Every Reader’s Raleigh

 

   

     The story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s laying down his coat for Queen Elizabeth to cross a puddle was not recorded until eighty years after his death but it signifies his courtly style at a time when members of the ruling class were expected to display both politesse and aesthetic refinement as well as political discernment and military valor.  Like others of his age, he was only by the way a poet.  An active courtier, he endured military service and hazardous voyages of exploration in service to the crown, though his public role under powerful and jealous rulers led him to be imprisoned for several months by Elizabeth and later for thirteen years by James I who ultimately beheaded him.   As a diplomat and a military man, he held influential positions that enabled him to reinforce British rule over Ireland, defend England against Spain, and develop colonies in North America.

     His adventures on behalf of his country are recorded in part in his The Discovery of Guiana, which mixed reportage of his experiences in  the New World with fanciful tales of natives with faces in their chests (highlighted by depiction in the book’s frontispiece) as well as of the gold-rich city of El Dorado.  With the involuntary leisure of his imprisonment he also began a compendious History of the World, admired yet as a monument of English prose if not of historiography. 

      Much of his poetry is written in the comparatively conversational mode called the plain style, eschewing elaborate conceits and dense classical allusions to create the impression of sincerity and passion.  This relatively realistic vision is illustrated by Raleigh’s response to Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” a seduction poem in which the man offers his beloved endless “pleasures” and “delights” might she only “live with me, and be my love.”  Raleigh’s canny lady is well aware that love is not always such an unmixed blessing.   

 

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

 

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares to come.

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,

To wayward winter reckoning yields,

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

 

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

 

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,

The Coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

 

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Each of the blandishments so invitingly catalogued by Marlowe is questioned.  A “honey tongue” may conceal a “heart of gall.”  Material objects are all subject to dessication or rot, people grow old and love fades, time changes all things.  The sole classical reference here is more like a hand grenade than a decorative posy.  Philomel was raped and then suffered her tongue being cut out to prevent her disclosing the crime, a horrific example of sexual violence here concealed in an allusion.

     Raleigh’s sober realism coexists with the most fanciful figures of speech.  Raleigh’s “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk” constructs a fine filigree of imagination idealizing the beloved only to dismiss that pleasing illusion. 

 

Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk

 

Nature, that washed her hands in milk,

And had forgot to dry them,

Instead of earth took snow and silk,

At love’s request to try them,

If she a mistress could compose

To please love’s fancy out of those.

 

Her eyes he would should be of light,

A violet breath, and lips of jelly;

Her hair not black, nor overbright,

And of the softest down her belly;

As for her inside he’d have it

Only of wantonness and wit.

 

At love’s entreaty such a one

Nature made, but with her beauty

She hath framed a heart of stone;

So as love, by ill destiny,

Must die for her whom nature gave him,

Because her darling would not save him.

 

But time (which nature doth despise,

And rudely gives her love the lie,

Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise)

His hands do neither wash nor dry;

But being made of steel and rust,

Turns snow and silk and milk to dust.

 

The light, the belly, lips, and breath,

He dims, discolors, and destroys;

With those he feeds but fills not death,

Which sometimes were the food of joys.

Yea, time doth dull each lively wit,

And dries all wantonness with it.

 

Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

 

 

     Whereas Adam and Eve were made from earth, the beloved cannot be so common; she, the poet says, is composed of finer things: milk, snow, and silk.  She has eyes of light, a floral breath, and lips of jelly!  Yet this perfect creature refuses her devoted lover, having “a heart of stone.”  Her loss thereby is evident as time turns all her charms in the end  to dust.  Her physical charms and her “wanton” spirit cannot last, since decline comes to all and death and everyone’s story ends with the same lamentable conclusion.  The ubi sunt (‘where has gone  . . .”} theme is here allied with the advice to “seize the day” (carpe diem), advising lovers to make the most of their youth since it will soon vanish. 

     The same ironic realism is apparent in “The Lie,” denouncing what Kenneth Rexroth called the Social Lie, the set of assumptions that ratifies social order, each element of which Raleigh disputes. 

 

The Lie

 

 Go, Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others' action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honour how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favour how it falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

 

Tell faith it's fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity

And virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.       

 

     Relentlessly in stanza after stanza Raleigh exposes the pretensions of the world.  At his trial Socrates denounced his accusers declaring that proximity to death brings prophetic power, and Raleigh dares likewise to turn accuser before his execution with the honesty that nearness to the grave lends.  The court’s glamor, he says, is specious, and the power of rulers depends upon “factions,” while the nobles are themselves hateful and self-interested.  Raleigh then moves toward a more general cynicism, declaring zeal to be hollow and all love merely lust.  The flesh is ashes and everyone is moving steadily toward the grave.  Intelligence, he says, is only ingenuity and science arrogance, charity is phony, and law nothing but wrangling.  Academics even want “soundness” and depend only on “seeming.”  Both faith and morality have “fled.”  Even  his own mantic denunciations are only in the end “blabbing,” though to let the cat out of the bag, to admit mankind’s hypocrisy, is a capital offense.

