GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The George Inn in Southwark is photogenic. The neighborhood is pure history. At a pub in White Hart Yard, Jack Cade had his headquarters for the revolt of 1450. It’s where Mr. Pickwick met Sam Weller a few centuries later. Chaucer’s Tabard Inn was in Talbot Yard. All the coaches set off from here for places south and east. The George is how people imagine Chaucer’s Tabard, though it arrived on the site four hundred years after the pilgrims set out on their adventure.
Critics attack Coleridge for not finishing major works (Wordsworth, Byron and others were as bad offenders—all those trunks that never develop legs and arms, or heads that stop short at the neck). They forget that of the great poets the most incomplete is Chaucer, author—as the great literary historian George Saintsbury puts it—of torsi. There’s unfinished and unfinished, of course. The House of Fame is a fragment, but the Canterbury Tales is such a huge fragment that we imagine we can infer a whole. Chaucer did finish Troilus and Criseyde, just as Coleridge finished “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” not to mention Biographia Literaria.
Both men are steeped in literature. But Chaucer is at the start of something. Thus his envoi from Troilus:
Modesty, first: “litel bok” for the great English epyllion. This habit of self-deprecation is especially evident in the House of Fame and Canterbury Tales. After reading even his lesser works we feel we know him. But who is he? Is Ford Madox Ford right to see him as impersonal, as much so as Flaubert? In these lines he recognizes that he has produced a work different in genre from any he has written, from any written before in English: a tragedy. The awful truth of the poem makes him long to write a comedy to follow. He prays for this, and that his book may find a humble place among authors he considers masters. It aspires at most to kiss the steps where they pass. Yet it’s doubtful that he read Homer, and who now reads Lucan and Statius?
He prays too that his poem will be properly copied and properly recited.
He knows English is an unstable medium; the copying my scribal antecedents did—they were young, some days lazy, occasionally careless—filled him with concern. He wrote a poem cautioning his copyist, Adam:
Chaucer led an active life. Compared with Sir John, who pottered about in his own way at his own pace, Chaucer belonged to the wider world. He was born around 1340 and survived for sixty years. He died as the century turned, in 1400. “The English Tityrus,” “the well of English undefiled,” Edmund Spenser called him; “O reverend Chaucer, rose of rethoris [rhetoricians] all,” was Dunbar’s tribute; and Skelton’s:
Chaucer, that famous clerk
His termes were not dark,
But pleasant, easy, and plain;
No word he wrote in vain.
In one manuscript Thomas Hoccleve leaves a line portrait of him, the basis for our view of Chaucer in his maturity: a fine two-pointed beard, wide thin-lipped mouth, long straight nose, eyes of a vivid, calm paleness. His hair, covered in the picture, was covered in life, but where it showed it was pale brown.
He draws himself differently, a small man, hooded, a little beard, eyes used to gazing to the side—eyes, says Robert Graves, that see what, to right or left, you’re up to, while, the face averted, you’re unaware that he’s observing... Lydgate celebrates him in his Life of the Virgin Mary, as one who used to “amende and correcte the wronge traces of my rude penne.” He had foreign admirers. The historian Froissart praised him as a diplomat. Eustache Deschamps wrote a laudatory ballad to him as a translator. In the mid-sixteenth century Lilius Giraldus, the eminent Italian humanist, recognized his accomplishment.
A hundred years later Abraham Cowley described Chaucer as “a dry, old-fashioned wit, not worth reviving.” What is our opinion of Cowley? Dryden acknowledges that Chaucer “must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature... because he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales, the various manners and humours of the whole English nation, in his age.” Dryden “modernized” Chaucer and wrote one of the first great English essays in literary criticism largely about him. He calls him “the father of English poetry,” to be venerated as the Greeks did Homer. He remembers how “Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body; and that he was begotten of him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me, that Spenser was his original.” Wordsworth too “modernized” Chaucer. Matthew Arnold may miss in him the highest poetic seriousness, but he recognizes the value of “his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human life,” for he “gained the power to survey the world from a central, a truly human point of view.” Few English poets before the First World War were entirely free of a debt to him.
He was born in London, maybe in Thames Street. His father, John Chaucer, was citizen and vintner in London, himself son of Robert le Chaucer who was collector of customs on wine. John Chaucer served Lionel, son of Edward II, later Duke of Clarence. Chaucer’s mother, Agnes, outlived John and in 1367 married again. Well placed as the Chaucers were with regard to the court, they remained a merchant family. Despite patronage Geoffrey was never assimilated into courtly life, nor did he—as Gower did—stand aloof from the world. He was a man of affairs first and a poet after.
Was he educated at St. Paul’s cathedral school? It’s unlikely that he attended university, though he was a member of the Inns of Court. As a young man, some report, he was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. In 1357 he received a suit of livery as a member of Lionel’s household. In his late teens—it was 1359—he entered military service, was sent to France and taken prisoner near Rennes or Reims. By March 1360 he was freed on payment of a ransom: the king subscribed £16 to it. Some believe that during his captivity he translated part of the Romance of the Rose.
Philippa Chaucer, his wife, was awarded an annuity of 10 marks for life in 1366. She was born Roet (or Rouet), daughter of Sir Payn Roet, a Hainault knight, and sister of the third wife of John of Gaunt. This helps explain, if virtue is not enough, Gaunt’s long patronage of the poet and Chaucer’s familiarity with Wycliffe, whom Gaunt fatefully patronized as well.
