SOURCE: Bowers, R. H. “Iconography in Lydgate's ‘Dance of Death.’” Southern Folklore Quarterly 12, no. 2 (June 1948): 111-28.

In the following essay, Bowers points out the various ideas and motifs that informed Dance of Death and discusses the work's significance in the medieval danse macabre tradition.

John Lydgate, the “monk of Bury” (c.1375-c.1448), dealt almost entirely with medieval themes in his poetry, themes which one might suppose would no longer interest the modern world; yet when the English poet Auden published his acrid poem The Dance of Death in 1933, he was drawing on a motif (likewise used by Lydgate) and sentiment which was so ubiquitous in Western Europe during the fifteenth century that it has been termed the last characteristic gesture of the Middle Ages. The universal truth that all men must die (Jeder Mensch muss sterben), was fashioned at that time into a didactic and compelling theme of...