The Columbia History of British Poetry (16 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 66
the Retraction to
The Canterbury Tales
. In both versions of the Prologue to the
Legend
, the God of Love brands the Chaucerian persona as a traitor for having translated the
Roman de la Rose
and written of Crisyede's betrayal of Troilus. In his defense, Queen Alceste rejoins that Chaucer has written in praise of Love's name, listing specifically
The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls
, the story of "Palamon and Arcite of Thebes," and many shorter poems in his honor; that he has translated into prose the Boethius and (mentioned in version G only) the no longer extant
De miseria condicione humane
of Pope Innocent III; and that he has made a life of Saint Cecile and, long ago, "Origenes upon the Maudeleyne," a lost version of a pseudo-Origen sermon on Mary Magdalene. The Man of Law, apparently making no connection between Chaucer the pilgrim persona and Chaucer the poet, speaks slightingly of Chaucer's abilities, "he kan but lewedly / On metres and on ryming craftily" (47-48), and says without particular praise that Chaucer has told more stories about lovers than Ovid mentions in his
Heroides
. Still, the Man of Law seems to identify with the poet, who in his youth wrote about King Ceyx and his loyal wife Alcione (from Ovid's
Metamorphoses
XI in
The Book of the Duchess
) and later composed "the Seintes Legende of Cupide" (61), as he refers to
The Legend of Good Women
. About to narrate his own tale in a different hagiographic mode of the calumniated heroine, Custance, the Man of Law approves Chaucer's treatment of ''wifhod" and his omission of tales about incest.
No doubt the Man of Law's story of Christian constancy in action was among the group of unnamed "bookes of legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun" (X.1087) that Chaucer excepted from recantation in his much discussed Retraction at the end of
The Canterbury Tales
. In a canonical context, the Retraction is especially important because it provides, in what is apparently the poet's own voice, a catalogue of his authentic works. Chaucer specifically names only the translation of Boethius among the unrepudiated works, but in the Retraction proper he refers explicitly to the
Troilus, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women
, to the "tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne" (1085), and to the unidentified "Book of the Lion" (possibly a redaction of either or both poems titled "Dit du Lyon" by Machaut and Deschamps) before closing the list with the generalized categories of books no longer remembered and many a lecherous song and lay.
 
Page 67
The translation of the
Roman de la Rose
, which was mentioned by Deschamps in his ballade to Chaucer and by the God of Love in
The Legend of Good Women
, is conspicuously absent from the Retraction. As the earliest work generally ascribed to him,
The Romaunt of the Rose
may belong with those forgotten poems of his youth that do not need specific reference. Even if the first fragment of the Middle English redaction, which covers most of the Guillaume de Lorris section, is all that Chaucer actually wrote, it is the appropriate point at which to begin consideration of the dream visions, a genre that Chaucer favored early in his career.
The opening section of Guillaume's poem established the prototypical pattern of the dream vision frame that Chaucer borrowed directly from Guillaume and from subsequent generations of French poets influenced by him. The major elements in this pattern were trust in the truthfulness of dreams, deference to an ancient authority like Macrobius on their nature, an entrance into the special world of love through the introduction of a first-person narrator who tells of his adventure in an enclosed garden during a perfect May, and a presentation of an exemplary story before the main action as one of its fundamental reference points. Chaucer, however, extended the narrative possibilities offered by these conventions so that each of his four dream visions enacts its own experiment with the form as it explores its unique subject.
The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls
, and
The Legend of Good Women
, taken as a group, demonstrate not only that Chaucer was interested in pursuing the dream as a narrative structure but also that he was interested in the nature of the dream state itself. This interest, along with the psychological dexterity with which he handles dreamers and dreams, is apparent in many other works as well, especially the
Troilus
and several of the Tales. Except for the unfinished
House of Fame
, the dream poems conclude with the persona's commitment to writing them down, suggesting that the dream corresponds to the poetic process itself. For the persona, the dream precedes the poem's making, but for the reader, the dream is subsumed in its own poetic account. This account, in turn, is conditioned by Chaucer's claim that an old book is the source of the conventional exemplary story which launches and nurtures the poem. Thus we find Ovid's tale of Ceyx and Alcione in
The Book of the Duchess
; Virgil's
Aeneid in The House of Fame
; "Tullyus of the Drem of Scipioun" (Cicero's
Somnium Scipionis
) in
The Parliament of Fowls
; and the general praise for the
 