The king gave Chaucer an annuity of 20 marks in 1367 as dilectus valettus noster (our beloved valet) and by the end of 1368 he was an esquire. Six years later he was granted a pitcher of wine per day (commuted to a money gift). He rejoined the army, and in 1370 went abroad on public duty of some kind. He must have been successful. In 1372 he spent a year away, part of it in Genoa arranging the selection of an English port for the Genoese trade. He went to Florence and perhaps to Padua. Petrarch died in 1374. It is suggested that in Italy Chaucer was introduced to Petrarch at the wedding of Violante, daughter of the Duke of Milan, by the Duke of Clarence: and it is not impossible that Boccaccio was of the party. It’s a tempting but unlikely scenario. Certainly he took their poetry, like Dante’s, to heart. Indeed it may have helped purge him of French enthusiasms. In Canterbury Tales the Clerk plays a tribute in his Prologue which, if taken literally, gives substance to the legend of a meeting. It generously records a debt:
Back home, Chaucer leased Aldgate gatehouse; he was prospering, and later in the year was made controller of customs for wools, skins and hides in the port of London, with an extra £10 pension from John of Gaunt. How did he conduct his duties and manage to write as well? In 1377 he was back on diplomatic business in Flanders and France. When Edward III died and Richard came to the throne in 1378, he was in France once more, then went to Italy, on a mission to Bernabo Visconti.
The controllership of petty customs was added to his duties in 1384, and two years later he sat in Parliament as a knight of the shire of Kent. He lived for a time in Kent, where around 1386 he began planning Canterbury Tales. Then the wheel of fortune turned: during Gaunt’s absence in Spain the Duke of Gloucester rose, Gaunt was eclipsed and Chaucer lost his controllership. In 1387 Philippa died. The next year he assigned his pensions and property to someone else, a sign of financial distress. Then in 1389 the Duke of Gloucester fell, Gaunt was reinstated, and Chaucer became clerk of works to the king for two years. He was also a commissioner responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames. He was rising again but it was hard. In 1390 he fell among the same thieves twice in a day and was robbed of public money, but excused from repaying it. In that year and the next he held the forestership of North Petherton Park, Somerset, and in 1394 his pension was refreshed: £20 a year from Richard II. But he remained needy. Richard gave him an additional tun of wine a year, and in Richard’s wake his third royal patron, Henry IV, added 40 marks to the pension Richard restored. “Envoy to Scogan” and “Complaint to his Purse” suggest that Chaucer continued impecunious. Henry gave him a purple robe trimmed with fur, and he felt secure enough to lease a house in the garden of St. Mary’s, Westminster, close by the palace. He enjoyed it briefly. On 25 October 1400 he died and was buried in the Abbey, in the chapel of St. Benedict. Poet’s Corner came into being, with Chaucer as cornerstone and first tenant.
Tradition says he lived in Woodstock. Tradition says many things. He is not above retelling stories of himself and, like all storytellers, he embroiders. His admirers want him to have more of a life than written evidence entitles him to. There is a mysterious incident: in 1380 Cecilia de Chaumpaigne gave him a release de raptu meo (“of my abduction or rape”). It’s hard to think of Chaucer as a rapist. This may refer to a more commonplace matter, an attempt to kidnap a ward or minor and marry him or her to someone for money.
Did Chaucer have children? The Astrolabe is dedicated to “little Lewis my son,” aged ten when it was written. Philosophical Strode may have tutored “little Lewis” at Oxford. Cancellor Gascoigne, a generation after Chaucer died, speaks of Thomas Chaucer, rich and well placed, as Geoffrey’s son. This Thomas took the coat of arms of Rouet—his mother’s maiden name—late in life. Gaunt in 1381 established an Elizabeth Chaucer as a nun at Barking. She may have been the poet’s daughter.
Why dwell on such a scatter of fact and hearsay? To show at how many points and in how many ways Chaucer touched his age.
His work divides into three periods, conveniently labeled French, Italian and English, or mature. Before 1373—he was a “late starter” and may not have taken up his pen to write English verse until he was almost thirty—he composed the ABC, The Book of the Duchess (1369–70), early ballads and complaints, his translations of Boethius and of about a third of the Romance of the Rose. This is the period of French influence, dominated by the octosyllabic couplet.
Young Chaucer was infatuated with the Romance, but abandoned the translation. Maybe Petrarch’s emphatic rejection of it affected him. Petrarch, when Guy de Gonzago sent him a copy, received it as a cold, merely artificial and “extravagant composition.” Chaucer’s version, perhaps only partly by him, runs to 7,700 lines, compared with the more than 24,000 lines of Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s composite original. It embodies the lore and literary conventions of courtly romance: dream, allegorical garden, cardboard personification. The latter part of the original includes satire on women, church and the established order. Such satire struck a chord with Chaucer.
The Book of the Duchess shows him almost fully fledged. It’s a consolatory romance for John of Gaunt on the death of his first wife, Blanche, and draws on the Romance. The octosyllabic couplets foreshadow Gower’s fifteen years later; but Chaucer’s poem keeps close to a single subject and illustrates a crucial difference between Chaucer and Gower. Gower is encyclopedic by design; Chaucer is inclusive by nature. His verse is integrated because the human and poetic contexts admit more. Allusion and illustration are means, not end. His morality is implicit in the poem, not appended to it. The Book of the Duchess hints at what’s to come: a dream frame, a garden, personification, confession, allegory, May morning and the hunt. There is also a debt to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. What makes it Chaucerian is the actual-seeming grief and sympathy, acknowledging the impotence of consolation. The sense of grief depends on the creation of two credible human figures, the poet and the mourner.
