‘The dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon!’: The Medieval Alba in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Abstract

This paper argues for the importance of the alba, a medieval genre of courtly love poetry, to Ford Madox Ford's oeuvre and particularly to his tetralogy Parade's End. While the influence of troubadour songs and culture on Ford is widely recognised, no work has yet been devoted to the presence of the alba in his work. Describing a scene in which a knight and lady's adulterous love affair is interrupted by the coming of dawn, the alba invests daybreak with erotic and dramatic potential. Ford co-opts the conventions of this poetic form to illuminate and intensify one of the tetralogy's central themes: the analogy between love and war. In Parade's End daybreak repeatedly spells the interruption of the lovers' bliss and the end of the soldiers' vigil. The alba shows the motif to be key to the work's treatment of the love/war parallelism.