Page 68
authority of books expressed in the Prologue to
The Legend of Good Women
:
And if that olde bokes were aweye,
Yloren were of remembrance the keye.
Wel oughte us thanne on olde bokes leve,
There as there is non other assay by preve.
                                                    (G.25-28)
Clearly, the old book, in Chaucer's hands, becomes an essential component of the genre.
In
The Book of the Duchess
the key book is Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, with its story of Alcione's confronting the death of her beloved husband, Ceyx. Chaucer's narrator retells a misread version of the tale of "Seys and Alcyone" before he falls asleep and dreams of the green wood, where he meets the friendly young hound that leads him deeper into the wood, where, in turn, he overhears a man in black lamenting the death of his lady. Chaucer's account of the Ovidian story contains many significant changes, including an ending in which Alcyone simply dies and the loving couple does not triumph over death through their metamorphosis into a pair of sea birds. This "misreading" not only implies that people read according to their needs, particularly poets who mine the works of their predecessors for ways of posing and resolving their own problems, it also invokes one of Chaucer's major themes, the relationship of poetry to grief.
Between the eight years of "sorwful ymagynacioun" (line 14) that afflict the narrator at the poem's beginning and his resolve at its conclusion "to put this sweven in ryme" (1332), there occurs a transformation of Ovid's story into the story of the Black Knight's inconsolable grief over the loss of his "goode faire White," which the Knight represents at one point as the loss of his Queen to Fortune in a game of chess. After a lengthy, complex dialogue in which the narrator maneuvers the bereft knight into confronting and accepting her death, he then offers him direct, simple consolation:
"Allas sir, how? What may that be?"
"She ys ded!" "Nay!" ''Yis, be my trouthe!"
"Is that youre los? Be God, hyt is routhe!"
                                                (1308-1310)
Both of them are changed in the process by which grief has been consoled through its metamorphosis into art, and the poet
 
Page 69
Chaucer affirms that his use of reading is catalytic rather than emulative.
In writing
The Book of the Duchess
, Chaucer incorporated features from several French courtly poems; in
The House of Fame
he broadened his focus by calling upon elements from Ovid, Virgil, Boethius, and Dante. Different as they are in conception and outcome, these two dream visions are the only poems in which he used the staple verse of French poetry, the octosyllabic couplet. Abandoning this verse form with the last, mysterious line of the unfinished second dream poem, in which he refers to "A man of gret auctorite" (2158), Chaucer admits in the Invocation to Book III that "som vers fayle in a sillable" (1098), most likely an indication that he wanted his readers to understand he was concerned more with the number of syllables that were stressed than with the number of syllables themselves. Despite their shared verse form and classification as dream visions,
The Book of the Duchess
and
The House of Fame
are worlds apart. The former is a brilliant, one-of-a-kind success; the latter, ambitiously experimental and full of risk-taking innovations, fails in the end, but not until it makes a compelling display of Chaucer's gifts for dialogue, characterization, narrative control, and intertextual complexity.
Divided into three books, of which the unfinished third is as long as the first two combined,
The House of Fame
depicts a dream in which the narrator undertakes a haphazard journey to the goddess Fame's palace, which stands "Ryght even in myddes of the weye / Betwixen hevene and erthe and see" (714-715). Perhaps because the poet falls asleep on the tenth day of December, the expected springtime garden or forest green never materializes. Instead the dreamer finds himself immediately in a temple of glass that stands in the middle of a desert. The temple belongs to Venus, who is herself not present except in a portrait that shows her figure "Naked fletynge in a see" (133). Uncertainty is the dominant note of the narrative; even the Proem to Book I begins with an inconclusive account of the nature of dreams. This note is firmly struck in the ecphrastic passage describing the mural of Virgil's
Aeneid
in Venus's temple and is held through a variety of topics to the point where the poem breaks off. By underplaying the Virgilian roles of duty and destiny in Aeneas's departure from Carthage and by emphasizing Ovid's sympathetic treatment of Dido in the
Heroides
as an abandoned, wronged woman, Chaucer shows us that even a story as famous as that of Aeneas and Dido varies according to the versions of its successive tellersVirgil's, Ovid's, the anonymous temple muralist's, as well as

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