ABSTRACT
William Dunbar epitomizes the reality, the terror and the awe of Christ’s suffering and its meaning for mankind, as it was present throughout the Middle Ages. There is about Dunbar, even in his lighter moods, often a sense of the ominous. The inconstancy of love is a theme that has been dealt with throughout the ages, and usually with a sense of unconcern. The successes are in such a poem as the “Tua mariit wemen and the wedo,” although it should again be noticed how the “perle of plesance” is introduced most unobtrusively and yet perhaps not without overtones of some quite imperfectly paradisical vision. To describe the literature of a period in terms as these is obviously to do it some injustice. But if it is a simplification, it may be regarded as an indication of a coherent set of characteristics that can help to describe the range of the poets of the end of the fuedal period.