    Though the poem is utterly cynical, it concludes on a defiantly positive note, declaring “no stab the soul can kill.”  The reader may well suspect that Raleigh had more in mind his preservation of dignified equanimity rather than Christian salvation.  He had asked that his beheading be public and he impressed onlookers calling the ax “sharp medicine” and, when executioner hesitated, saying “What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!”  His reputation was such that one of his judges later said, “The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh.”

     Skilled as he was at satire and ironic realism. Raleigh was also capable of spinning courtly sentiments, elegant if not exactly aureate, even making specific reference to Petrarch.   

 

A Vision upon the Fairy Queen

 

Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,

Within the Temple, where the vestall flame

Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,

To see that buried dust of living fame,

Whose tombe faire love and fairer vertue kept;

 

All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:

At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;

And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,

For they this Queene attended: in whose steed

Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse:

Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,

And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse,

Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,

And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

 

 

 

     Here Raleigh applauds his friend Edmund Spenser for his monumental allegorical epic The Faery Queene.  Raleigh’s witty compliment is based on  the conceit that Spenser’s queen, representing Elizabeth I, has beauty and virtues that put Petrarch’s lover Laura in the shade.  The Italian poet breaks into tears when the arrival of the living queen so outshines the earlier lady that Laura is cast into “oblivion.”  This substitution of one female ideal with another disturbs even buried ghosts, including that of Homer as obsolete poetic practices and the women praised by earlier poets are displaced by the new queen. This ingenuity and literary shop-talk befits the poem’s place in the introductory material to an edition  of The Faery Queen where it is accompanied by a lengthy letter from Raleigh to Spenser commending and commenting on the method of his friend’s vast poem.

     Raleigh’s life story is the history of his age in courtly rivalries, Realpolitik among nations, and colonial expansion.  His poetry likewise is part of the fabric of his times, representing a late development of courtly love influenced by Italian poets, but with a distinctively British tone of realism and irony that makes many of his pieces appeal to the contemporary reader.   

Irony in Aucassin et Nicolette

 

 

 

     It may surprise the modern reader of Aucassin et Nicolette, the eight-hundred-year-old chantefable [1], to learn that it was long regarded as a straightforward story of two perfect partners, according to one scholar “the purest example imaginable of characters motivated by idyllic love” [2].  The modern age is admittedly suspicious of ideals and finds a particular appeal in paradox and irony.  Even those who would not label themselves post-structuralists are liable to see earlier authors burlesquing or otherwise undermining themselves.  Yet, quite apart from a modern taste for cynicism and iconoclasm, this particular tale of love’s overcoming obstacles seems at times explicit in its own self-satire [3].

     The episode of Torelore is the most undeniably comic passage.  In this up-side-down land, women fight by tossing foodstuffs while the king lies “en couvade,” as though in childbed.  There is surely caricature, too, in Aucassin’s declaration that he could never enjoy the afterlife without his beloved.  While the basic sentiment is more or less conventional, his depiction of heaven as boring, packed with tiresome old fogeys, in contrast to a hell populated by courtly sophisticates is certainly meant more to raise a smile at his silliness than to impress the reader with the depth of his devotion or to shock with his apparent irreligion. 

     Apart from these farcical passages, Aucassin is regularly presented as an incompetent hero.  Initially unwilling to fight at all, he is lost in a dream when he does enter the battlefield.  The reader sees him in  warrior mode only when he attacks the helpless Toreloreans including their feckless bed-ridden king.  Separated from his beloved, Aucassin makes no attempt to find her and he is, indeed, slow to recognize her in the end.  On the other hand, Nicolette is an unusually active heroine.  Her seeking out her lover while disguised is more often a man’s ploy (as in the case of Odysseus) than a woman’s.   

     Apart from the satirical comments on romance conventions and on the church, at the outset the poet makes an extravagant self-reflective claim. 

 

 

Nus hom n’est si esbahis,

Tant dolans ni entrepris,

de grant mal amaladis,

se il l’oit, ne soit garis,

et de joie resbaudis,

     tant par est douce.

 

There is no one so downcast, afflicted and in poor shape, so very ill that he would not, at hearing this [story] recover health, joy, and vigor, so sweet as it is.