Chaucer alludes abundantly to Blanche, to Lancaster and Richmond (Yorkshire), John of Gaunt’s seat. He marries love vision and the traditional elements of elegy. This might argue for a later date: such a deliberated and courtly composition would not answer the needs of immediate, unassimilated grief. But if we read the later love visions, it’s clear that this must be the earliest, fresh and complete as few of the later poems are. Some readers are unbeguiled and consider it apprentice work. The weakness is allegory and Chaucer’s discomfort within its constraints, against which his whole writing life was a struggle.
Did Keats get “La Belle Dame sans Merci” from it? Lines 448–49 and what precedes and follows, the dense wood, the aloneness, the color:
“Lord,” thoght I, “who may that be?
What ayleth hym to sitten her?”
The poem is so well judged and handled that it’s fully expressive: the sleepless narrator, the tale of Ceix and Alcyone, how he at last falls asleep and dreams the hunt, the knight in the forest; his account of the chess game with Dame Fortune, the story of emotional reversals; after the conceits, the knight’s confession of his youthful wandering eye, his eventual true love conveyed in physical terms which are a window on the beloved’s moral beauty, his courtship, his loss. The interlocutor wakes up. The verse has some of the ruggedness of the accentual tradition but is “correct” when properly voiced.
Then the Italian phase, Dante and Boccaccio in the ascendant, when he uses the “heroic” stanza of seven lines and begins to use heroic couplets. This is a wonderful early maturity. It begins (1372–80) with The House of Fame, Saint Cecilia (which would become “The Second Nun’s Tale”), the tragedies used for “The Monk’s Tale,” Anelida, and some lyrics. The defining impact of Italian poetry is made clear and then assimilated in the work of the next six years (1380–86): The Parliament of Fowls, Palamon (later to become “The Knight’s Tale”), Troilus and Criseyde, with Boece (his translation of the Boethius) probably a bit before, short poems, Boethian ballades, The Legend of Good Women, and some of Canterbury Tales.
Maturity (1386–1400) includes major parts of the Canterbury Tales, the Prologues, and work where he is “purely and intensely English.” “The figures are all British, and bear no suspicious signatures of Classical, Italian, or French imitation,” says Ford; and Warton: “He made England what she was and, having made her, remains forever a part of his own creation.”
The House of Fame is my favorite torso—unfinished, unfinishable: he bit off more of Dante than he could chew. Pope liked it enough to translate it into his century, out of octosyllabics and into heroic couplets. Warton didn’t like Pope’s version: he imitated it, with elegance of diction, harmonious versification, but he warped the story and changed the character of the poem. In correcting its extravagance he overlooked the fact that extravagance was necessary to this kind of poem, that its beauties consisted in extravagances. “An attempt to unite order and exactness of imagery with a subject formed on principles so professedly romantic and anomalous, is like giving Corinthian pillars to a Gothic palace.” Chaucer’s amazing, amusing eagle vanishes altogether from Pope’s version.
Chaucer controls the pace, with a new eloquence learned in part from Dante, chunks of whose Divine Comedy the poem swallows as it proceeds. A love vision, it incorporates several love stories, French material, an abridgment of the Aeneid,
The tone is comic. There’s a hint of autobiography in his boredom with routine, his mundane job, and a vivid portrait of a bookish poet who goes home after work, ignores his neighbors and—as the eagle says—
He had a big library for his time—perhaps forty books—which he pored over again and again. There is a Breton poem called Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal and Lay le Freine: one of the Orfeo manuscripts may have belonged to him. The dialect is Londonish. It is, with “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Franklin’s Tale,” the most successful lay in English. We do not have an inventory of his library, but he knew the Latin literature current in his century, especially Ovid. He had no scholastic instruction in English (though he had it in French, and in Italian perhaps). English was unknown in schools even for the modest purpose of construing, until the next century. He made his own path through the untamed—or uncodified—wilds of English.
Metrically The House of Fame is similar to the Book of the Duchess and uses a love vision (deployed again in the Legend of Good Women). A technical advance on the Book of the Duchess, it is more learned and has been brushed by the Italian wing—Dante, not Boccaccio. In a sense it’s our first great comic poem. How visualized the fantasy is, clear as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch: the architecture, the “science” that underpins it, the sense of heat and cold, and the narrator’s fear, effort, exhaustion and exaltation. Love is the theme, but Chaucer turns to fame, the fame of lovers. His ostensible motive is to escape the routine of life and visit a place of extraordinary persons, stories and events. Allegorical readers try to attach it to his disappointment at lack of recognition; others tie it to court events. It may be simple entertainment. Unlike the Tales, it’s drawn from books, not from life.
