JOHN GOWER, BOETHIUS, ROMANCE OF THE ROSE, GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Looking today across the river to Southwark you see the reconstructed Globe Theatre, its pennants rattling in the breeze. Southwark Cathedral takes you back two centuries further. Sir John contributed to rebuilding it in its elegant form, a beautiful pattern of the lighter Gothic; at the same time he founded, at his tomb, a perpetual chantry. Sir John might recognize his church even today.
Visitors shoulder in past memorials to great men and great names: Lancelot Andrewes, the divine beloved of T. S. Eliot and, centuries before, of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets who harkened to his sermons and learned ways of seeing and expression from him; Edmund Shakespeare, William’s brother, partner in establishing the Globe in 1599; John Harvard, less forgotten because he established a great university. The space Gower’s scriptorium occupied is now built over a dozen times, but his tomb survives, gaudily restored. Under a stone canopy Sir John Gower reclines, overlooked by three allegorical angel muses, his feet resting on a benign mastiff or lion, his head propped awkwardly on his three principal works: the French Mirrour de l’homme (Speculum Meditantis, 1376–79), the Latin Vox Clamantis (c. 1381) and the Confessio Amantis. His hands press together in prayer. The tomb has been altered substantially and the effigy does not resemble surviving portraits. It’s taller than in life, more jauntily and tidily bearded, wearing a long red gown embroidered with gold foliage like a figure out of allegory, a monument fitting for a man of such imaginative and material substance. He came of a prominent family with estates in Yorkshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Kent. Had he not written a word he would have merited such a tomb, perhaps with a more comfortable pillow.
He was born around 1330 with every advantage landed wealth affords: security, leisure, education “liberal and uncircumscribed,” as Thomas Warton, that patient historian of our early literature, puts it. Gower received training for legal and civil office. He grew learned. He was certainly more than the “burel clerk” or common clerk that his Amans claims to be. Poor William Langland was the burel clerk. Langland had none of Gower’s advantages, though some maintain that he had twice his originality and genius. Sir John bought and sold estates, dividing his time between rural and urban abodes until in 1377 he took up residence at what was then St. Mary Overie (Over the River) priory. If he had a first wife, she died before 1380. In 1398 and nearly blind, he married Agnes Groundolf in his own private oratory in the priory. He lived for another decade, then went to his sumptuous rest.
Gower wrote poems specifically for recitation, while Chaucer, the first bourgeois poet, wrote poems to be read silently, in the privacy of one’s room, or between two or three people, preferably lovers. His best poems and fragments are too long and richly textured for an audience of monks or courtiers or common folk on feast days. The step from Gower to Chaucer is the step from pulpit or lectern into unbuttoned private comfort.
Gower is complex, of course, and long. But his complexity is old-fashioned allegory. His length as often as not is long-windedness. The Speculum Meditantis is allegory and takes itself seriously. Warton says it illustrates the “general nature of virtue and vice, enumerates the felicity of conjugal fidelity... and describes the path which the reprobate ought to pursue for the recovery of divine grace”: a tidy summary. Gower provides a genealogy of sin, a catalogue of vices and virtues, illustrated with precept, homily and story. In this and other ways it foreshadows the Confessio. You might even call it, ungenerously, the French original or first draft.
After writing it he confronted his fear and anger at the events of 1381. His Latin poem Vox Clamantis—he chose Latin as befitting a somber occasion, or because he believed he had mastered the medium—is less deliberately conceived than Speculum. He had to speak out, about the Peasants’ Revolt and, indirectly, about how Wycliffe was in many respects right but in crucial respects misunderstood. Vox is a dream fable, a freer form than the Speculum, less systematic in argument. The Confessio, properly speaking, is an allegorical dream fable, marrying the forms of the first two poems. The Latin elegiacs illustrate the way in which irresponsible action, at both the head and the foot of the body politic, leads to the kingdom’s undoing.
Gower is a descriptive moralist rather than an innovator (except in his leniency over incest). He believes what the best had believed for centuries and the poem shapes around those beliefs. He sets out to define and deepen, not to change moral attitudes. Religious belief and a structured and stable society guarantee a common humanity. When church or state fumble, each of us is threatened. English people were once candid: “Of mannes hertè the corage / Was shewèd thanne in the visage.” In that happy time, words were close to what they named, not distorted by hyperbole and misuse. “The word was lich to the conceite / Withoutè semblant of deceite.”
In 1381 things turn topsy-turvy. Even the Church is at fault.
A little radical, but not very. He speaks not with anger like Langland or sardonically like Chaucer, but with civic and spiritual sorrow.
And
He keeps distance from an age in which “stant the crop under the rot.”