(Lines 10-15)

 

     To what degree of irony is this assertion pitched?  Taking it as a direct assertion of truth may seem somewhat fanciful, but in fact the idea that poetry (or music or stories) might have healing power, though entirely magical, is widespread, indeed, all  but universal in human culture.  The Chinese character for medicine contains the sign for music (as well as a radical indicating herbs).  As it happens I can present more than one bit of contemporary evidence of this belief.  I was once acquainted with a Gnaoui musician from Marrakech who had not attended even a Koranic school.  He said that in his youth he was most often hired, not for weddings or parties, but to play by the bedside of sick people.  He had not the slightest doubt that his art was an agent of healing.  In modern American culture, my wife worked in an inpatient mental health unit that employed a full-time music therapist whose work was considered to contribute to effective treatment [4].    

     To most readers the author’s declaration of the healing powers of his composition seems satirical.  The primary object of the humor might be the literary conventions of the day, paralleling the lovers’ puffed-up professions of devotion, but it might also have seemed a burlesque of the spiritual rewards sometimes promised for the reading of religious texts like saints’ lives. 

     Those who wish to salvage some of the promised benefits of consuming such stories might respond to this ironic reading by insisting that while a poem cannot cure illness, it can improve life by heightening a person’s sensitivity.  Surely the catharsis Aristotle expected from tragedy was therapeutic.  The humanistic approach to literature, unfashionable in the twenty-first century, but dominant in various forms earlier, rests on the notion that literature in some way is “improving.”  

     The theoretical critic might answer that artists know no more than others about how properly to live the good life, that their particular skill lies instead on the artful arrangement of forms or words or sounds, and that it is thus futile to look to poets for wisdom. 

     This back-and-forth dialectic is generated by the special capacity of art to deal with ambiguities and contradictions.  Further elaboration is possible but would require ingenuity more than hermeneutics.  Fundamentally, the proposition is in a sense true and also false.  The oscillation between the possibilities creates a rich resonance and avoids reductive formulae.  This is one example of the transformation of convention characteristic of literature in which to employ a formula or repeat a phrase instantly enables variations and contradictions that render the idea more precise as well as thickening the plot of narrative.  Aucassin et Nicolette makes its parodic values clear to most contemporary readers, but the same phenomenon is traceable in less strident form in most aesthetic texts.

 

 

 

1.  While the combination of prose and verse exists elsewhere, under the name of prosimetrum in Latin literature (e.g. Petronius and Boethius) and (變) in Chinese tradition (e.g. Jiang Mo Bianwen [降魔變文], “Magical Combat”) as well as elsewhere, but Aucassin et Nicolette is unique among French narratives.  For a comparison of Aucassin et Nicolette with the biànwén form, see Li-Li Ch'en, “Wen Chantefable and Aucassin et Nicolette,” Comparative Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1971).

2.  Robert Harden, ‘"Aucassin et Nicolette’ as Parody,” Studies in Philology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Jan., 1966). 

3.  Apart from the article already cited above, additional evidence is presented in Barbara Nelson Sargent, “Parody in Aucassin et Nicolette: Some Further Considerations,” The French Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Mar., 1970).

4.  In America this artist played with the likes of Don Cherry and Miles Davis and worked regularly here with three bands: one traditional, one jazz, and one rock.  Listening to his Arabic singing with the rock ensemble, I asked him to translate the lyrics.  They were all cliches of the Islamic shahada: Allah is great, there is one god, Allah determines all things.  “Of course,” he said, “music is always an offering to Allah.”  According to him, in Morocco they would often perform through the night, and generally found their patient better by daybreak. 

Aggression and Love in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain

 

miniature from the Roman de Lancelot

      Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain has all the trappings associated with medieval romance: valiant knights, lovely ladies, and a measure of magic.  The poem is exemplary as well in its episodic structure, propounding and manipulating plot elements in part for the abstract beauty of the patterns so created, in part to mirror the dialectics of lived experience.  The poem embodies many of the commonest conventions of romances, yet, at critical moments, Chrétien opposes the fundamental passions of aggression and love in a tense ambivalence.  Though Yvain’s character and actions in many ways conform to heroic expectations, his story also indicates the knight’s need for the female other, for love and selflessness.   

     The principal theme of Yvain is announced clearly to be love at the outset.  Chrétien tells a tale of King Arthur’s court because he feels that love has suffered a decline since those days of glory when Amor was “dolz et buens” (17).  True love has since, he says, all but vanished since, dwindled to a mere “fable” (24), its devotees gone (19-20).  Moderns may imitate, however, the legendary times of Arthur by telling stories of great lives, just as those in earlier times had done.

Li un recontoient noveles,

Li autre parlaient d’Amors

Des angoisses et des dolors

Et des granz biens qu’orent souvant

                              (12-15)  

Earlier heroic epics such as Beowulf or the Song of Roland including early Arthurian stories such as those in the Geoffrey of Monmouth Wace’s Roman de Brut and Layamon's Brut likewise focused on war and derring-do rather than romantic love, but Yvain announces the paramount importance of love at the outset.