The narrator, like Ganymede who was “mad the goddys botiller,” is plucked up by an eagle and swept off in one of the earliest English dreams of nonspiritual and nonmechanized flight. But he isn’t going to Olympus to mix martinis for Jove. This isn’t transcendental or mystical in that way; and the eagle keeps “articulating” as they fly. His first word is “Awak!”—a squawky word in “the same vois and stevene / That useth oon I koude nevene”—perhaps Mrs. Chaucer. The eagle reassures him, but when he opens his eyes he’s scared out of his wits. Does Jove want to make him into a star? He is not Enoch or Elijah or Romulus or Ganymede. But Jupiter is rewarding him for his laborious, bookish research into love and for his writing. Jupiter knows his man, a customs officer, a solitary even in the social world. The eagle takes him to the House of Fame for instruction and distraction. He calls his passenger “Geffrey,” becomes philosophical, explains the natural order, how sound works, and much else. As they ascend, the world dwindles below. Looking up the poet sees enlarged the Milky Way and the stars.
The invocation in Book One is to the god of sleep, in Book Two to “every maner man / That Englissh understonde kan.” Book Three invokes Apollo, and Chaucer lets the rhyme carry the reader from the invocation into the dream. In the invocation he wryly sets himself in the same relation to Apollo as Apollo is to Daphne. Reflecting on the vanity of Fame, he climbs a crystal hill: “A roche of yse, and not of stel.” The ice image is developed: the words and names are so melted he cannot read them (as gravestones are in old churchyards). On the other side of the hill the names are unmelted: true fame, protected from heat by the shadow of the castle. He can’t describe the castle, it’s too beautiful. But he can tell the “substance” of what it contained, so big, seamless and precious: “and ful eke of wyndowes, / As flakes falle in grete snowes.” He evokes the musicians he hears:
This is the poetry that shaped Spenser’s voice in The Shepheardes Calender.
Finally he goes inside the house, having seen more than he can tell, and sees still more. Abundance of vision makes it hard for him to finish his work. Inside he finds a huge lady, Fame, enthroned, her head touching the sky, her feet the earth. She’s covered with eyes, like Virgil’s Rumor. He evokes the Apocalypse, but here a secular, or classicized, version: an interesting marriage of Roman and biblical divinity.
In the poem he does not distinguish among historical, legendary and mythical figures. They’re an equal resource for the poet; his audience will expect all three kinds. Josephus, Statius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian, the chroniclers of Troy do the same, and disagree—some favor Troy, some Greece:
As in Dante, parties of the damned and blessed appear, petitioning Good Fame. The lady is fickle and disappoints. Then comes Aeolus, god of wind, whom she gets to blow Bad Fame abroad. Images of coprology and farting hover near the surface. The poet witnesses the wronging of right reputation, the unjust whims of Fame, how it is louder the further away it gets from Aeolus’s smelly trumpet. A third party of good petitioners arrives and she promises better fame than they deserve. Aeolus blows his golden horn. Again, the poet responds to smell more than sound. The black trumpet is all stink, the gold trumpet’s mouth is balm in a basket of roses. Another group asks that their deeds remain unknown. A fifth group asks anonymity, but she refuses since their good deeds, known, will breed good deeds. A sixth group of semiwastrels gets good fame. The lazy and covetous get the thumbs down. Then come traitors, “shrews,” men who have been utterly bad and courted fame for fame’s sake.
Geoffrey gets into conversation. Why is he there—as petitioner? Certainly not, says the poet. He is led out to the labyrinth, Dedalus’s construction. The quaint house spins and is never still: the dizziness of fame. Lightly built of twigs, with holes to let sound escape, it’s an ever restless, sleepless place. The poet sees his eagle perched nearby, asks leave to visit the spinning labyrinth, and the eagle agrees, but points out that he needs a guide—otherwise he won’t get in (or out again). The poem stops.
Though the figures are literary, the world imagined is concrete, particular, the voices “real”: it was a short step to put real characters into a world seen rather than visualized. At the end of the poem the rush of people eager to gain a view of the “man of gret auctorite” is especially clear: they “troden fast on others heles, / And stampen, as men doon aftir eles.”
In The Parliament of Fowls we meet the mature Chaucer. Another love vision, it is also a bird and beast fable, pointing toward “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Again a gormless poet, who knows not love “in dede” but from books, is reading. He dozes, dreams: a supernatural guide conveys him through an allegorical vision. What is the poem’s occasion? A valentine entertainment? No better explanation has been offered. There is more social satire than Chaucer practiced before, rising out of a conflict between the “gentil” and the “cherles,” or common birds. The opening lines are among his best-known. The craft he speaks of in the first line is not poetry, but love:
His professed ignorance of love-craft, his desire to learn from books and dreams rather than action in the field of love, add to the humor. The volume he reads before his dream is the apocryphal Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis, a classic attributed to Scipio Africanus, neglected today but with an importance for medieval writers second only to that of Boethius’s Consolation.
Night falls on his reading and “Berafte me my bok for lak of lyght” so “to my bed I gan me for to dresse,” depressed because he has what he doesn’t want and lacks what he wants. In sleep Scipio Africanus calls on him. The dream is wish fulfillment, as a hunter in dream revisits the wood, a barrister dreams successful cases. Scipio takes him to a garden, and the first inscription over the gate is a reversal of Dante’s Inferno lettering (the second is bleak, for failed love):
He stands affrighted till Scipio shoves him through, assuring him that as he has no taste for love he’s in no peril: he can gather useful subjects for his writing. He is led into a forest of immortal trees. An idyllic river flows, flowers bloom: the superb description again foreshadows Spenser and early Milton. Each tree and creature is assigned an attribute from a human world: “The sayynge fyr,” “the dronke vyne,” “The victor palm” and so forth.
