As he lay wrapped in blankets on the dirt of the family den, watching the shadows of trees shift about outside at the entrance of the lair,
Wondering what secret knowledge their patterns signified, wondering if the trees themselves watched him too, and thought of life, in their own cryptic way.
And all around him smelt like a mixture of stolen sweet meats and carrion, cozy, criminal, and carnal.
Reynard would pile up blocks repeatedly with his tiny paws to the roof, then knock them down. Better to fall by his own hands than any others.
Perhaps if one was careful and cunning, you could build a tower to the sky, as had been tried once before, if only for an hour, if only for a moment.
Perhaps, if you, the builder, knew the fitting formula, if you said the right words, if you chanted your begging with just the correct intonation, the jealousy of angels would pass you by and leave each stone on stone still standing.
Perhaps the blessed ones would see through you, like indulgent guardians, smile, pat you on the head, and return to talking with themselves.
He liked the company of gentle and harmless creatures, his future prey. Reminders of innocence that had always already been lost for him, which they themselves did not remember, unwitting memorials of Eden.
When he could not sleep at night, he would count the beads on the rosary, until the monster ridden darkness itself was made quiet and calm. Reynard was once reprimanded for saying the Ave Maria more often than the Lord’s prayer; but he could not help but adore Our Lady, whose image, in many different versions, was enshrined throughout the foxes’ family home. He loved to rest curled up at her statue’s feet, under the merciful eyes of the magna mater, the terror of overflowing life before whom even Hell fled back.
A baby sheep doll, held close to his chest, absorbed his love and dreams, as he nestled on his bed of leaves and sticks with his brothers and sisters.
His growing teeth, his growing body, disturbed him.
I was, nonetheless, one of the best children anywhere since the moment I was weaned. I went and played with the lambs because I gladly heard them bleat. I spent so much time with them that I bit one, and so first learned to lap blood, which tasted so good….
II
Never did I see an uglier household…. They were slimed and clotted to their ears in their own dung. It stank so much that I almost suffocated.
He was close friends with the wolf, Isengrim, though the latter perhaps did not see it that way.
They would play games of the war with their fellow carnivores, elaborate make believe, utilizing the history and myth of all ages and nations compressed into the bounds of the neighborhood forest.
The wolf feared nothing, had no reticence, to the point of rudeness. He was the image of unhampered strength, his voice unstopped up by stammering. The young fox was drawn to him with friendly envy, but also with his own secret condescension; I have a subtlety and a depth he knows nothing of, he thought.
Reynard, even when he was a bit too old for it, appreciated playground pastimes like tag, where he could run on his four legs as fast as he could, as far as he could. To be sometimes the chased, sometimes the pursuer, was enough variety for him.
Often at school, Reynard would pace about at lunchtime on the grassy slope and practice speechifying in his head, gesticulating with hands and tail to an imaginary audience of fellow animals. As if he could captivate them all with a smoothly delivered line, crush every one of them with a devastating retort.
He was rarely bullied. An aura of being slightly touched protected him. But he sympathized with those singled out, whatever type of animal they were. Their meekness touched him. He felt solidarity with those who were overwhelmed because he himself felt trapped in his head, in his skin, in his bones. One day, somehow, they would all alike, every broken creature among them, inherit the world and the fullness thereof.
He longed for authority. Even if it was corrupt, it would have satisfied him. But everywhere that should have held firm he found weakness, disavowal, and the corroding rot of irony. The powers that dominated his life didn’t have the courtesy to believe in themselves. And yet they still expected him to obey, all the same.
He would flatter teachers. Because he liked to be petted by them. But he also wanted to believe they were worthy of his love. That if he praised them enough, they would become what he wanted them to be.
“I didn’t dare say anything but compliments.”
III
“Help, Bellin! Where are you? This pilgrim is killing me!”
Cuwaert the Hare cried. It pierced Reynard’s heart even after so many crimes. And yet he bit through the hapless young courtier’s neck, all the same. The youth’s cry from a tunnel deep under the ground, was in the end heard by no one besides his killer.