     While the glittering world of King Arthur’s court might seem at first charmed in its perfection, before long the reader encounter Sir Kex (Kay) who is anything but courtly, and Sir Qualogrenant (Calogrenant) who at the queen’s urging reluctantly relates the story of his defeat by a mighty and mysterious knight.  When the king emerges, he declares that he and anyone willing to join his entourage will investigate the unknown knight in two weeks.  Yvain, however outstanding in behavior generally, wishes to avenge his cousin Sir Qualogrenant and steals off in the night to confront the challenge himself.  Already King Arthur’s court has been shown to include a failure at arms, a rude mocker, and a hero who acts surreptitiously contrary to his ruler’s plan due to his ego.  A woman sets the narrative in motion.

     Yvain proves victor in the struggle with Esclados le Ros, but his success as a fighter, far from advancing his cause as his widow Laudine’s lover, makes his approach to her all but impossible as he is her husband’s killer.  However, her maid Lunete (Lunette) assists him and, though a combination of hiding the knight and advocating for him, succeeds in introducing him to her mistress.  She must use considerable argumentation to convince Laudine that he is honorable and without blame in Esclados’ death.

     Already the simplest heroic paradigm has been violated numerous times.  The fallibility of Arthur’s court is demonstrated by Qualogrenant’s failure.  Yvain himself has transgressed feudal propriety by acting on his own and, while he does defeat his foe, he could not have won Laudine without the help of Lunete, whose selfless devotion to his interests is unexplained but consistent.

     After his marriage Yvain lives happily for a time until Gauvain (Gawain) convinces him to compete in tournaments.  Gauvain specifically opposes such competitive masculine accomplishments with love which he thinks is likely to weaken a man (2484-2489).  His companionship and the challenge of competition so successfully distracts Yvain who wishes to win renown through such sports that he fails to return to his wife after the agreed year had passed, causing her to then reject him, and causing her husband what might be called a nervous breakdown. 

     He recovers from this low point only through the intervention of another lady who uses a medicine provided her by Morgue le Sage (Morgan le Fay) (2949).  Once he is physically and mentally restored he proceeds to rehabilitate himself, not by appealing directly to his estranged wife, but by further adventures, now motivated no longer by a thirst for fame but rather by the desire to practice love, not for the time romantic love, but love of others, of community, of humanity.  He undertakes a series of combats, each more altruistic than the competitions he had entered with Gauvain for the satisfaction of his ego.  Practicing disinterested love-service, he repays the lady of Norison (Noroison) who had nursed him in his recovery defeating the Count of Alier. 

     During that fight he was described as like a lion hunting deer (3198-3199), an image which is to be dramatically enacted when he next encounters a lion set upon by a snake.  “Pity” urges him to enter the fray (3369) on behalf of the lion whom he considers noble and great-hearted (“gentil et franche,” 3371), characteristics he reinforces in himself by his selfless combat.  The lion is an exemplar not only of valor and generosity but also of loyalty to the point that he contemplates suicide when he thinks Yvain may be dead.  Though Yvain regularly tells the lion not to intervene in his combats, the lion’s help is in fact critical to his success more than once.  The animal represents the nobility of disinterested courage.

     Yvain then assists Gauvain’s brother-in-law against Harpin of the Mountain as well ss Lunette who was to be executed because of her helping him.  He frees the unwilling laborers of the Castle of Misfortune and restores the inheritance of the younger daughter of the lord of blackthorn Noire Espine.  Each of these acts is in service to others and by such selfless acts he eventually gains readmittance to his marriage. 

     His deeds alone, however, would not have brought him victory.  Though Yvain is an outstanding warrior, he could not succeed with the aid of others.  Not only is the lion his invaluable companion who assists him even when directed to stand apart, but he relies also on a series of wise women.  From his rescue from Esclados’ men to the remedy originating from Morgan le Fay and provided him by another lady to Lunette’s tricking Laudine in the end, his own prowess is insufficient to bring him his victories; he requires alliances. 

     Though the poem is not assertively Christian at one point Yvain acknowledges the need to ask for divine help (3760). The aid of the lion and Yvain’s female allies parallels the Christian dogma of sanctifying grace, which is always undeserved.  The hero’s pushy egotism, so closely linked to his martial aggression and to the pride of original sin, is insufficient to win him what he wants; indeed, his desire for the sort of fame the Greeks called κλέος, renown derived from  both combat and tournaments, is what led him to disobey his king, lose his wife, and sink to a state of madness.  Unregulated by a female psyche, his aggression may prove destructive.  Yet, his match with Laudine is presented as ideal, and the poem concludes with the promise of continued balance in which the flourishing of love guarantees country-wide as well as personal harmony.

     The profound ambivalence at the heart of Yvain arises from the assumption that men can best distinguish themselves by valor, yet courage alone will be insufficient unless moderated and controlled by love.  The one is ego-aggrandizing; the other, selfless.  Yvain is an elegantly structured romance in which the nice aesthetic discernment of the artist authenticates the salutary integration of love and death, altruism and aggression in the hero’s progress to maturation. 