Cupid and his daughter Will are preparing arrows. All the courtly virtues are personified. “I saw Beute withouten any atyr.” Venus. The Goddess Nature. And here is the hierarchy of birds for mate choosing, and a quite wonderful catalogue of birds that prefigures Skelton’s lists. Nature holds on her hand a loved female formel eagle, the catalyst for the courtship debate. Nature insists that the female has to consent to being chosen. A tersel eagle claims the formel and declares terms and conditions of perfect courtly servitude. Other tersels of lower condition interject and the debate commences.
In The Parliament Chaucer visualizes. He attributes this power to his reading and stresses the derivative nature of his work: he’s a reteller of tales. But he is no regurgitator. He assimilates and retells past knowledge in present terms. Selection and collation are preliminaries to creation. In The Legend of Good Women he makes the point the other way around: “And if that olde bokes weren aweye, / Yloren were of remembraunce the keye.” Translation and creation go hand in hand. He chooses, participates in the text, adapts, prunes and patches it.
Troilus and Criseyde, his great finished poem, is the outstanding verse narrative in English, the more remarkable for standing so near the threshold of our poetry. Sidney marveled at it: “Chaucer, undoubtedly, did excellently in his Troilus and Criseyde; of whom, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age go so stumblingly after him. Yet had he great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverent an antiquity.” It goes with “The Knight’s Tale,” his second great narrative, and like it is rooted in Boccaccio. He claims to be translating and asks pardon for aught amiss: “For as myn auctor seyde, so sey I.” This is a way of borrowing authority, the authority of a classic text. But he is not translating: he is adapting. “The Knight’s Tale” condenses a huge story, Troilus expands a small story in the Filostrato. The characters are different from Boccaccio’s. Though the structure is allegorical, Chaucer’s characters outgrow the figurative and take on dramatic life; he lets them, he makes them real. Warton conjectures from certain images in the poem that it may have been composed on Chaucer’s travels: had he composed it at home other metaphors and images would have occurred to him. Or is it based more closely on an original than we suppose?
Chaucer’s telling of Troilus in five books improves on the plot and characters of Boccaccio and provides philosophical and dramatic coherence and a visualized setting. Saintsbury calls Chaucer a hermit crab, crawling into someone else’s shell, this time Boccaccio’s, and making it his own, a common medieval practice. The woodenness of Chaucer’s allegorical figures softens here into a kind of realism we do not find again in our poetry before Marlowe. Characters may be representative; they are not stylized.
The poem begins with Calkas’s treacherously going over to the Greeks. He has read the oracles. He leaves his daughter Criseyde in Troy. Hector forgives her when she seeks mercy for herself. It is April, a month fatal for lovers, who repair to the temple for their ceremonies.
Chaucer alludes to Anne of Bohemia, Richard’s queen. Troilus is cruising in the temple and teasing his friends for falling in love. Then he sees Criseyde. He resists but at last allows himself the full rein of love. He sings his love song, then burns for her volubly, but she is ignorant of his love; her nonresponse he takes for indifference or an indication that she has another beau.
Pandarus arrives. He courts Troilus’s confidence with banter and concern. The language moves into courtly love gear. He offers to help—how the devil can you help me, says Troilus, you who never prospered in love yourself? (In this Pandarus recalls the narrators of The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls.) Keeping to courtly rules, Troilus resists naming his beloved. Pandarus tells him that unknown she will despise him if he dies and she knows no cause; besides, he’s making himself unlovable. “Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought.” Pandarus evokes Boethius’s wheel of fortune. At last Troilus confesses, repents to the god of love for past cynicism, and Pandarus goes to work. Troilus has the fervent zeal of the convert. His indolence is turned to action, his vices to virtues, he returns to the field of battle and all are delighted to look into his face.
The second book shifts to Criseyde. “Owt of thise blake wawes for to saylle, / O wynd, o wynd, the weder gynneth clere...” April is gone. It is May, mother of happy months. Procne awakes Pandarus with her sad song and he hies to Criseyde’s. He finds her listening to a maid reading from the tales of the siege of Thebes, one of Chaucer’s unsettling anachronisms. Pandarus pricks her curiosity, and women, we know from Pandora, cannot resist temptation. He starts praising Troilus. Criseyde attends. At last she persuades him to come clean and he drops his bombshell; if she doesn’t respond, Troilus will kill himself and so will he. He weeps. Criseyde hears him out but doesn’t immediately respond. He gives advice. She accuses him of letting her down. He starts to kill himself; she slyly humors him. He lies about how he found out Troilus’s love. He goes, she repairs to her closet “And set hire doun as stylle as any ston.” Then Troilus rides below her window, returning from battle.
Criseÿde gan al his chere aspien,
And leet it so softe in hire herte synke,
That to hirself she seyde, “Who yaf me drynke?”
Her love is not sudden: a sinking in, she talks herself into it. She is concerned first for her own estaat, then for his heele. In sleep she dreams that a bone-white eagle removes her heart. As she sleeps, Chaucer takes us back to Troilus. Pandarus persuades him to write a letter, then persuades Criseyde to reply. They meet and declare fidelity.
