JOHN GOWER
Sir John Gower, well into his fifties, the poet who had composed more than 32,000 lines of French verse and 11,000 lines of Latin elegiacs, began—in “the Monthe of Maii” the poem says, in the year 1386(ish) in a high room beside the priory church of St. Mary Overie—to write his first poem in English. Generally he was decorous and quiet as a ghost. Now the scribes felt his physical presence as if for the first time, a kind of sudden storm, though he’d been their master for years. His gray lips were red under his moustache, pursing, shaping sounds. They saw him, his long pinched face pleated with age, the acorn headpiece gathering a silky abundance of white hair that, where it escaped, curled upward like the hair of an aging child. He might have been a cleric, a parched disciple of Wycliffe! His mustache and the slightly forked beard—like Chaucer’s, except Gower was rounder of face—took on a life of their own; his hand wrote the sounds he did not voice aloud, the fingers danced as if counting beads or syllables. Were his scribes shocked? English was a vulgar tongue, what men like Sir John spoke chiefly to peasants and servants, dressing their better conversation and private thoughts in French. The Lover’s Confession, or, as he dignified it in Latin, the Confessio Amantis, was the poem he embarked on.
Strange matter, you might think, for such a religious old man. Senex et cecus Iohannes Gower. Old and almost blind: his eyes froze over completely a few years later. When Sir John regained his composure on that astounding day, he recalled the occasion. After writing so much in the language of the court (French), and of the Church (Latin), he turned to English because he had bumped into King Richard II, still “the boy king” but nearing his majority, on the river Thames. The king invited his poet aboard the barge and asked him to write “some newe thing.” Despite ill health, the poet promised to oblige “for king Richardes sake,” to provide “wisdome to the wise / And pley to hem that lust to pleye.” It was a momentous request. When a poet like Sir John cast aside the sanctioned instruments of his trade, the languages of secular and spiritual power, and took up native clay, took the mess that was English and breathed coherent life into it, the language came alive at last.
English was not foreign to poetry. But it was foreign to the great poeta doctus, the “learned poet,” and it’s the learned poet whose works survive. All the early poets were learned but untalented. Sir John was different: he wrote feverishly, under compulsion, and as the work progressed he dictated to his scribes. Those hours of taking down his recitation, the words he’d thought out in the night or translated extempore from French or Latin books, or which he wrested from the air, were exhilarating for his scribes.
He had set up his copying house at St. Mary’s. The scribes—French, English, failed students from university, poor clerks earning a crust—were paid to copy his works and any that his noble or church patrons required. There were probably several scribes in 1380. Some prepared the parchments, pinning and lining them, readying the inks. The scribes themselves worked from the poet’s dictation, their quills like birds in flight. There was an illuminator who decorated the parchments with color and gilt. The first and best copy was reserved for the king. The other copies were for lesser patrons who needed books to read aloud to provincial courts and convocations, or privately on long winter nights.
When there were errors, they went undetected until a scholar centuries later read over and collated surviving copies. At every point of difference the editor had to make a decision. The creative process continued: a scribe mishearing or inventing silently, a scholar discovering and making new emendations. Always fluid at the edges, the text of a great poem taken down by hand or a poem set in type. Never a final authoritative version.
That’s a Renaissance notion: a final version of a poem. A poem was never finished. Like a cathedral it grew, bits were added or removed to make new space. Even as the poet dictated, scribes might add a bit or, when they grew tired and dozed, miss whole passages. Hovering over them was an ideal poem which the poet almost knew. But even he could change his mind: the poem he made one year might be out of date the next. Sir John wrote his Confessio for King Richard; when Richard proved unworthy, he made it over, adding an allegorical record of royal errors. Poems can die—or be killed by fire or neglect—unless the poet refashions and refreshes them. If he learns something new, he has to add it. The aim is to delight, but the purpose is to instruct. Delight without precept is pointless.
