Essay Questions

What leads a person to ruin according to the poem, La Male Regle?

According to the persona in the poem, La Male Regle, various behaviors lead to the ruin of a person. These are extravagance, excessive consumption of food and drink, flattery, bad friends and failure to heed advice from those that are more experienced than oneself.

The persona says that because of not heeding to the advice of his friends to stop being gluttonous, he fell ill in his advanced age. He says that in his youth he failed to heed the teachings on how to preserve his health. Flattery causes a person to overlook their mistakes and continue making them. In the poem, the persona tells of how servants flatter their lords that everything was going well even when it was not. This led to the accumulation of the mistake and eventually the collapse of the lord’s wealth.

What is the importance of good health according to La Male Regle?

Most of the stanzas in La Male Regle teach the reader the importance of good health and how to maintain it. The persona is lamenting because he did not heed to advice on how to maintain his health and how he had fallen ill. The following excerpt shows the parallelism between a person’s character when they are healthy and when they are not.

The persona says, 'While your energy and excellent strength (As far as was pleasing to your honour)

Reigned in me and was my sovereign,

Then I was well, then I felt no distress,

Then I was stuffed with gladness of spirit,

And now my body is empty and bare

Of joy and full of troubling misery,

All poor in health and rich in tough times

Good health makes an individual hopeful, happy and industrious. Whereas illness makes an individual melancholy, full of pain, bitter and distressed.

Describe the character of the persona in the poem

The persona in the poem is a man who is in his middle ages. The persona is a melancholy, regretful and bitter individual. This is because he regrets having neglected to take care of his health in his youth. The consequence of this was that he fell ill in his advanced age.

He says that when he was a youth, he did not listen to reason and he hated any other person’s opinion. He was extravagant in his spending and this made him end up poor and lose his friends.