Every Reader’s Chaucer

 

     This Every Reader’s Poet, the twenty-first, differs somewhat from other essays in the series.  Though Every Reader’s Poets assumes no knowledge of literature among its readers, aiming at simply acquainting people with a few of the most well-known works by canonical poets, the “Every Reader’s Chaucer” presents challenges unlike any other.  Since Chaucer wrote over six hundred years ago, his language is significantly different from modern usage.  Modernizations convey much information, but no poetry.  I have therefore included below the original Middle English texts and my own prose translations.  I recognize that, even apart from the hurdle the language presents to those new to it, I use rather long samples of Chaucer’s poetry.  Only the ambitious and particularly curious, perhaps, will attempt to make their way through this post, but I prefer to make the reader’s task rewarding, even if it turns out to be a bit arduous as well.   

 

     Geoffrey Chaucer is certainly the most widely-read and influential medieval English poet.  Everyone knows his Canterbury Tales and specialists are aware of his voluminous other works, including narratives like his monumental Trojan story Troilus and Criseyde and allegories like The Parliament of Foules as well as translations of Boethius and Romance of the Rose and the scientific Treatise on the Astrolabe.  Remarkably, he produced this considerable oeuvre while working at full-time government jobs including positions as Comptroller of Customs and Clerk of the King’s Works, as well as serving in Parliament.  Though his own family was of middle-class origin he regularly frequented the court. He received pensions and grants from  the throne beginning with a daily gallon of wine from Edward II, later converted to cash, and patronage continued under Richard II and Henry IV.  Some historians think it likely that he acted as a spy during his European travels.

     Through Chaucer’s time, French was the language of English royalty (and of British legal courtrooms as well).  Poets might choose to write in Latin, Norman French, or English.  Gower, whose dates are close to Chaucer’s, wrote major works in each.  Latin, of course, was associated with scholarship and the great authors of antiquity, while French could boast of greatest current social prestige.  For Chaucer to choose to write in English was an unusual choice, but his use of the language established it for literary usage, inspiring his contemporary Thomas Hoccleve to call him "the firste fyndere of our fair langage."

     Though he advanced the role of their native language in poetry, he also decisively influenced English poets to use Continental models of prosody.   Old English verse like Beowulf had been accentual and alliterative.  Fluent in Latin, competent in French, and knowing some Italian as well, Chaucer imported European verse forms that subsequently came to dominate English poetry, including rhyme, accentual syllabic meters, and, in particular, iambic pentameter.  Most poets who followed Chaucer chronologically followed these aspects of his poetic practice as well.

     Thus the forms of Chaucer’s poetry will seem more or less familiar to modern readers, but his language is likely to look a bit daunting at first.  He falls between Shakespeare’s use of what linguists call Early Modern English, usually readable for today’s readers with a few words glossed, and Old English, which is definitely a foreign language for twenty-first century readers.  At the end of the poet’s life final letter e was just beginning to be elided and the Great Vowel Shift from European values to those in English today was underway, significantly changing the sound of the spoken word.   We need not be concerned with the details of these changes apart from acknowledging that the modern reader of Middle English will face real difficulties at first.  Readers who do not throw up their hands and retire from the field will find that, in a short time indeed, they will read Chaucer with pleasure.  The ease of reading a modernization sacrifices  too great a share of the poetry.  To encourage reference to the original text, I here transcribe the Middle English and provide a following prose translation meant only to facilitate a return to Chaucer’s own words.  Even a first-time reader of Middle English, will, with a bit of effort, find Chaucer intelligible before long. 

    The “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales provides a description of the company that had assembled to travel together the sixty miles or so the visit the shrine of St. Thomas.  Such a trip is a device to bring together people of widely varying social classes, amounting really to a microcosm of English society.  Along with the pilgrims’ individual stories, which cover a wide range from  the courtly to the ribald, from the literary to the colloquial, the narration as a whole is a kind of encyclopedia of English types of the era, a comprehensive catalogue of the period’s sociology as well as of human psychology.  Novels as we know them were not to be written for several hundred years, but Chaucer is almost novelistic in his portrayals of his characters.  The depiction, for instance, of the Wife of Bath when she is first introduced, implies a great deal about her in a brief passage. 

 

A Good Wif was ther of biside Bathe,                           

But she was som-del deef, and that was scathe.

Of clooth-makyng she hadde swich an haunt

She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.

In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon

That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon;              

And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she

That she was out of alle charitee.

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground;

I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound

That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.                      

Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,

Ful streite y-teyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.

Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.

She was a worthy womman al hir lyve;

Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve,          

Withouten oother compaignye in youthe;

But ther-of nedeth nat to speke as nowthe.

