Poem: The Lament for the Makaris

Overview
"The Lament for the Makaris" is a 1508 elegy by William Dunbar in which the speaker mourns fellow poets, or "makaris," and confronts the universal reality of death. The poem moves between specific names and general reflections, using a persistent Latin refrain, "Timor mortis conturbat me" ("The fear of death disturbs me"), to anchor its meditation on mortality. Its tone blends sorrow and moral urgency with a sharply observed recognition that poetic renown cannot avert the grave.

Form and Structure
The poem is built as a series of short stanzas that repeatedly return to the refrain, giving it the feel of a communal dirge or litany. Dunbar writes in Middle Scots with occasional Latin lines, mixing vernacular immediacy and learned diction. The recurring chorus creates a rhythmic insistence that mirrors the unavoidable, cyclical nature of death, while the varied couplets and quatrains allow for both catalogues of names and pointed moral reflections.

Themes
Mortality is the central theme, presented not only as an abstract fate but as something that erases social distinctions, artistic achievement, and worldly pleasures. Fame, skill, and learning are shown to be transient; the poem repeatedly emphasizes that even celebrated poets fall to the same decay as ordinary men. Linked to mortality is the moralizing impulse: the poem urges readers and fellow poets to live rightly and to remember their souls, converting elegy into admonition.

Imagery and Language
Dunbar uses stark images of decay and dissolution, dust, worms, and the leveling hand of Death, to make mortality palpable. The terse Scots diction gives emotional force and immediacy, while the Latin refrain lends a ritual, ecclesiastical weight. At times the language is intimate and conversational, as when the poet names or imagines the fates of specific makers; at other moments it becomes exhortatory, addressing the reader or Death itself with rhetorical force. This mixture produces a texture that is elegiac, didactic, and occasionally wry.

Character and Voice
The speaker combines personal grief with public witness. He adopts the role of mourner and moralist, pacing between lamenting friends and challenging readers to consider their own end. The voice is worldly and learned yet vulnerable, admitting fear even as it delivers moral counsel. That mixture of self-awareness and authority gives the poem its enduring dramatic power: it is both a private confession and a communal warning.

Significance and Legacy
As a work by one of Scotland's foremost Renaissance poets, the lament operates at the intersection of medieval devotional practice and emerging humanist sensibility. Its use of vernacular speech alongside Latin echoes broader cultural shifts while preserving the older tradition of poetic commemoration. The poem has been read as a key example of the "makar" consciousness, the self-aware poet who understands craft, fame, and mortality, and continues to offer modern readers a vivid, compact meditation on the limits of art in the face of death.