It cannot last. Book Four invokes the furies, the end of the affair. The focus of the Proem is on Criseyde. After a day of battle, a truce for the exchange of prisoners is declared. Calkas asks that Criseyde be sent over in exchange for Antenor. Troilus, a courtly lover, can’t name his love. Hector says the Trojans don’t sell women and she is no prisoner. The people resist, with perhaps an allusion to 1381 and Jack Straw:
The political irony is not lost on Chaucer: Antenor later turned traitor. The common will is not to be trusted.
At moments of special tension Chaucer resorts to heavy alliteration:
Troilus laments hugely and long. Pandarus comes and bucks him up. First he argues that Troilus has had his love: let her go, seek out another. But Troilus, doggedly faithful, accuses Pandarus of playing racket, “to and fro, / Nettle in, dok out, now this, now that.” Pandarus urges Troilus to ravish her (with her consent) before she goes. Criseyde meanwhile is raising her own moan, reading her will and testament to the air. Pandarus comes and talks her round.
Pandarus summons Troilus from the temple, lectures him in a Boethian spirit, then takes him to Criseyde. Their meeting is touching:
Soth is, that when they gonnen first to mete,
So gan the peyne hire hertes for to twiste,
That neyther of hem other myghte grete,
But hem in armes toke, and after kiste.
Briefly, they are too full of feeling for language. She puts her head on his breast and faints. He thinks her dead and designs to kill himself. He finds his voice and makes another speech, she comes around and cries out his name, he is overjoyed and kisses her some more, to this effect: “For which hire goost, that flikered ay on lofte, / Into hire woful herte ayeyn it wente.” Seeing the sword she chides him for considering suicide. She suggests they go to bed and discuss matters further since day is drawing nigh. And thus in Romeo and Juliet haste they make their way to consummation. In bed they plan secret meetings. She has a low opinion of her father and thinks to bribe and corrupt him. She unfolds her plot, and Chaucer comments, as if to absolve her from what comes later:
Troilus comes round to her point of view, recovers, gets excited and “Bigan for joie th’amorouse daunce.” Speech has cleared their hearts as birdsong makes a morning. She swears and swears fidelity with huger and huger oaths. Note: She does not doubt his faith for an instant.
Like the fifth act of a Shakespearean tragedy, the Parcas or Fates begin the last book. Diomede comes to take Criseyde away. He senses Troilus’s love. As he leads Criseyde among the Greeks he chats about the Greek world and how she will feel at home there. He takes her to Calkas’s tent and declares his new love for her. Back in Troy Pandarus tries to distract Troilus, but he wants to see his beloved. Criseyde’s house is shut up. He remembers, then reverts to grief. “Men myght a book make of it, lik a storie.”
We return to Criseyde, busy being courted by Diomede and pushed by her father into his arms, until she falls. After a couple of months she has forgotten Troilus. Diomede is virile and eligible. She is beautiful, with only one fault: her eyebrows join. Troilus is more a paragon than Diomede, but he is no longer there. Diomede pleads with Calkas, with her. She gives him hope, and having given him hope, she must in time give the rest. She does so with diminishing reluctance, calculating her need, forgetting her troth. She laments her infidelity, knowing what it is and deliberately turning—laments, but does not repent. The author can’t say how long it took her to turn. His sources are unclear. He suggests the time was brief, but gives her the benefit of the doubt.
Troilus and Pandarus are on the walls, straining their eyes for a sighting of Criseyde. They keep gazing, conversing and japing. Troilus imagines he sees her but it’s a distant cart. Night falls. After some days, Troilus is overcome by jealousy. He weakens and everyone, from King Priam down, is concerned. One night he goes to bed and dreams of a wood with a large sleeping boar, in whose arms lies Criseyde, kissing it. Pandarus counsels him to write a letter, which he does eloquently. She replies, her reply not transcribed for us, but she promises to come in due course. Troilus asks Cassandra to interpret his boar dream, which she does, relating it to Tideus who was Diomede’s father. Her interpretation is long, its conclusion merciless: “Wep if thow wolt, or lef! For, out of doute, / This Diomede is inne, and thow art oute.” No one believes Cassandra, that’s what she’s famous for. Troilus keeps his hope just a little longer.
When Hector is slain, Troilus becomes chief warrior. He sneaks out to try to glimpse Criseyde in the night, in vain. Then she writes again, this letter quoted in the poem. At last Troilus understands. Deiphobus in battle has rent from Diomede Criseyde’s brooch, which Troilus gave her. He still loves but knows he cannot have or trust her ever again. He refers to her as “bright Criseyde,” an epithet that recurs seventeen times in the poem. He goes to battle and triumphs over all but Diomede.
Chaucer begs pardon from his lady readers. They will find elsewhere, in other sources, that Criseyde proved false. It isn’t his story, he is just the teller of an historical tragedy.
He must release Troilus’s soul. Slain by Achilles, he ascends to heaven and looks down on the little spot of earth, embraced by the sea; he despises earth’s vanity, gazing at where he was slain. He laughs at those who lament his passing. Chaucer urges readers to set their young minds on higher things, to love God and Christ who died and rose. He will not betray. Finally Chaucer condemns the pagan world and its rites, its gods, its (and our) appetites. The classical gods are rascals. There is a final, gracious hand-washing in the dedication:
And he prays, he prays with Dante of the Paradiso, in a key that changes the key of his whole poem. The prayer rounds up the tone from passion to a kind of transcendence, a change of key that is not overextended so as to destroy the impact of the poem but that brings it from the treacherous brink of the erotic and subversive back into the realm of courtly and divine love.
