An allegorical text and short dialogue, The Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune features a prisoner railing against Fortune, who responds briefly and then disappears from the poem. In the first 28 lines, the prisoner bemoans Fortune’s ever shifting nature, but hopes nonetheless that she will favor him once more: “torne thy whele that I may ones arise” (21). Though he mostly addresses Fortune’s fickleness, he notes the “myschaunce” and desolation he suffers in prison at the beginning and end of this first section, anchoring the source of his despair in his imprisonment, where he “lyes” and “suffers” (28, 2). Fortune, in her 22 line interlude, has no sympathy for the prisoner, and little concern that he has been, in the eyes of worldly law, unjustly imprisoned; though he may be innocent of the crime for which he was condemned, God is punishing him for “synnes ..that now perauntre ful litel are in thi thought” (33). Moreover, she says that suffering on earth allows him to be saved in heaven, framing his imprisonment as a kind of gift of grace. She quotes lines about patience and being strong in spirit in Latin, her formality in contradistinction to the prisoner’s passionate plea. Thus she shifts the focus from fortune’s variability to God’s grace, and sanctions the prisoner’s stay in prison as right because it is divinely wished for, even if it is an unfair by earthly standards; she undermines his complaints about Fortune by switching attention to God, and his complaints about unfair imprisonment by highlighting the spiritual benefits of grace and the character-building qualities of unjust confinement. The prisoner, however, is not swayed by this reasoning; he dismisses Fortune and addresses himself to the three Fates. To them he complains that he is not so distressed that the end of his life may be drawing near, but that they ordained his death be in a prison: he wishes for any other means or place to be the means of his death. To him, it is being imprisoned rather than having to die that is so upsetting.
At line 64, he gets to the heart of why being imprisoned distresses him so: he grieves the loss of his good name and reputation, of which imprisonment has stripped him. He resents that he can gain a bad reputation so easily, because people slander one another so easily, while “goode loos slepith and lith ful soft” (70). Moreover, he has lost his friends, who have abandoned him in his time of need, and the bareness of the statement “I have no friende that wil me now visite” imparts how extreme the loneliness of his imprisonment is (85). Though scriptures also say that Christians should comfort the imprisoned, he has encountered no comforters; only Echo repeats back his words (and he seems to want, very much, someone to “bere [him] witness”). It is the creature comforts he seems to miss: he wants small, concrete things, like having someone listen to him or give him some water to drink; he wants affection and contact, someone to ask him, “Friend, wiltow ought with me?” (79). His affective language in this part of the poem stresses pain and sorrow: he is grieved “so sore,” he has “sorow inowgh,” he has a “hevyness” that he has no one to talk to about. Nor can he unload his sorrow, because “to telle my sorwe my wittes bien al bare:” it is beyond his powers of expression, and in fact drains his wits.
The prisoner accepts, by the end of the poem, that he must submit and pray to God and Mary: he asks for their pity and repents his sins, while also throwing off his reliance on Fortune and the Fates. Thus, he seems to have followed Fortune’s advice to rely on God and to view imprisonment as a way into heaven; he admits that suffering in prison will release him from later pains in purgatory. The TEAMS text series introduction stresses that, in this complete rejection of Fortune, the prisoner acts in a proper Boethian manner. Yet this acceptance does not override the prisoner’s critique of what prison does to the people it confines, nor does the narrator’s wounded tone leave the poem. “Swerte is none,” he cries, and because no security in guaranteed, he is forced to conclude “Than best is this world to sette at nought/And mekely suffre al adversité/That may us availe of synnes that we have wrought” (100, 106-108). In other words, he accepts fortune’s reproach because he has no other option; if the earth only yields an insecure existence, if death is always to come, and if he has no escape from this prison, the only way he can avoid despair is to suffer through imprisonment and hope that he “may” do some penance for his sins (108).
Imprisonment has caused him to learn painful things about the world, and that pain leads him less to find comfort in heaven than to feel betrayed by his hopes about the world (“Fy on this world; it is but fantasie!”)(99). Nor does he come to terms with the “myschaunces” of imprisonment. Thus, his decision to suffer quietly, wait for death, and hope for heaven does not erase the afflictions of imprisonment: its disastrous effect on his name and the pervasive loneliness that arises from being abandoned by those he thought were his friends.
In the final lines, which are addressed to Mary, the prisoner concludes, “Now, lady swete, I can no more now sey,/But rewe on me and help me whan I dey” (139-140). The narrator is rendered silent by the acceptance of his condition; not even Echo will bear witness to his existence now. The unsettling conclusion seems to be that for the prisoner to assent to the grace of God through imprisonment, he must lose his voice or any stake in his earthly life; he must bear out the rest of his life waiting. We are left with the image of a silent prisoner, whose only option is to hope for Mary’s pity and for the quick approach of death.
While various texts emphasize the spiritual boons of imprisonment, this poems gets at the agony of the experience itself, the intensity of the suffering that must happen in the present, worldly moment. Thus the poem, while repeating these spiritual justifications for imprisonment, actually highlights how excruciatingly distant a future heaven is from an unjust, lonely, painful, and insecure present.
(This text is graciously provided by the TEAMS Middle English Text Series at the University of Rochester. It can be found here.)
