Chaucer's Poetry Words, authority and ethics Cliodhna Carney and Frances McCormack Editors CI FOUR COURTS PRESS Set in 10.5 pt on 12 pt Ehrhardt for FOUR COURTS PRESS LTD 7 Malpas Street, Dublin 8, Ireland www.fourcourtspress.ie and in North America for FOUR COURTS PRESS C/O ISBS, 920 N.E. 58th Avenue, Suite 300, Portland, OR 97213. © The various authors and Four Courts Press, 2013 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-84682-336-7 SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT This publication was grant-aided by the Publication Fund of the National University of Ireland Galway and by the National University of Ireland All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts. Chaucer's metrical landscape 93 Chaucer's metrical landscape tributed to what is arguably the most revisionist period of English poetry prior to the advent of free verse. We can organize Middle English poetry into a binary of native language and metre versus imported language and metre, but such an arrangement Kristin Lynn Cole oversimplifies the linguistic situation that influenced the resulting spectrum of Middle English metres written across England in the fourteenth century. In this most fertile period of poetic production, the two great experiments Recent scholarship has called for a fresh appraisal of Chaucer's relationship were Chaucer's nascent iambic pentameter and the strong-stress alliterative to his contemporaries, mostly as a push to resituate him within his literary metre that was so quickly developed and deployed in the West Midlands. Not milieu. Martin Duffell's A new history of English metre and Ardis Butterfield's only did these two developments happen simultaneously, but they also demon- The familiar enemy argue for a Chaucer who is not the quintessential English strably did not occur in isolation from, or even opposition to, each other. poet, but rather a 'cross-channel author, continental as well as insular, com- The long-standing elevation of Chaucer above his West Midland contem- mitted to a plural linguistic texture and an international imagination that poraries has perpetuated the notion of a perceived antagonism between them. speaks directly to our own." Chaucer's poetry blends strong English and When Chaucer's Parson states in his prologue that 'I kan nat geeste "rum, French traditions and borrows heavily from others such as the Italian, from ram, ruf," by lettre' (CT X. 43) — that is, he cannot compose an historical which he developed the decasyllable that we now call iambic pentameter.2 romance (`geeste') in alliterative verse — literary historians have assumed that Daniel Birkholz and Carter Revard have both sought, simultaneously, to revive this statement is the `southren man' Chaucer's dismissal of the genre of allit- various fourteenth-century Middle English poems by casting them, too, as erative poetry.5 In 'Chaucer as an English writer', D. Vance Smith claims that products of cross-channel intellectual commerce; their recent articles offer evi- this single line of poetry has epitomized for many literary scholars what they dence, respectively, that the writers of the Harley Lyrics, and almost certainly have perceived as 'Chaucer's neglect of native English traditions'.6 In the next the Gawain-Poet, travelled through France and were also heavily influenced line, however, the Parson also dismisses `rym' because he cannot compose by exposure to continental poetry.3 rhyming poetry, and announces to his audience that he will tell his tale in These two veins of historical criticism, while treating seemingly dissimilar prose. In other words, the Parson selects from the three genres of tale-telling poems, poets, and geographies, remind us that Chaucer and his contempo- available; his rejection is therefore of poetry itself, either because of his inabil- raries in the West Midlands wrote poems that reveal their membership in an ity to compose it or, more likely, its nature as fiction or glosing, feyning, and essentially trilingual and deeply cosmopolitan culture. The longstanding bifur- contrefeting (`I wol nat glose').7 cation of Middle English poetry into native versus foreign — a divide that often Chaucer thus acknowledges alliterative poetry and its imaginative power aligns the native with provincial and the foreign with cosmopolitan — over- by aligning it with the rhyming poetry he composes, and by having the Parson simplifies the reality of intellectual life in medieval England, since it is impos- show equal disdain for both. He extends this acknowledgement beyond the sible to understand these poets without consideration of their context. To lose Parson's words to the person of his Plowman, pious brother of the pious sight of these facts — to recast Chaucer as a metonym of Englishness,4 or the Parson. Chaucer's Plowman resembles Piers the Plowman, and such a sym- poets of the West Midlands as his quaint