Lollai, Little Child

This is poem 82 from a wonderful little anthology, “A Selection of Religious Lyrics,” edited by Douglas Gray, in Oxford University Press’s Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series (1975). Written in Middle English, I have put it into modern English with a handful of changes/ "improvements" to enhance readability.

   The poems in this anthology are mainly not literary masterpieces; they derive from the faith of "ordinary" people or, often, the priests and friars who wrote them for use in preaching to unlettered congregations. They reveal how medieval society was completely saturated in the life and language of the Christian faith and, therefore, how disastrously far Western Europe has fallen into the intellectual barbarism of "secularism," i.e. social Marxism. But now there is a new swamping faith knocking at the door - Islam, which will deliver the coup de grace to the unfaithful, child-aborting snowflakes who constitute what is left of Western "civilization."

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Lollai, lollai, my little child, why weep so sore?
You needs must weep; it was prepared before
Ever to live in sorrow, and sigh for evermore,
As your elders did before, while still alive they were.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lulloo,
   In an unknown world trapped are you.

Beasts and birds, the fishes in the flood,
And everything alive that’s made of bone and blood,
When they come into the world, they do themselves some good –
All but the wretched brats of Adam’s brood.
   Lollai, little child, by care are you fore-met,
   You are lost in this world’s wildness that’s before you set.

Child, if it chances you shall thrive in plenty,
Remember you were fostered at your mother’s knee;
Ever have in your heart’s-mind thought of these three –
Whence you came, what you are, and what shall come of thee.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lollai,
   With sorrow you came into this world, with sorrow you’ll wend away.

Nor should you trust this world, it’s your foul foe,
The rich it makes poor, the poor rich also,
It turns woe to weal, and then weal to woe,
Trust not any man in this world while it turns so.
   Lollai, little child, your foot is in the wheel,
   You know not whether it turns to woe or weal.

Oh child, you are a pilgrim wicked-born,
You wander this false world, looking before.
Death shall come with a blast out of a sombre horn
And cast down Adam’s kin, as he was cast before.
   Lollai, little child, your woe was caused by Adam,
   In Paradise-land through the wickedness of Satan.

Child, you’re not a pilgrim but a foreign guest,
Your days are reckoned, journeys all imprest;
And whether you wend north, or whether east,
Death shall waylay you with sadness in your breast.
   Lollai, little child, this woe has Adam wrought,
   When he ate of the apple which Eve him brought.

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Put into modern English © November 2021

"Ah, Ah, Ah"

This poem derives from Jeremias 1:6 - "And I said: Ah, ah, ah, Lord God: behold I cannot speak, for I am a child." It also refers to David Jones's "I said, Ah! what shall I write?" in his "The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments" (Faber 1974). David Jones is the Welshman in stanza 5.

   I was impressed to learn from Douglas Gray's "A Selection of Religious Lyrics" (see my introduction to the following post of "Lollai, Little Child") that in the medieval age "there was a traditional belief that men when born cried 'A!', the first letter of Adam's name," i.e. in recognition of the disaster of Original Sin into which they had now arrived.

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“Ah, ah,” the new-born cried,
   “Adam, you have done me ill:
Safe was I in the squeezing womb;
   Now, in the air I chill.”

An apple’s bite brought psyche’s woe,
   Edginess in the self’s deep;
Pigs and swill are the crème of life:
   The dumbstruck children weep.

“Ah, ah,” the prophet said,
   “Words begrudge, but God-touched I
Waste and strike down the bellied cits –
   Their idols and their scry.”

But few there are face truth with will:
   Exile’s trek, task-master’s whip,
Bloody those who “coud’na fash”
   Begging for bite and sip.

“Ah, ah,” the Welshman wrote,
   God’s seven lamps gone flicking-faint;
“Nozzles pump and glass refracts,
   But purpose, form, are taint.”

The Lost in Action being lost
   Crassness fevers each man’s glance:
Turn, turn, but where, to what end?
   A dice! It falls askance.

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© November 2021