The governing convention of the Confessio is courtly love—drawn from French and other romances about devoted knights and the unattainable ladies they woo and serve. Behind this convention is something serious, concerned with civic love, order, natural hierarchy. The Confessio endorses a pure, old-fashioned feudal order. What alternative was there—Wat Tyler and his rabble? Besides, such stability is an ideal, not a possibility. It never truly existed in a sustained form over generations. The wheel of fortune turns in his tales. The mighty rise, then fall under it; the poor and unfortunate reap rewards as in the beatitudes. Man is responsible for his fallen state and needs institution and instruction to reclaim himself. It’s a severe task:
The Confessio is haunted by the poet’s studious reading. The ghost of one writer in particular fascinates him, as it did King Alfred, Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I (all of whom translated him or caused him to be translated into English). That writer was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Chaucer’s Boece, of the noted Praenestine family, the Anicii, born in Rome in 480, consul under Theodoric the Ostrogoth, father of consuls and notables. Boethius fell afoul of Theodoric and got himself condemned to death. In prison in Pavla he was visited—his poem tells us—by Dame Philosophy, to whom he made a confession. She consoled him. He wrote his consolatory poem, only to be cruelly executed in 524. For half a millennium most European poets would have named The Consolation of Philosophy one of the great books of all time, for its matter and manner, a mixture of prose and verse. Philosophy does not save Boethius; it reconciles him to his fate. It’s a dream, but a dream of truth. The Consolation stands behind everything Gower wrote. Behind Boethius, a little hazily, stand the works of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom he set out to translate into Latin; he then tried to harmonize their doctrines. The Consolation is applied philosophy.
Edward Gibbon, who knew the Romans better than they knew themselves, calls De Consolatione Philosophiae “a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or of Tully.” It was so well known in the dark and middle ages that eight translations in French survive from before the end of the fifteenth century, one by Jean de Meun, author of Part II of the Romance of the Rose.
Gower also drew heavily on that poem, which Chaucer in part translated. The French poem conventionalized, sometimes tongue in cheek, the ceremonial of courtly love. A large, disorderly masterpiece, it was written by two men of contrasting temperaments. Not a good formal model, perhaps, but Gower like others followed it. He includes too much of it in the deliberately encyclopedic Confessio: everything he knows, and then some.
Gower’s “Prologue” in general terms passes state, church and commons in review. From that turbulent, plaguey world we retreat to Book One. Since I cannot put the world to rights, I speak of love. As in most courtly love poems, the month is May, the world is young. Amans speaks of his condition. “For I was further fro my love / Than Erthe is fro the hevene above.” He falls asleep, and who can blame him? Many medieval poets fall asleep to have their vision of truth. It’s as though the waking world is a veil that can only be penetrated by means of the symbol structures of dream.
Amans meets Venus, odd for a decidedly Christian poet, but his Venus is a conventional figure rather than a buxom Roman goddess. She summons her priest to hear his confession. No one found it sacrilegious that he made literary play of the sacrament of confession. The poem—paganizing in conceit—is clearly Christian. The deadly sins provide a structure. There’s one book for each in its different kinds. Finally Venus shows Amans his wizened face in a mirror and he gets the message, the melancholy at the poem’s heart: Amans has been virtuous by default. It isn’t “Love cured by Age” or “Passion at war with Time,” as C. S. Lewis has it, but more the Virtues of Amorous Ineptitude: Amans knows all about love from reading, but his body is outside the equation. Love is in the pulses of the characters in the tales. But Venus and Passion and Genius are insubstantial figures. This is more Will controlled by Resoun, or consoled by Resoun. It’s a cool poem, whereas Chaucer can be hot, releasing doubtful impulses in the reader. Gower’s Amans accepts his fate. At the end of the poem, in the “Epilogue,” Amans is delivered back to the waking world of England and the 1390s. It’s a mechanical construction, a moral grid. Chaucer outstrips Gower in terms of larger form.
But Gower never overreached himself. He finished all the big projects he started. He was ambitious but did not presume to know more than the huge disorderly amount he knew—about science or history or religion. Or about the people in his stories. This is part of his English charm: “He thoughte morè than he seide.” A long poem thrifty of language. He likes verbs of action. He is sparing with adjectives and adverbs. He focuses on observable fact, the essence of a moral art. He leaves imagery, decoration, the panoply of adjectives, to others—to Chaucer for example.
If we set Gower’s “Tale of Florent” beside Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” we might expect no contest. If we look closely, we find that there is. The two poets, let loose on the same story, work to different ends. Gower wrote his tale first. Florent is set the task of discovering “What alle wommen most desire.” Chaucer tells his version in 407 rhymed pentameter couplets as against Gower’s 455 rhymed tetrameters. Chaucer narrates in a more complex way than Gower: his story attaches to its fictional narrator, the Wife of Bath, and reflects her character. She weaves Arthurian motifs into her story, giving it color and visual substance, to painterly rather than dramatic effect. For her Florent’s sin against love is rape.