“Pax tecum, frater Christi,” he said, with a cool sarcasm that he desperately meant with his whole heart, regardless.
His secret vendetta against the realm had been affirmed again indeed. And the dead aristocrat undeniably made a fine meal. The fox’s gang of clan, hangers ons, cut throats, and partisans would clean up the rest and nothing would soon remain of the young fop.
Reynard pinned this latest death on no other than Bellin the Ram, a corrupt, lascivious, and stupid priest gone in the teeth, who came galumphing back to King unwittingly with Cuwaert’s head in his pouch, claiming it was a letter to his Majesty, he had written himself, and thus went to it on the gibbet.
Good riddance to old garbage, Reynard thought. The poor hare, God rest him, was hardly guilty of anything but his title. But at least he had become bait to catch a grand old sinner.
“No Master above me” was his watchword. Whether he also wanted no slaves below him he left ambiguous, even to himself.
He sold all the dead animal’s clothes on the down low and redistributed the proceeds to the beggars and cripples of the neighborhood. To see one of them smile kept his heart aflame with a lively generosity despite the corrosive cruelty of his way of life.
A weak but clever and witty beast of prey is the ideal hero for a story, he thought sometimes to himself. All the pathos of the downtrodden with all the beauty of the skillfully victorious. Those crippled by life and the able bodied alike want to be him.
He would visit the court periodically to clear his name of all suspicions and keep up appearances. It was the finest sort of game to run circles around the king, then retire to the country again to work out his hidden purposes, creating networks of subversion in every dark corner of the land, gradually expanding the zones where the Royal officials would dare not go.
The following morning after the murder he went to church, as he always faithfully did each day, and heard the dead hare’s relatives sing in the choir at a requiem High Mass:
Credo, Credo….
A Romantic Intermission
Reynard met Dame Ermilyn the Fox in the time of summer when the days were long, and the warm short nights were blessed by the fair folk.
They were like two sphinxes who could solve each other’s long-hidden riddles at last and come up with new ones to decipher together in their regal play.
To make her smile was for Reynard to win gentle absolution for years of crimes, to kiss her fair vulpine face the deepest revenge on years of disappointments.
They would sit together for long stretches of time, composing litanies to each other, in a chaste, poetic fashion, blushing still like they were children who had never known love before.
The pair walked side by side through the woods as if they were its true lords, not the absentee lion who extracted tax upon tax for those who dared make use of God’s plenty.
They shared memories as if they had long known each since childhood, pleasantly haunting each other’s memories like the oldest of friends or guardian spirits made flesh.
O, how sweet the air of the blossoming vineyard where the little foxes played.
The north wind and south winds kiss above them as they dance cheek to cheek, amid the fragrance of spice and flowers.
IV
How on earth should anyone handle honey without licking his fingers?
Reynard joked, as if he was some far-off observer of someone else’s life while it was very much his own that was in danger.
He was running, running, running through the thick of the woods. Hunted again. Outlawed again.
Reynard at each twist and then of the forest calculated his next move, thinking of when he should rest, of who he could count to give him shelter, of how many he could count to answer to his next call to arms, if he could but find a place to catch his breath.
He had begun a cycle of crime and reprisal yet again, out of a mixture of principal, rascality, and the compulsion of appetite.
The specters of all who he had killed, mutilated, robbed, and cheated, screamed in his ear, claiming Heaven to witness against him, crowded his mind. When he was in such extremis he did not dare argue with this crowd of witnesses.
And yet he would still throw defiance to the end against the whole pack of scheming lords, clerics, and merchants, from the grubby village money lender to the king on his throne of stolen gold. “Zeal for your House consumes me, even me, O Lord,” repeated the Fox. The deep of his sovereign will cried out to the deep of the heaven of Most High, and no other.
Not that he whipped the money changers out the temple for pure gratis. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life- all pricked him on to ever more crimson outrages. The high and low motives were inextricably mixed. And he could hardly hold them together as everything was again, reduced to brute survival.
The shadows grew longer as the dusk fell. He could hear the hounds cry, following him, ever closer. And he was growing tired, trying to repress the memory of his victims as he panted for air. One more time, one more time, let me live, let me be free….