And thries hadde she been at Jérusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge strem;

At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,               

In Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne.

She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.

Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.

Upon an amblere esily she sat,

Y-wympled wel, and on hir heed an hat                   

As brood as is a bokeler or a targe;

A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large,

And on hire feet a paire of spores sharpe.

In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe;

Of remedies of love she knew per chauncé,           

For she koude of that art the olde daunce.

                                                         (445-476)

 

 

There was a good wife who lived near Bath, but she was somewhat deaf, and that was a pity.  She was so good at cloth-making that she surpassed the producers in Ypres and Ghent.  In her parish no one else could go to make an offering before her.  If anyone beat her, she was so angry she lost all charitable feeling.  Her kerchiefs were very finely woven, I dare swear that what she wore on her head on Sunday weighed ten pounds.  Her stockings were a fine scarlet red, tightly tied and shoes quite supple and new.  She was a respectable woman all her life.  She had married five husbands by the church door, not counting her boyfriends in youth of which we need say no more.  She had visited Jerusalem three times and had been through many a strange body of water.  She had been at Rome and at Boulogne, at St. James in Galicia and at Cologne.  She knew much about wandering the byways.  She was gap-toothed to tell the truth and sat easily on a pacing horse.  On her head over a good wimple she wore a hat as broad as a buckler or shield and around her big hips she had an overskirt while on her feet she had sharp spurs.  In society she knew well how to laugh and gab.  She happened to know many remedies for love, for she knew well the ways of that old dance.

 

 

     Though medieval England was, of course, a patriarchal society, the example of the Wife of Bath proves that a determined woman could enjoy significant autonomy.  Her skill at weaving provided a secure economic base, and her pride at having achieved a certain affluence is evident in her wish to make a show of her offerings in church.  For her Christian charity was incidental to social rivalry and the conspicuous display of wealth.  Thus her clothing also conveys status with elaborate headwear for religious services where she would be seen by all (like some contemporary church ladies).  Her physical vigor is suggested by her having outlived five husbands, not to mention her earlier boyfriends, though she always kept her behavior within bounds, remaining a “worthy woman.”  Her restless energy is also indicated by her extensive travels.  Few people made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land even once, but she has done it three times as well as having visited the chief shrines of Europe.  Though physically imperfect with her partial deafness and gap-teeth, she has lived a full and adventurous life.  Her joie de vivre is indicated by her pleasure in conversation and even more in her character as a lover, one who knows well “that old dance.”

     The many concrete details in her depiction all contribute to a unified and convincing picture of a woman who makes the most of her possibilities, letting neither her husbands’ deaths nor her physical imperfections limit her pleasure in living the good life.  These characteristics are further developed in the tale she later tells, as well as in its prologue, twice as long as the story itself, but virtually all are at least implied in these thirty-one lines of verse in the Prologue.

     Though Chaucer’s fame rests on his long poems, chiefly The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, he did leave a number of shorter pieces, among them a love poem, the “Balade to Rosamounde.”  The ballade form was one of the three patterns (the “formes fixes”) developed in fourteenth century France, but the versification was not the only Continental convention Chaucer naturalized for Britain.  The poem’s content, a courtly love lament in which the lover extravagantly praises his beloved while complaining of her coldness, had appeared in poetry since ancient times, but it had been particularly cultivated among the Troubadours, trouvères, and Minnesinger of Europe since the beginning of the twelfth century.  Chaucer explicitly declares his use of such “courtly” conventions by saying he acts “curtaysly.”

 

 

Madame, ye ben of al beaute shryne

As fer as cercled is the mapamounde,

For as the cristal glorious ye shyne,

And lyke ruby ben your chekes rounde.

Therwith ye ben so mery and so jocounde

That at a revel whan that I see you daunce,

It is an oynement unto my wounde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

 

For thogh I wepe of teres ful a tyne,

Yet may that wo myn herte nat confounde;

Your semy voys that ye so smal out twyne

Maketh my thoght in joy and blis habounde.

So curtaysly I go with love bounde

That to myself I sey in my penaunce,

"Suffyseth me to love you, Rosemounde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce."

 

Nas neuer pyk walwed in galauntyne

As I in love am walwed and ywounde,

For which ful ofte I of myself devyne

That I am trew Tristam the secounde.

My love may not refreyde nor affounde,

I brenne ay in an amorous plesaunce.

Do what you lyst, I wyl your thral be founde,

Thogh ye to me ne do no daliaunce.