In the revised version that he worked on in 1391, Sir John mentions Henry of Lancaster, and the third version of 1393 is dedicated to the future king. Sir John was rewarded with an ornamental collar and when Henry was in due course crowned Henry IV, he allowed him two pipes of Gascony wine a year. Sir John was his laureate and praised him sincerely, not to get patronage—he was a man of means who didn’t need support—but because he admired his strength. He deserted Richard who was weak and impressionable. The truths a poet tells alter as the things he sees alter. There are scratchings out, repentances. Marvell and Dryden, Wordsworth and Auden are no different. Hypocrites, their critics say; or perhaps just men changing, growing up.
In 1390—the year after Richard declared he had come of age and took the reins of power in his own hands—Sir John completed his book in its first version. It was in the English that the king spoke, that Geoffrey Chaucer spoke, that the clerks used when at leisure. A language not deliberately poetical but precise, easier on the ear than French or Latin, or the rugged English of the north, which is the dialect of the Gawain poems, Pearl and the ballads. Closer to the dialect of William Langland, that idiom was harsh on the ear.
Sir John’s English was accessible rather than ambitious. It is not resonant or inventive like Chaucer’s. The lines are for the most part tetrameter couplets, as in Chaucer’s early poems. A well-worn French measure that Sir John made supple. He had learned to handle the form skillfully in French: polite, simple, courtly with the unassertive firmness of conversation—a mark of the best French poem. French was his apprenticeship. He understood extension, how to play line against sentence and draw the sense out evenly.
A line in the Confessio generally has eight syllables, or four iambic feet: teTUM teTUM teTUM teTUM. Because of the rhyme the eye and ear take the line or two lines together—the couplet—as a basic unit. But the reading mind, what Wycliffe called the “understanding,” is looking for larger parcels of sense. The ear is satisfied when the meter is balanced and the rhyme struck, but the sentence is incomplete and the mind seeks its satisfaction in resolution of the sense. Sense resolves, but not at the rhyme, so eye and ear move on to their next fulfillment. By the counterpoint—a kind of suspense—created between the arrangement of sounds and the construing of sense, a pace builds and a drama develops that has nothing to do with details of the story or its moral. This drama in the language is the poetry of the poem. It can bring even the most exhausted tale alive. And that’s the thing that never changes, from the time of Homer, or Gower, until today: poetry is in language, you can paraphrase the sense but not the poetry of an achieved poem.
Confessio Amantis should be read rather briskly and in long runs. Imagine the speaker a man not unlike Sir John at the time, getting on in years, unlucky in love, yet ironically called Amans: Lover. He has complained to Venus that he can’t get anywhere with his beloved. The goddess sends him a confessor called Genius to bring him to his senses: What is a man so long in the tooth up to, looking in the month of May for the love of a young lady? Such love belongs to youth and virtue. Genius interrogates the supplicant, describing one by one each of the seven deadly sins and their subcategories, illustrating them with stories and challenging Amans to confess to one of them. Amans denies the sin of sloth. He tells Genius of his devoted—if fruitless—attention to his beloved:
This is simple and sensual. It is about desire, which won’t let his pulse stop hoping, and her cool indifference. It’s hard for the old man; he can’t get her body out of his mind:
She controls him; he follows with no will of his own. If she stands he stands, if she sits he kneels beside her. Erotic hope returns, the verse heats up, sentences grow breathless: And, and, and, and... He turns his attention to her pets, her pages and chambermaids, anything that is hers upon which he can lavish attention, gain commendation and deflect passion:
He plays back and forth between nakid and clothed, and it’s sexy, candid, it feels like a true confession of desire heightened by a subtly disclosing discretion. The poetry keeps almost concluding, then starting again in a different key: memory, imagination, strategy, confession. This is remarkable writing “in character”—a character speaks, acts out his obsession in the way he constructs and arranges the language. A knight is reduced by passion to mere temporiser. That’s one of love’s effects.
What did he feel like, this Englishman already “for my dayes olde... feble and impotent,” devoted to an England of which he wrote (in French), “O gentile Engleterre a toi iescrits,” what did he feel, to be writing verse for the first time in his native tongue? It must have been like discovering a new world in his own mouth.
But he was not the first. People never stopped writing English, even if they didn’t write it quite so well. The old measures were almost lost, and new rhymers, because they imitated French without understanding how it worked, or because they tried to keep alive old forms that had lost their power over a changing language, might occasionally take off, but they seldom stayed in the air for long. Still, these verse writers weren’t all flying at Kitty Hawk. But English even in Sir John’s time was a language that, shire by shire, borough by borough, was parceled out into mutually obscure dialects.