The world returns to me and will have me for itself.
V
They delivered their judicial sentence: that the fox should be put to death, hanged by the neck.
It is a relief to be finally caught,
He reflected, as he straightened his garments and combed his head and tail. He awaited the morning in his cell.
“Dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness,”
Reynard chanted to himself. “What a fine deacon they are about to execute,” he said with a half grin.
The darkness drew on slowly. He never had savored each second so intently before. Every moment of his life played out before his eyes, summoned to an internal judgment that went beyond pleasure or regret.
The wheel had come full circle. He was here.
As the dawn broke, he heard the call of birds. Ambassadors of a forgotten past and an unknown future. A surprising Maternal warmth surrounded him as he lay on the prison bed with eyes wide open, staring at nothing, as chirping continued outside.
And after all this I still can hardly believe in my own death,
He thought, as the guards led him away.
He entered without compulsion the rickety tumbril. He slipped his last coin to the driver with a smile.
All his friends, family, and supporters who dared to come stared at him sorrowfully, but most, with dry eyes, afraid they were next.
Dame Ermilyn looked at him, utterly broken, but with a questioning glance, as if expecting him to reveal his last liberating gambit.
A tonsured monkey imprisoned for conspiracy to counterfeit, and a young goose caught in adultery with her lord’s brother stood by him on the cart, in morose defeated silence. They only increased his serene elation, which he shared thus with his gallows comrades:
“Recall your Seneca, brother monk: ‘Scorn death: either it finishes you or it transforms you.’”
“And dear sister, remember, no virgin soul besides the Mother of God herself stands higher than the Magdalene. Those who love much will be forgiven much.”
Reynard tapped his foot to the beat of the drummer that walked before the condemned. How merry it was to die to a martial rhythm! He was a soldier, after all, of a sort.
He walked up to the scaffold, surrounded by the shouting throng and the curses of his enemies. His erstwhile friend the wolf, the presiding royal captain, snickered and spat in his general direction.
The monkey, stammering but strangely relieved, confessed his crimes, counseled all tempted to follow his path to repentance, said a Pater Noster, and died with little struggle.
Then the goose came up the steps, weeping and crying to the sky, but then she looked at the noose until she calmed down. She asked forgiveness, said an Ave Maria, and gave up the ghost with her own sort of dignity.
Now it was Reynard’s turn.
Time to finish the intentions of the Holy Father, he thought:
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.
Amen.
Suddenly, in the face of each beast, however sunk in stupidity or disfigured by vice, he read an infinite destiny, awaiting only a tireless compassion to lead them step to step into the peace, the love, that passes worldly understanding. He could embrace every one of them, weeping for sorrow and joy, gathering the multitude upon multitude of suffering creatures under the canopy of heaven, all understood, all pardoned….
Reynard, who hadn’t said anything for some while, addressed Isengrim: “Shorten my agony….”
VI
And if only you could have seen Reynard—how meekly he went forth with his pouch and his Psalter on his shoulder and his shoes on his feet!
Was this his last reprieve, he wondered?
Had he talked his way out of it all, one more time?
Or was this the prolonged dream of one whose neck was about to break on the noose?
Or was this his eternal destiny being spun out before him in this lonely forest on a misty mountain?
He could not remember. And, eventually, he stopped asking.
Reynard dug a hermit’s cell for himself. My last hiding place, he thought. From life into death, from death into life.
He left room enough for Emerlyn, if in this twilight realm they were destined to meet again.
Each day he greeted the morn with matins and the evening with vespers.
Every word he read spoke to him. The Book of Life that he had read intermittently since his childhood up was now coalesced into a single volume of divine praise. It was the unfolding of a new nature in his body and soul, every passion stilled, or transformed into something new, and strange, and yet more familiar to his soul than his most intimate and earliest memories.
A herd of sheep and lambs would sometimes gather around him as he meditated in the noonday sun. They smiled at him with love, as if all was finished and forgotten and forgiven. With a mute gaze he blessed them in return.
Peace with God is all he wants.