Several of the poems of William Dunbar…
1508 CE
Several of the poems of William Dunbar are included in the Chepman and Myllar prints of 1508, the first books to be printed in Scotland.
Dunbar’s allegory, “The Golden Targe,” written in 1508, exemplifies the poet’s sparkling description and elaborate diction.
In an epic work completed in this year, “The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins,” the agile Dunbar employs conventional allegorical figures to create a grimly comic effect.
His richly imagined religious lyrics, especially “A Ballad of Our Lady and Of the Nativitie of Christ,” are characterized by a joyful energy, elaborate meter and rhyme, and a suggestive use of Latin.
In such satires as “The Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow", he juxtaposes a lively description of ordinary life with courtly and common diction.
He explores the somber themes of old age, mutability, and death in his “Lament for the Makaris,” composed in about 1508 in the tradition of Francois Villon, whose work Dunbar had read in Paris.