The Cock and the Jasp
"The Taill of the Cok and the Jasp" is a Middle Scots version of Aesop's Fable The Cock and the Jewel by the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson.
One modern translation of the fable, in its most cogent form, runs thus: A Cock, scratching the ground for something to eat, turned up a Jewel that had by chance been dropped there.
The standard medieval interpretation of the fable, however (which Henryson follows) came down firmly against the cockerel on the grounds that the jewel represents wisdom rather than mere wealth or allure.
[2] It opens with a defense of poetry (expanded from the verse Romulus), presents an apologia for making the translatioun, establishes the first person narrator, summarises Aesop's work and provides a bridging passage into the First Fabill.
[3] The humility topos continues into the next stanza where the narrator pretends to have no understanding of eloquence and an ability only to write in rude and hamelie language, a self-deferential reference to his choice to create poetry in Scots rather than Latin.
A brief precis of Aesop's fable literature then follows in the next three stanzas with a stark view of its purposes and some comments on how animal behaviour and human nature compare.
Henryson's innovation and development from his sources chiefly involve presenting an unusually well-rounded, imaginatively realised figure of the cok in a specific and concretely drawn setting.
The jasp, he says, is an object that belongs more properly to a lord or king (line 81), while he is content simply to satisfy his humble wants in draf, corn, wormis and snaillis — his daily meit.
The narrator minces no words in expressing how serious the cockerel's error has been in rejecting the stone because, he says, the jasp represents science, in the sense of wisdom, which he defines in terms that bring it close in meaning to concepts like dharma.
In the final stanza he laments mankind's general failure to respect and comprehend these values: He closes, with pretended indifference, by advising the reader, if he so wishes, to go seek the jasp where it lies.
[6] Henryson's expansion of Aesop's fable makes its inferences concrete, introduces complexity and raises a large number of themes in a very short space.