country cousins stuck in lesser-than pathetic portrait of a charitable labourer in dung can be found only in these iterations of provincial prosody — is to underestimate how these poets con- two texts.8 Whatever mockery or dismissal might be read into the Parson's The Yale companion to 5 This definition of geeste is Seth Lerer's, from his Introduction to I would like to thank Thomas Cable for his comments on this argument as it developed and for Chaucer (New Haven, zoo6), pp 1-28, p. 12. The definition is offered to describe the choices bringing to my attention the metrically curious section of the Tale of Sir Thopas: 'Thy Book of the Duchess that I scan the Host gives Chaucer-Pilgrim after the former declares of the latter's below. I M. Duffell, A new history of English metre (London, 2008); A. Butterfield, drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!' (CT VII. 930). The other option the Host offers is prose; iar enemy The famil- (Oxford, 2009), p. xxix. 2 M. Duffell, 'The history of the hendecasyllable' in C.B. thus, the three ways the pilgrims imagine to tell a tale are in rhymed verse, alliterative poetry McCully & J.J. Anderson (eds), Yale companion to Chaucer, pp English historical metrics (Cambridge, 1996), pp 210-18, p. 216. and prose. 6 'Chaucer as an English writer' in Lerer (ed.), The 3 D. Birkholz, 'Harley lyrics and Hereford clerics: the implications of mobility, e.1300-1351', 87-121, p. 107. He later notes that Chaucer writes in 'alliterating lines', which Smith carefully Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 31 (2009), 175-230; Carter Revard, Was the Pearl poet in distinguishes from alliterative verse; he also argues that Chaucer does `geeste' in some battle Aquitaine with Chaucer? A note on Fade, 1.49 of Legend of Good Women Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', SELIM, scenes from the Knight's Tale and in 'The legend of Cleopatra' in the (2oo1-2), 5-26. 4 Butterfield, The familiar enemy, p. xxii. (p. 109). 7 See D.V. Smith, 'Chaucer as an English writer', pp Ito-12. 8 Lerer and, espe- 95 94 Kristin Lynn Cole Chaucer's metrical landscape words, neither mockery nor dismissal emerges in this allusion to Langland's Chaucer and the alliterative poets thus exploited the potential of the most poetry, whose popularity rivalled Chaucer's. The fact that the Parson and phonologically versatile English that we know of. The story of English's loss Plowman are brothers further emphasizes this homage to an alliterative poem of inflections begins long before the fourteenth century, and even before the and the nod to alliterative poetry in general. arrival of conquering Normans in 1°66. But by 135o, it is highly likely that -e had More importantly, the rhythms of the poems themselves show a shared the various inflectional endings that had first been eroded to final use of the metrical phonology available to all poets of English at that time. mostly dropped out of the spoken dialects of the West Midlands, while in the We can use Chaucer's prosody to discern the alliterative poets' metrical deci- more conservative dialect of London speakers could be found who actively sions; although the alliterative poets used a different poetic vocabulary and retained these older forms. Ironically, the West Midland poets may have sought very different rhythms, they employed the same metrical tightening spoken with the newer, innovated forms, yet their phonology indicates a vir- and loosening toolkit, such as elision, as the London poets.9 In other words, tuosity in older forms; meanwhile, the London poets probably either spoke or the apparently stark difference between Chaucer's tightly alternating decasyl- heard the competing forms and chose between them as needed to satisfy the lable and the long line of the Alliterative Revival poets masks their shared demands of the metres in which they were writing. It is also probably not an phonology, which indicates that these poets inherited the same audience. accident that the language of West Midland alliterative poetry could be easily Fourteenth-century English contained a treasure trove of phonological read by a London audience; M.L. Samuels assumes this was the audience for where it could find a larger choices for poets, thanks to the rapid loss of endings and concomitant vowel whom William Langland wrote Piers Plowman, reduction that define the Middle English period. Poets could choose between readership and thus enjoy a greater success." The West Midland poets' choice syllabic doublets such as neuer/ ner, euer/ ere, °Per/ or, syfien/ syn, ouer/ ore, and solely to use the older, historical forms makes sense in context of their inter- a variety of words that had alternate forms, such as one older and with an his- est in traditional native poetry.'2 This choice to compose using word forms torical final -e, and the other more recent forms that had shed those endings.