An Essay by George David Gopen
In which I admit to a forty-year obsession with animal fables — and explain why you should share it.
I have a confession to make.
Early in my career, I became mildly obsessed with a fifteenth-century Scottish schoolmaster who wrote animal fables. Not Aesop — Aesop was the inspiration. I mean Robert Henryson, a man about whom we know almost nothing except that he taught children in Dunfermline, wrote beautifully, and apparently never felt the need to explain himself to anyone.
My colleagues were politely puzzled. Henryson was considered minor. Charming, yes. Occasionally witty, certainly. But minor. The scholarly consensus was that his collection of thirteen animal fables — the Moral Fables — was a pleasant curiosity, best enjoyed for its humor and left at that.
I was convinced they were missing something. I just couldn’t yet prove it.
Then I started looking at the structure — not the individual tales, but the architecture of the whole collection. And what I found stopped me cold.
Henryson had built something extraordinary. Thirteen fables, organized into three interlocking structural symmetries operating simultaneously. One alternates Aesopic and Reynardian tales in a pattern you cannot perceive while reading — it exists above the level of the individual story, a kind of hidden order built into the bones of the work. A second builds like a symphony: six tales crescendoing toward a luminous central seventh, then six more descending, tale by tale, into deepening darkness. A third radiates concentrically outward from that center the way rings spread from a stone dropped in water.
The central fable — “The Lion and the Mouse” — is surrounded on each side by exactly 200 stanzas. Exactly. It is the only tale presented as a dream-vision. The only one where characters actually listen to reason. The only one that ends happily. Before it, wrongdoers are punished but the innocent escape. After it, the innocent start to suffer. By the end, a spotless Lamb is simply eaten. A Mouse is flayed alive. The world has gone dark.
Henryson never explains any of this. He just builds it. And through the building, he makes you feel what no moral lesson could make you feel: the actual weight of a world where reason fails and evil wins.
Structure is not a container for meaning. Structure is meaning.
I was so taken by what Henryson had done that in 1986 I edited and introduced a modern edition of the poems for the University of Notre Dame Press. My introduction tries to do what Henryson himself never bothered to do: explain the architecture, trace the symmetries, and make the case that these fables deserve to be read not as charming minor verse but as one of the most carefully designed works in the English literary tradition.
The poems themselves are Henryson’s — and they are wonderful. Funny, strange, morally serious in ways that sneak up on you. The introduction is my attempt to hand the reader a map before she sets off into the territory.
That question — what is the structure doing to the reader? — has driven everything I have done since. When I work with scientists on their grant proposals, lawyers on their briefs, or executives on their presentations, I am asking the same thing I asked of Henryson’s fables: Where does the weight fall? What will she expect, and what will she find? What does the architecture of this writing make the reader experience?
This June, Anthem Press publishes The New Science of Scientific Writing, the first of a series of new books in which I try to answer those questions as directly and practically as I know how. But the thinking started with a fifteenth-century schoolmaster in Dunfermline who built one of the most carefully designed works in the English literary tradition and, as far as anyone can tell, never mentioned it to a soul.
Go find the Jasper. As Henryson says — you who will, for there it lies.
➤ The Moral Fables of Aesop is available on Amazon. Henryson’s poems, with my introduction. If you’ve ever wondered where a lifetime of thinking about writing comes from, this is part of the answer.
George David Gopen is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University and the creator of the Reader Expectation Approach to professional writing. His book The New Science of Scientific Writing publishes June 2026 from Anthem Press.