This splendid short lyric offers tongue-twisting, mind-bending, pithy aphorisms on how Wit personified must struggle to contain and control Will – that is, the rational mind’s (or soul’s) constant effort to rein in the physical body’s wayward desires. The lyric ends humorously with Wisdom losing his cap over Will’s willful ignorance.

Will and Wit survives only in MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, but it was very likely present in Jesus 29 as well because the two manuscripts’ lyric sequences overlap wherever they both survive. Viewed within the context of the Jesus 29 poems, Will and Wit is one of several brief, aphoristic, mnemonic poems set alongside Weal, Ten Abuses, Signs of Death, and Three Sorrowful Tidings (arts. 6, 15, 22, 23). It is here printed in long lines with internal rhymes — the layout used by the Jesus 29 scribe for longer poems in the same meter: The Five Joys of Our Lady Saint Mary, Love Rune, Fire and Ice, and A Homily on Sooth Love (arts. 11, 19, 21, 26). The poem in Cotton is laid out in eight short lines; it may be viewed digitally at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Caligula_A_IX(Opens in a new tab or window).

[NIMEV 4016. DIMEV 6410. Manuscript: London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix, fol. 246vb. Meter: 4 lines in long lines with caesuras and internal rhymes, aaaa7 (compare arts. 11, 19, 21, 26); the Cotton scribe copies it in a right-hand column as 8 lines, rhyming abababab3–4. Layout: In Cotton, the poem is written in short lines with end punctuation (except for line 8, which lacks punctuation). On the long-line layout adopted here (as used by the Jesus scribe for this meter), see Fein, “Designing English,” pp. 50–51. Editions: Wright, p. 67; Morris, p. 192; Brown, pp. 65, 195–96; Dickins, p. 9; Luria and Hoffman, eds., Middle English Lyrics, p. 152 (with regularized spelling). Other MSS: None.]