In Troilus and Criseyde the plot holds no surprises. The poet tells us the outcome in the opening passages: “The double sorwe of Troilus,” “Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie,” and as early as line 55 we are prepared for Criseyde’s bad faith: “the double sorwes here / Of Troilus in lovynge of Criseyde, / And how that she forsook him ere she deyde.” It is not the working of plot but the philosophical process of predestination and the motive and development of character we watch. In the fifth book the poet insistently intervenes, to hold our sympathy at bay so that we can judge characters fairly. They’ve grown too big for the moral clarity he seeks. Criseyde is too beguiling. Yet we do keep a certain distance. Chaucer insists, even as he makes Troy visible, that it is remote in time, a different world altogether. Facts are foreknown and static. Narrative need not be linear. It can turn back on itself, allow gaps in sequence. Chaucer stops and starts action, accelerates and brakes, lingers when we would have him hurry and hurries when we would have him stay. It’s a technique he uses in “The Knight’s Tale” too, leaving Palamon and Arcite “ankle deep” in blood while he visits another part of the story. Our perspective becomes all-inclusive, as Troilus’s does when his “lighte goost” escapes his body and ascends to the highest sphere.
There are two time schemes, historical and symbolic. It is April in the first book, May in the second and third; Book Four takes place three years later, in autumn; Book Five passes in a cold season. This poetic chronology provides images and a satisfying cycle, an additional unity. With autumn the tone begins to change.
The philosophical theme is proved by facts in the narrative. Dreams never lie: Troilus’s dream of the boar and Criseyde’s of the eagle are symbolically true. Pandarus, who, like Criseyde’s turncoat father, is an astrologer, foresees what is to be and catalyzes it. His foreknowledge is great. At one point the poet tells us, “But God and Pandarus wist al what this ment.” Only the lovers cannot see ahead.
Criseyde, when she falls in love, is natural and passionate, her virtue pragmatic. We learn little of her past except that she has been widowed. Her father’s treachery made her presence in Troy precarious. Pandarus advises her to love Troilus in part to protect herself. All these facts tend a little to exculpate her. If she is natural and active once aroused, Troilus, the knight and warrior, in matters of love proves phlegmatic and philosophical. Just when we expect his heart to break, he launches into Boethian lectures on predestination: “For al that comth, comth by necessitee, / Thus to ben lorn, it is my destinee.” When he first falls in love his response is not virile and eager but passive and reflective. The word “think” is associated with Criseyde. Talking (at length) is the prerogative of Troilus. Action characterizes Pandarus. These are, despite particular characterization, their modes of being. To this extent Chaucer’s characters are thematic clauses in an argument.
It is the narrator (not “Chaucer himself”) who alters most during the course of the poem. An innocent servant of the servants of Venus—a sort of Pandarus himself—he is overcome by what he has to tell. He tries to draw a positive moral; it defeats him. He interrupts the story to preempt our objections. In the end, with tender pity, he lets Criseyde go. He condemns reluctantly but absolutely: “Men seyn,—I not,—that she yaf hym [Diomede] hire herte.” His effort to keep us at a moral distance from the story has snared him in it.
Chaucer makes emotional abstractions accessible to the senses through homely metaphors. When Troilus loves, his heart like a loaf of bread begins to “sprede and ryse.” Epic simile behaves this way, likening great with familiar things. Bayard the horse remembers his horsiness after a moment’s abandon to feeling; there is the snail, lyming of bird feathers, a snare; “Now artow hent, now gnaw thin owen cheyne!”; a whetstone, or
Criseyde’s memory of Troy is a knotless thread drawn painlessly through her heart. The language is fully transitive. Characters fight, touch, kiss, embrace. Dialogue is credible, even dramatic. Pandarus reports to his niece from the battlefield: “There nas but Grekes blood,—and Troilus.” That pause sparks the best hyperbole in the poem.
Chaucer develops an architecture, balancing scene against scene, linking by echo and reiteration passages in different books. This patterning begins in the stanza form. Normally the pivot of the stanza is in the fourth line, the center. The language builds to it, then changes tone or direction into the final couplet. The pivot can be the line, a word, or a subject and verb carefully placed. In Book Two, we read Pandarus’s subtle exhortation:
There at the stanza’s heart is “Troilus, so loveth,” preceded by his virtues and followed by his desires. There is also Chaucer’s mastery of the enjambement. One example, Troilus’s declaration:
But fro my soule shal Criseydes darte
Out nevere mo...
Is “darte” a noun? “Out” comes at the head of the line with the emphasis of a verb. It becomes a preposition only in retrospect. It is “darte out,” no talk of darts but of mingled souls; yet the dart hovers at the edge of metaphor.
After Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s next production, The Legend of Good Women (c. 1385) is minor: a penance exacted by the God of Love for his defamation of women in Troilus and Criseyde. He must write of “Cupid’s saints.” Another love vision (all the love visions have the word “of” in the title, emblematizing possession), it is most original and interesting in the “Prologue,” where the daisy undergoes her memorable metamorphosis into that most faithful of Trojan women, Alceste. The poet worships the daisy on the first of May. The “Prologue” is a sort of palinode, a poem of celebration. Here Chaucer uses for the first time the rhymed decasyllabic couplets, which become heroic couplets. The poem has a secure place in the history of English prosody.