English verse right up to the end of the fourteenth century was scattered through monasteries, castles and manor houses in manuscript books, each a chaos of orthography and diction, to be read out after a winter supper or as an alternative to scriptural collations. Or it was recited by minstrels who bought verses from monks or dreamed them up for feast days and market days. To speak of such material as a literature misstates its purpose and its merit. Sir John was actually a poet, not a scribe or a mere versifier.
His king sent him home to write a poem in English, and he wrote 34,000 lines in the end. There’s no hesitation in his art. He knew the English poems—the poor crabbed ones that his scribes sometimes had to copy out for clients and patrons; he knew the sweet new style of Chaucer, who in 1385 dedicated to him Troilus and Criseyde. It was for “Moral Gower and philosophical Strode”—the very Strode with whom Wycliffe conducted friendly logical disputations at Oxford. Some say that Strode wrote the poems Pearl and Gawain and the Green Knight. It’s hard to imagine the logician as a poet: he put such stuff behind him in favor of more sober studies. Strode was eminent for his scholastic knowledge. He may have tutored Chaucer’s son Lewis at Merton College, Oxford.
Sir John knew the limping verse histories and romances. But his verse like Chaucer’s was fluent, the Confessio inspires confidence: here is a man who knows how a voice shapes a sentence, how in verse it can imitate the movement of thought and feeling. Still, it felt strange to write in his daily language. He kept coming back to his unease, now apologetically, now affirming his aims. Chaucer was there for him, making new poems even as Gower composed the Confessio. Sir John would not have considered Chaucer a great poet: he never wrote great works in Latin or French. All his longer works except for Troilus and Criseyde are fragments.
Gower’s claims do diminish beside Chaucer, Langland and others. If Chaucer did not write the interminable French lines of Sir John’s Speculum Meditantis or the Latin hexameters of his Vox Clamantis, bravo Chaucer! Think of the sheep whose skins he spared. Yet Gower’s claims are large and genuine. The reader who understands him understands his century and gets a handle on the beginning of our poetry—our real poetry, not verse in Old English, which is a foreign language, or the limping chronicles and romances that came after. Sir John had suggestive antecedents in English. But his poetry was fathered by French, and after he finished the Confessio, French gathered him back to its bosom. He could only write one further poem in English, for Henry IV, around 1399. It was called “In Praise of Peace.” But for seven years—writing and revising—he gave himself up to English, let his scribes’ hands shape English words that English ears warmed to. He read in a firm Kentish voice.
Sir John’s success was unprecedented in English. Confessio Amantis was the first English poem to be translated into the languages of the Continent. This is an ambiguous tribute: it was readily translatable. He used a French meter, the conventions of fashionable European verse; much of his poem was adapted from the languages that welcomed it back. Long before Caxton printed it, Spanish and Portuguese versions existed. The Confessio is as much a part of the international literature of the “clerks,” with Latin and French affinities, as it is of English. Gower’s great poetic risk is to choose English: beyond that, he uses accepted forms; intent on conventional matter, the stories he tells, the lessons he teaches. He’s not inventive but efficient, a virtue in a moral writer. But if his work illuminates the mind and temper of his age, it casts only a dim light on the social world that lent them substance: the world he lived in.
He is a European although his French and Latin poems are forgotten, along with almost all the French and Latin verse of the first six centuries of our poetry. Nowadays we read Milton’s Latin and Italian verses in translation for what they tell us about his father, his early attitudes, his friendships, seldom as poetry in their own right. Yet well into the seventeenth century, for some writers—Francis Bacon among them—a book didn’t exist until it existed in Latin and belonged to the culture of Europe on Europe’s terms, that is, written in a purified classical humanist spirit much like the terms of medieval culture: Latin, though no longer the adaptable and expressive Latin of the medieval church. In the end it isn’t Gower’s timeless Latin or fashionable French but his English poem that lives. He did something for the pleasure of his king and the kingdom. A labor as much as a pleasure for him. When it was done he felt released back to his natural culture:
