Medieval English Poetry
The Isle of Ladies
15th century, Middle English: 16th century manuscript copies at the British Library and Longleat House, Wiltshire, England.
Apples that grow on a rock in an enchanted sea prevent all illness and death for seven years to those who possess them.
The fifteenth century poem The Isle of Ladies is a long poem of over two thousand lines, originally attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer and once called ‘Chaucer’s Dream’. But in the nineteenth century it was relegated to the ‘Chaucer apocrypha’ and is now considered to have been composed by an anonymous poet nearer to the time that Sir Thomas Malory was writing his famous Le Morte d’Arthur, in the late-fifteenth century.
The central character of this story falls asleep near a spring (or so we are led to believe) and dreams that he has been taken to an Otherworldly island where all the buildings are made of glass, like the crystal spheres of the heavens, and inhabited solely by women.
Soon he encounters his lady-love. She, also, is newly-arrived, having first been to an Island of Apples, we are told, an island which the queen of this Isle of Ladies also frequents. On this island of Apples, in a remote sea on a roche so highe stondes, in strange se, out from all londes... oppon whiche roche growethe a tree that certayne yeres bares apples three.
The apples that grow on this island in an enchanted sea have the property that they prevent all illness and death for seven years to those who possess them. But his lady-love soon expresses a wish to return to her own land again, and, so it seems, without him.
Forthe goethe the shipe; owt goethe the sonde; and I, as wood man unbownde...
Out went the ship, down went the sounding-line, and like an unbound madman I ran fearlessly into the water after her until a wave threw me over and swept me backwards and forwards ‘til both mind and breath were all but gone. Sailors with two large hooks grappled me aboard and lay me by the mast, convinced that I would die very shortly; and agreeing, I confessed to the mast, said goodbye to everybody and closed my eyes. My lady, though, thought it a pity that I should die and so she came to me, bade me rise and said: ‘Stop this nonsense and come with me! I will always be friendly. Rise up, look!’ and of her apples in my sleve one she put, and toke her leve
– she put into my sleeve one of the apples she had collected from the Island of Apples. With that, all my pains left me and I felt like dancing; I jumped up with a joyous heart, alive and well!’