 

 

Madame, you are a shrine of beauty itself, as much as exists through the map of the world, for you shine like glorious crystal, and your full cheeks are like rubies, besides which you are so merry and jolly that when I see you dance at a party it is a balm to my wounds.  Though you do not make love to me in return, though I weep a bowlful of tears, may that woe not confound my heart.  Your becoming voice that you use so softly makes my thoughts abound in joy and bliss.  So I proceed courteously bound by love that I say to myself in penance, “Let me love you, Rosamond, though you to me give no love back.”  Never was pike so covered in aspic as I am covered in love and wounded.  For this reason I often declare to myself that I am a second Tristan.  My love may not cool down or be destroyed, I burn always in the delight of love.  Do as you please, I wis you would recognize your slave, though to me you give no love in return. 

 

 

     The superlatives, cast in imagery of precious stones, resemble those in dream visions.  The poet’s praise of the woman is thus otherworldly, miraculous, verging on supernatural.  She herself constitutes a “shrine” to a sort of divine beauty.  The second stanza describes the lover’s frustration as a sort of semi-religious penance.  The third stanza compares him, besotted by love, to a fish served in aspic, and then balances this striking and novel image with a reference to Tristan, tragic protagonist of one of the most well-known medieval legends.  The question of to what extent such conventions reflected actual behavior remains debated, but such artificial lyric conventions convey the very real helplessness one may experience with overmastering desire and the mystic power of sexual love.  Chaucer here defines the note later to be elaborated at great length by Elizabethan sonneteers and modern country music composers.

     Such love was not, however the only variety of eros that Chaucer depicts.  The first of the pilgrims’ stories is the knight’s very refined and courtly tale and, after his conclusion, the host asks the monk to follow, but the miller, sufficiently drunk that he has difficulty staying in the saddle, intrudes, wanting to be next.  When the host asks him to allow his “better” to precede him, he threatens to leave the company, promising his tale will be “noble.”  The host then relents and the miller tells an altogether  vulgar story about two lusty youths and an old carpenter’s young wife.  Nicholas, a student, rooms with the carpenter and, noticing that the wife “hadde a likerous ye,” (“had a lecherous eye”), one day when the husband is away, “prively he caughte hire by the queynte” (“he intimately grabs her by the cunt”), and the two plot a tryst. 

     Without describing the details of their rather elaborate plot, it is enough to know that a parish clerk, Absolon, also has his eye on the fair wife and gives her gifts, but she does not care for him, preferring the poor clerk.  He approaches her window at night, asking for a kiss and Nicholas and Alison enjoy a hearty laugh when Absolon is tricked into kissing her bare ass in the dark

 

 

Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys,

For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd.

He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd,

And seyde, "Fy! allas! what have I do?"

 

 

Back he jumped, and thought it was amiss, for he knew well that a woman has no beard.  He felt a rough and long-haired thing, and said, “Fie!  Alas! What have I done?”

 

 

When he returns, Nicholas and Alson assume that the trick will work equally well a second time, but Absolon surprises them.

 

 

This Nicholas was risen for to pisse,

And thoughte he wolde amenden al the jape;

He sholde kisse his ers er that he scape.

And up the wyndowe dide he hastily,

And out his ers he putteth pryvely

Over the buttok, to the haunche-bon;

And therwith spak this clerk, this Absolon,

"Spek, sweete bryd, I noot nat where thou art."

This Nicholas anon leet fle a fart

As greet as it had been a thonder-dent,

That with the strook he was almoost yblent;

And he was redy with his iren hoot,

And Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot.

Of gooth the skyn an hande-brede aboute,

The hoote kultour brende so his toute,

And for the smert he wende for to dye.

As he were wood, for wo he gan to crye,

"Help! Water! Water! Help, for Goddes herte!"

 

 

Nicholas had got up in order to piss and thought he would improve the joke and make him kiss his ass before he escapes.  So he rapidly open the window and stealthily puts out his ass, the whole buttock up to the haunch-bone.  And with that this clerk, this Absolon, speaks, “Speak, sweet bird, I don’t know where you are.”  This Nicholas then lets fly a fart as great as a crack of thunder so that he was almost blinded by the stroke.  And he (Absolon) was ready with his hot iron  and off goes the skin for a hand’s breadth around.  The hot plow blade so burned bis butt he thought he would die with the pain.  He began to cry like a crazy person, “Help!  Water!  Water! Help, for god’s heart!”

 

 

     The conclusion, for the story goes on to detail the carpenter’s disgrace, causes “everyone to laugh at this contention” (“every wight gan laughen at this stryf”).  Far from the lofty, idealistic, self-discipline of the ballade, this story is the sort the French call a fabliau, a novel genre with few roots in earlier European literature. Fabliaux typically employ earthy humor with a very indelicate view of love-making and an eye more toward entertainment than didacticism. In such passages moderns may hear the vernacular voice of medieval England directly. 

     Though Chaucer was innovative, he was in some ways a typical  medieval poet.  For instance, though he wrote gritty and realistic stories in colloquial language, he also cultivated the art of rhetoric and wrote a number of allegorical dream visions with no pretense of resemblance to everyday lived experience.  His Parlement of Foules (Parliament of Fowls).  In this story the narrator falls asleep reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio) and himself dreams that Scipio himself is leading him through the heavenly realms were, after passing through a temple of Venus, he comes upon a meeting of all the birds called that they might each  choose a mate.  The  following passage illustrates the allegorical technique of personifying abstractions. 

