3 - Ego Dormio

Summary

Named by modern editors after its opening text, Ego Dormio is usually considered the earliest of Rolle's English epistles and is an exposition of ‘thre degrees of lufe’, the third being ‘contemplatife lyfe’. According to CUL MS Dd. 5. 64 it was written for a nun of Yedingham Priory (near Pickering, North Yorkshire), and modern opinion has been divided on whether the exhortations against worldliness point to a laywoman reader (who may have been considering becoming a nun, or became one after the epistle's composition), or whether the opening and the emphasis on the second degree of love imply an intended reader who is already a nun. Whoever the recipient, there is a striking intimacy of address in the opening paragraph's identification with wooing for another and with a ‘messanger to bryng the to hys bed’, as also in the declaration ‘Til the I write specialy ….’ Such a reader may at least aspire to the third degree of love, in which ‘kyndelde with fyre of Cristes lufe … and feland lufe, joy, and swetnes … thi prayers turnes intil joyful sange’. Rolle's account of the three degrees of love is hence fittingly punctuated by lyric passages: the first degree closes with some unrhymed alliterative lines (‘Alle perisches and passes …’); the second degree is closed by a Passion Meditation lyric, which may serve as a means of transition to the third degree (although ‘I say noght that thou, or another that redes this, sal do it all’); the third degree closes with a love lyric to Jesus, offered, like the Passion lyric, for the reader's devotional use.