Apart from minor and miscellaneous work, his last great poem, largely from his mature period, is Canterbury Tales. As Dryden comments in his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern: “Here is God’s plenty!” Dryden “modernized” some of the Canterbury Tales. “All the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, their humours, their features, and the very dress, [I see] as distinctly as if I’d supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark.” The breadth of Chaucer’s direct knowledge and observation is formidable. “He is a perpetual fountain of good sense; learned in all sciences; and therefore speaks properly on all subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off; a continence which is practised by few writers.” In particular, few medieval writers. The accuracy of detail impressed Dryden. “Chaucer followed nature everywhere; but was never so bold to go beyond her.” In their scope the Tales reveal “a most wonderful comprehensive nature,” learning and social vision, despite what the Roman Catholic Dryden sees as Wycliffite blemishes in his thought—evident especially in “The Parson’s Tale,” though certainly not strident.
Canterbury Tales is an anthology of stories of many kinds set in the framework of a pilgrimage, the medieval equivalent of a vacation, with spiritual overtones. The tales are told by individuals, the first such characters in English literature, passing the time on their journey from Southwark to the tomb of St. Thomas à Beckett at Canterbury. Our first interest is in the pilgrims, introduced one by one in the “Prologue,” Chaucer’s most original verse, evoking season, place, a motive for the gathering, then the pilgrims themselves, in order of social eminence: a knight at the top, a plowman at the bottom, and in between representatives of the Church in its various manifestations, also a shipman, a cook, a franklin, a widow, and so on. The host of the Tabard becomes master of ceremonies and accompanies them on the journey.
The sequence of tales was to include four by each pilgrim, but exists only in extended fragments. Rivalries and friendships are suggested; surrounding the drama of each tale is the drama of the storytellers revealed in their prologues. A tale can provide a window on their enthusiasms and hostilities. Friar and Summoner expose one another in their true colors. By savagely criticizing the Church from the mouths of members of its corrupt and privileged classes, Chaucer “made it true” and wryly distanced himself from controversy. “The Knight’s Tale” is obliquely answered by the Miller’s coarse, delightful tale, which in turn gives offense to the Reeve and provokes from him a further low tale.
“The Knight’s Tale” introduces the dominant themes: love, marriage, justice, predestination, the wheel of fortune—a courtly, civic and philosophical opening of a pilgrimage that concludes with the tedious theological didacticism of “The Parson’s Tale.” Chaucer finally recants all but his moral works: the translation of Boethius, the legends of saints, homilies, moralities and devotions. Between Knight’s and Parson’s stretch the other tales, twenty-four in all, not all complete.
Chaucer’s women are among his best creations. Criseyde, his completest and most complex woman, is a triumph. In the Tales we meet others. The Prioress faints at the sight of blood, mothers her puppies and swoons if one dies. She combines courtliness with an easy religious vocation: amor vincit omnia is her motto. She suffers a frustrated desire to be a mother. Hence her dogs and her tale about the murder of a child. Chaucer makes her physically and psychologically present. Her hypocrisies charm, but they remain hypocrisies.
The Wife of Bath’s prologue and her tale express rather than reflect her character. Her syntax, her face, her clothes, her stars, her past, all particularize her. Her dress is out of fashion: it is the fashion of her youth, her better years. She introduces her five husbands. Her vitality makes us overlook her numerous peccadilloes. Opposite and hostile to her is the repugnant Pardoner; she, the insatiable, throbbing but sterile woman faces in him the bitterly impotent man.
Chaucer is the father of English poetry for two reasons. The first is technical: adapting continental forms he evolves a relaxed and distinctly English style; he enriches the poetic vocabulary; and he introduces through translation and adaptation the great Latin, French and Italian poets into English poetry. The second reason relates to the first. In his powerful and original style Chaucer provides a formal and a thematic model. He brings England into the new English poetry. Langland portrays London, but his is a moralized, allegorical metropolis, in the spirit of didactic documentary. Chaucer introduces the diversity of English character and language, of English society at large. He has themes, not polemics or moral programs. His eyes are mild and unclouded. Gower writes from books. Chaucer starts writing from books, but the world takes over his verse.
Of the poems doubtfully attributed to Chaucer, one, “Merciles Beaute,” a triple roundel, touched Ezra Pound to the quick:
Doubtful attribution in the centuries after his death meant that almost any unattributed poem of merit (and some that were attributed) were put on Chaucer’s account, as it were, and his oeuvre grew and grew, until Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730–86), Chaucer’s first great editor in the eighteenth century, stripped the body of work down to what could definitely be identified, from internal evidence, as the poet’s own work. In 1775 he published an edition of Canterbury Tales with prefatory matter and glossary. Not a theorist, just a learned scholar of classical and medieval literature who had enjoyed legal training and possessed an impeccable ear, Tyrwhitt first realized that Chaucer’s metrics depended on the voicing of the “feminine ‘e.’ ” This “discovery” reopened the ear to fourteenth and fifteenth-century prosody. Indeed, it even affects how we can read Thomas Wyatt in the sixteenth. Tyrwhitt is one of those rare scholar-critics who merits an honored place in Poet’s Corner, along with all the great printers and publishers.