 

 

Tho was I war of Plesance anoonright,

 And of Array, and Lust, and Curteisye,

 And of the Craft that can and hath the might   220

 To doon by force a wight to doon folye:

 Disfigurat was she, I nil nat lie.

 And by hemself under an ook, I gesse,

 Saw I Delit that stood by Gentilesse.

 

 I saw Beautee withouten any attir,                     225

 And Youthe ful of game and jolitee,

 Foolhardinesse, and Flaterye, and Desir,

 Messagerye, and Meede, and other three—

 Hir names shal nat here be told for me;

 And upon pileres grete of jasper longe                230

 I saw a temple of bras yfounded stronge.

 

 Aboute that temple daunceden alway

 Wommen ynowe, of whiche some ther were

 Faire of hemself, and some of hem were gay;

 In kirteles al dischevele wente they there:         235

 That was hir office alway, yeer by yere.

 And on the temple of douves white and faire

 Saw I sittinge many an hundred paire.

 

 Bifore the temple-dore ful sobrely

 Dame Pees sat with a curtin in hir hond,              240

 And by hir side, wonder discreetly,

 Dame Pacience sitting ther I foond,

 With face pale, upon an hil of sond;

 And aldernext withinne and eek withoute

 Biheeste and Art, and of hir folk a route.              245

 

 

Then I was aware of Pleasure nearby, and of Ornament, Desire, and Courtesy, and of the Cunning that can have the power to force people to act foolishly.  She was disfigured, I will not lie, and, by himself, under an oak, I guess, I saw Delight that stood by Nobility.  I saw Beauty, lacking any clothes, and Youth, full of sport and jolliness, Foolhardiness, and Flattery, and Desire, Message-sending, and  pay-offs and three others I shall not mention.  And, with big pillars of lengthy jasper, I saw a temple of brass with strong foundation.  About that temple plenty of women were always dancing all over, of which some were fair themselves and some in fine outfits.  They went there with disorderly gowns .  That was their role always, year by year. And on the temple I saw white and pretty doves sittings, many a hundred pair.  In front of the temple door Dame Peace sat, a curtain in her hand, and, by her side, marvelously discreetly I found sitting, with a pale face on a hill of sand, and right next to her, both within and without, Promise and Subtlety and their entourage.

 

 

     Here his picture of love is more objective, more philosophical, than in the Ballade, but still quite genteel when compared to the down-to-earth desire of the Wife of Bath.  He suggests that love is rarely ideal; it may be motivated by fancy dress, lust, and the use of refined formulas, but it leads people to act foolishly.  This love is therefore to some extent “disfigured,”  Delight, significantly, is sitting alone though not far from the conventions of courtesy that ease human relations.  He mentions then naked Beauty and energetic Youth, likely guarantees of joy in love, but associated here with foolishness, flattery, and the desire that leads to crazy behavior.  The reader can imagine the gambits of lovers by his references to messengers and bribes as well as “three other things I will not mention here.”  One may only guess at such unnamed factors.  Though this locus of love is to some extent disorderly, yet the scene includes as well Dame Patience, the Promise (of a favorable outcome), artfulness, and their followers.

     Whereas the description of the Wife of Bath had been, in a way, realistic and novel-like, implying likely plot-lines for the life of such a woman, and the Balade is a lyric outcry as though direct from the heart, and the Miller’s Tale is a dirty joke, with the allegory of The Parlement of Foules the reader finds an essayistic analysis of love's nature in general.  Together these four texts provide a realistic view, than an idealized one, then a low and comic one, and finally an analytic sketch from top to bottom.

     Chaucer is an encyclopedic artist, like Homer and Shakespeare, aand his own personality is occluded as he strives to present the panorama of lived experience.  No single tone contains his vision; he seeks to cover alevels of society and to embrace self-contradictory themes.  Whereas today poetry is often considered a matter of self-expression and individuality and innovation are prized, Chaucer wrote at a time when precedent and imitation were prestigious and his own practice managed to transform English literature while maintaining a substantial loyalty to tradition at the same time.  The fact that he produced a very large body of sophisticated work while also taking an active professional role apart from writing suggests not only his own considerable talents, but the cultural gap between his era and modernity.  Today it is scarcely possible to imagine a government official who is a poet; then literary accomplishment was thought a desideratum for all gentleman. 

     The task of reading his words in the original Middle English may seem at first demanding, but, for the student who takes the trouble, it yields the great pleasure of hearing Chaucer’s voice directly, across the centuries, in some instructive ways strange, in others very like ourselves.