As we saw in Laustic, the nightingale was a subject of misplaced agency, a songbird that bore the weight of an unfaithful marriage and was thus destroyed though it had never involved itself. In Laustic the bird, which at the wife quickly thought up as an excuse for why she got up from her bed at night, winds up being a token of love that the wife sends her love across the wall once it has been killed and she no longer has an excuse to come to the window at night. Her love builds this dead bird an ornate box and carries it around with him for the rest of his days. This love, one that is prohibited by a small wall between two houses, seems so ridiculous that it is really quite sad for this bird to be sacrificed for their deception. Their love never meant much so the fact that the man carries around this dead bird for the rest of his days, which was never supposed to represent their love in the first place, is quite absurd.
We seem the same thing in Equitain, where their love and the fall of their love seems quite ridiculous. From the start, their love is invalidated by the fact that the King gets around frequently and never settles down. However, he seems very sincere when he confesses his love to her but as soon as she starts to get jealous of his possible marriage to another woman, they instantly decide to kill her husband…with boiling water. Boiling water? Really? Before the king and her husband are about to bleed and bathe together, the husband goes outside and the king and the wife just can’t keep their hands off each other. The husband busts in, catches them, and in a fit of fright (not very Kingly) the king jumps into the scalding bath and dies. The husband proceeds to plunge the wife’s head under water killing her too. This is another lai where everything seems like a trick in the end. The emotions, love, and devotion that we at first believed in all crumbled and their ridiculous plan backfired on them killing them both. Essentially, it seemed as though Laustic and Equitain were poems that presented false agency and then left the reader with nothing at the end.
You point to some suggestive parallels between the two poems, Simone. But there are also some seemingly suggestive distinctions that you don’t really address here, for instance: in Laustic, the nightingale dies but the lovers carry on; here, the deception is far greater (lies in one case, intended murder in the other) and a double death results. It seems that these differences need to be accounted for, to see what this lai might offer in addition to, and perhaps in contrast to, what Laustic provides us.