Marie de France (Le Fresne & Chevrefoil)

        In this week's reading, focusing on Marie de France’s poetry, readers get an inside look of not only her thought process as a writer but as a woman in the 12th century. While both poems are very different in plot, both exhibit a common theme of unconditional love.

        Focusing on Marie de France’s, Le Fresne, the reader is brought on a journey. In the beginning of the poem, I felt a slight bit of confusion and I especially didn't know where the story was headed. Marie de France begins the story with two families both expecting their first child. When the first mother gave birth to twin boys, the other wife snarled and made remarks which hinted towards adultery. Marie de France wrote, “That one woman in a single birth, had two separate sons, except where two separate men had put them there”, in this quote, the reader gets the sense that the other wife is quite negative and cruel. Nevertheless, when it was her time to give birth, the second wife also had a set of twin girls. Paranoid someone would be equally as cruel to her as she had been in the past, she decided to get rid of one of her daughters named Le Fresne. 

While the first part of the poem is quite sad, I enjoyed how Marie de France turned it into a happy ending. I specifically enjoyed how Marie de France didn't develop her character to be as cruel and dark as her mother, yet instead, she became gracious and selfless- “All who saw her loved this damsel, Admired her, prized her as a marvel”. To me, it makes so much sense that a young girl with such a complicated past would be given such a gracious future.  

At the end of the story where Le Fresne has become a married woman and has been reunited with her birth family, I felt as if it was almost a full circle ending. Although her birth mother didn't want to be looked poorly upon, it never meant that her family didn't want Le Fresne. I thought both poems were very well written and beautiful stories of unconditional love.