Noise, Soundplay, and Langland’s Poetics of Lolling in the Time of Wyclif

The two elements of subconscious association which form the basis for lyrical melos and opsis respectively have never been given names. We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified enough, babble and doodle. In babble, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and puns develop out of sound-associations.

Northrop Frye¹

In all versions of Piers Plowman, the poem’s opening lines stress hearing before vision. Will, the Dreamer, sets out on his spiritual quest in early summer, dressed in the rough woolen garments of a hermit. Equipped in this way, he “[Goes] forth in the world wondres to here, / And say many selles and selkouthe thynges.”² Hearing receives emphasis again at the close of the Prologue, when the last lines devolve into a cacophony of street songs sung by the urban tradesmen and professionals that populate the end of Will’s dream. Piers Plowman draws on and reworks the dream-vision topos of birds lulling a dreamer to sleep (or, in the case of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, waking him up), in any number of places, including in the first dream, when Will falls asleep at the sound of rushing water that “sweye[s] so murye” (A Prol. 10; B Prol. 10), or later on when he confesses that “Blisse of þe briddes abide me made / . . . Murþe of hire mouþes made me þer to slepe” (B VIII.64–67; C X.63–66; variation appears in A IX.58).

In a poem whose genre depends on its narrative of vision, this emphasis on hearing is somewhat surprising.³ It invites us both to attend more closely to what Langland might have to say about the sense of hearing and to listen more ardently to the sounds of his own poetry. In stressing sounds the way it does, the poem figures Will’s pilgrimage for moral and spiritual truth as a process of hearing what the world has to tell him, alongside, even before, seeing its marvels. More pointedly, Will’s early assertion that he is setting out “to hear wonders” suggests that the condition of hearing without knowing exactly or understanding completely is important to the poem. This emphasis on wonder thus underscores a distinction between hearing what people have to say and hearing how they say it.

This hearing-how—the process of listening, and not necessarily its end result, comprehending—is an important and as yet unacknowledged means of approaching spiritual knowledge in Piers Plowman. As the emerging field of sound studies has highlighted, historical narratives pitting the “Dark Ages” against the “Enlightenment” have long emphasized visual paradigms for knowledge and understanding.⁴ This persistent habit of thought has led scholars largely to overlook sound, noise, and hearing in their investigations of medieval sensory epistemologies.⁵ Yet hearing receives emphasis in any number of biblical episodes and religious sermons commonly recounted and glossed in the Middle Ages. The story of Pentecost, for example, narrates how the apostles perceive God’s voice by hearing a sudden disembodied sound, which ultimately kindles them with tongues of flame and authorizes them to preach the Word. Similarly, Paul asserts in his letter to the Romans that “faith comes from what is heard.”⁶ These and other texts laid the groundwork for the importance of sound and listening in medieval devotional culture.

Moreover, the study of hearing is inextricably tied to investigations of feeling: both as sensation and as emotion. Sound studies has emphasized the particular synaesthetic capacity of sound and its tendency toward “traversal and transference” with other senses, especially the sense of touch.⁷ Middle English verbs such as clateren—“to clatter, rattle, resound,” but also “to beat or batter”—remind us that to hear is to feel sonic vibration.⁸ Moreover, sounds stir feelings, affecting emotions. For the mystic Richard Rolle, whose eremitic way of life has been seen as a precursor to that of Langland’s Will, heavenly sounds (canor) kindle a “fire of love” (incendium amoris) for God.⁹ I argue that the study of sound proves useful in thinking about...