The Pastime of Pleasure: An Allegorical Poem — Key Ideas to Explore

Mechanical Marvels and Allegorical Architecture

The poem's most striking passages describe not characters but constructions. The tower in the "basse courte" is made of jasper "ful wonderly wrought," and its four armed horsemen are not static statues: they are animated by a system of wheels, cogs, and cords that make them trot, gallop, break their spears, and part for a tournament. Hawes specifies that the mechanism is "craftly Geometry," a phrase that points to a fascination with how things work—gears and joints—rather than with symbolic meaning alone. The temple of Mars is similarly detailed: its walls are painted with the destruction of Troy, and the god himself stands on a wheel with a two-faced lady. These descriptions occupy more space than any single action, suggesting that the poem's interest lies as much in the ingenuity of its imagined world as in the moral lesson it is supposed to convey.

The Narrator's Self-Assurance and Its Undoing

The narrator introduces himself at a specific age—"the xxxi. yere of my yonge flourynge aege"—and in a specific season, when the sun enters Gemini. He is walking in a temple, alone, when Venus appears and Cupid wounds him. The language of the wound is conventional—"Love had me wounded so sore inwardly"—but the poem frames it as a direct consequence of his earlier pride: "I thought that Venus might nothyng avaunce / Her strength against me." The excerpts do not show how this wound is resolved; they break off with the narrator still in distress, having lost his joy and pride. What is clear is that the poem's allegorical machinery does not protect the narrator from experience. The personifications do not remain abstract; they act on him, and he responds with a mixture of prayer and complaint.

Prayer as Action in a Personified World

When the narrator enters the temple of Mars, he kneels and prays directly to the god, addressing him as "O Mars! O god of the warre!" and asking for grace to "subverte / The hedyus monsters" and win victory. The prayer is a formal petition, complete with a promise to build a temple in return. This is not a passive observation of allegory; it is an attempt to intervene in the poem's own system. The narrator treats Mars as a being who can hear and respond, not merely as a figure on a wall. Similarly, the porter Stedfastnes is a personification who acts as a guide, leading the narrator into the courtyard. The poem thus operates on two levels at once: it describes a world of abstract qualities, but its protagonist moves through that world as if it were literal, praying to gods and walking through gates as if they were real places.

The excerpts offer a poem more interested in the texture of its imagined world than in straightforward moral instruction. Readers should attend to the density of physical detail—the jasper, the wheels, the painted walls—and to the way the narrator's voice shifts between confidence and vulnerability. The poem rewards attention to its craft, both in the mechanical sense of its descriptions and in the poetic craft of its seven-line stanzas. The 1555 reprint, from which this text is taken, includes editorial omissions in two passages, a reminder that even early editors found some content worth suppressing.

I’ve often thought how that knight’s jasper tower, with its silent automata, mirrors the strange stillness of a banquet hall before guests arrive. Both hold marvels meant for human joy, yet wait alone. Hilaria. The Festive Board — Key Ideas to Explore shares that quiet tension, a celebration poised between anticipation and memory, like a hundred abandoned feast-days I’ve shelved with fondness.