To set the stories justly side by side, we must unplug “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales. How different the moral Florent that Gower portrays! He is not a sinner but an epitome of honor tried and tested. Gower spares detail; there’s very little gilding. The physical ugliness of the crone Florent must marry to learn the answer to his appointed question and save his honor and his neck Gower does stress, to emphasize Florent’s integrity and pluck. His is a drama of motive, conscience and action. The Wife’s version is entertainment, and hardly moral. Gower’s tale is believable at the level of character, and it is dramatic. It reads better aloud than Chaucer’s, it is spoken, not literary. It’s also less re-readable. But there are incomparable moments. When Gower’s Florent reluctantly goes to bed with his hideous wife, before her transformation, the poet renders his feelings in two lines that touched the Shakespeare of Henry V.
Where Chaucer makes individual characters, Gower personifies. His tale tends toward abstraction, which is crucial to the boringly universal themes the poem explores.
Had Chaucer finished the Canterbury Tales, we might have had occasion to call him mechanical and boringly universal, too—though I doubt it. Because his poem is unfinished he’ll always have an advantage over Gower, who completed what he began. Given the allegorical mode, structure has to be mechanical. Allegory has meanings that can’t be arbitrary but must cohere at different levels. If “the Crown” does something, it means the living person of the sovereign, the institution of sovereignty, and what it contains of the divine within a human order. An image must inevitably contain several meanings. If you’re going to write allegory you choose a mechanical structure because figures must connect on many levels. The form is a form of belief, unoriginal because belief in a revealed religion cannot be “original.” So much—one might suppose—for the poetry being in the language. Beyond literal sense, the situation of the dreamer and the entertaining stories he hears, there’s a constant didactic purpose with religious dimensions. What qualifies the mechanical feel is the wry melancholy of Amans’s voice and the severity of his confessor. Amans has a tone, close to Sir John’s, composed of humility, wry self-deprecation and charity.
Gower’s poem might leave a common Londoner or English countryperson cold. It contains little of the living England. It lacks world. We acquire instead a universal morality unfolded in tales familiar to readers of romances and a sufficient, if primitive psychology. The poem entertains and instructs in two ways: teaching “facts” (which time has turned to fable—tedious “histories” of religion, royal instruction, astrology) and inculcating “virtue.” In its themes, even in the play of metaphor, the explosive politics of the day—Richard’s vices, his fate, the Peasants’ Revolt, anarchism and barbarity—are hardly a murmur beyond the priory wall. This kind of poem is insulated against real weather. His Latin poem was more topical, direct, troubled by the politics of the day. But it’s in Latin and has no readers.
Gower’s excellence is evident in discrete parts. Academic critics make a case for the aesthetic wholeness of the Confessio. It’s an academic, not a poetic case: a pattern can be drawn on the blackboard, but it does not emerge from our experience as we read. A reader prepared to read the work right through comes away as from a vast anthology: one editor has assembled it, but out of such varied materials that the parts exceed the whole. If we focus on passages or stories—“Deianira and Nessus,” “Constantine and Sylvester,” “Pygmalion,” “Demephon and Phyllis,” “Ceix and Alceone,” “Jason and Medea” or a score of others—and on the words of Amans, the link man, whose disappointment is the poem’s occasion, we find the poet there. In the “Prologue” and “Epilogue” briefly you come close to the world he inhabited.
He knew Chaucer personally and survived him. By 1378 their friendship was established. Chaucer left Sir John power of attorney in his affairs when he traveled abroad. He may even have encouraged Gower to try his hand at English. As I have mentioned, Chaucer dedicated Troilus and Criseyde “to moral Gower.” Gower returned the compliment by dedicating the first recension of the Confessio to Richard II and, obliquely, to Chaucer. Later recensions dropped the dedication to Richard and the encomium to Chaucer. Some say the poets fell out, identifying passages in The Tale of Sir Thopas as Chaucer’s poking fun at some of Gower’s beliefs.
For three centuries after his death Gower had champions among poets and critics. Skelton said his “matter was worth gold,” praising the content, especially the moral content. He appears as the moralizing chorus in Shakespeare’s Pericles, and Shakespeare used his tales in shaping plots. Ben Jonson in his English Grammar cites Gower more often than any other writer as a model of correctness. But his hold on readers weakened. Now confined to students of Middle English, he deserves to be given back, not whole but in judicious bits, with modernized orthography, to a new audience. If you read aloud, difficulties of diction and prosody resolve themselves.
But Gower’s poems didn’t come to him as naturally—in Keats’s phrase—as leaves to a tree. He approached the language tentatively, advancing with the responsible caution of a prose writer. C. S. Lewis calls him “our first formidable master of the plain style” and, unlike the Augustan poets, “noble rather than urbane.” (Chaucer can be urbane and is only intermittently noble.) Taken in large doses he is—monotonous. “It dulleth ofte a mannes wit / To him that schal it aldai rede.” He is easy in a good sense, much easier to get on with than Spenser or Milton, even when the language is old, because his verse is unpresumingly efficient, his sense of pace well gauged, his moral clear. The Confessio illuminates the temper of his social class and intellectual milieu, just as Langland’s Piers Plowman illuminates the very world that Gower does not address and excludes the world that Gower’s imagination temperately inhabits. To hear and see the age at large, we have to turn to Chaucer. Remember what Venus tells Amans in the poem:
