Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats
Unlike the Norton Anthology collections, which feature extensive “liner notes” and footnotes, and appendices in the back, and biographical essays about each poet, this book is pretty slim in that department. Chaucer gets no introduction. Just his name, and then four or five poems, then you move on to the next name on the list. The introduction is pretty blunt, not extensive at all. The good thing about this cheap paperback is the amount of poetry it holds, so it’s a terrific reference point in my library. Much of the poetry included here is obviously duplicated in other books that I have, but that’s okay, that’s bound to happen. There are certain books you just want to have around just in case, and this is one of them. I reference it all the time, to grab quotes for something I’m writing, or to take a look at some of the more obscure poets from the mists of time, poets that may not be anthologized anywhere else. Many of the poets in this collection are just called “ANONYMOUS”. Some of those poems are among the most famous in the world, which is amazing to me. The collection contains what would be known as ballads, songs sung back in the Middle Ages, things passed along and down through generations, authors unknown. It’s a good book to have around. Any book that goes from Chaucer to Wilfred Owen is a book that is good to have around. Because you never know. I dip into it surprisingly often.
First poet anthologized? Geoffrey Chaucer!
I took a Chaucer class in college and I am so glad I did. It was an excellent class. I had read Canterbury Tales in high school, only it was an ironed-out modernized version. In college, we read the Old English, which looks like gibberish, but unfolds amazingly into complete sense when read out loud. We read them all out loud in college, until by the end of the course, I could read any Chaucer, silently to myself, and totally get the sense of it. He’s funny, bawdy, worldly, lascivious, full of heart and humor. He sees people, in all their flaws and beauty and mistakes.
John Dryden (1631-1700), an English poet and critic, who modernized Chaucer for his generation, wrote of Chaucer:
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.
What were his influences? Ovid, Boccaccio, Petrarch, maybe. How did Chaucer become Chaucer? I’m no scholar, but one of the things that seems to stand him apart is that he seemed to shake off his influences, and express an entirely English way of being, something that up until that point was wholly new. Whatever his influences, he surpassed them. He was in another realm entirely.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
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, allegorized 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.
I love that. “The world takes over his verse.” John Dryden, in speaking of the collected works of Chaucer, exclaims, “Here is God’s plenty!”
I am not sure I would have understood that, entirely, without that great Chaucer class in college. I certainly cannot understand what exactly it is he DID with language, although I do remember getting glimpses of it back then, moments of awe and transcendence, when you realize that he stands alone, that no one before had done what he did. What was it like to BE him? Not just how he saw the world, but how he saw LANGUAGE? It is a fascinating thought.
Michael Schmidt, again, comparing Chaucer to another poet of that time, John Gower:
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.
You can see why I have referred to Michael Schmidt as my “go to guy” for context.
Another thing that sets Chaucer apart is his characterization. You don’t just remember his language or his themes. You remember his people. This is an enormous difference. A giant leap forward.
Schmidt writes:
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 Crisyde, 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 lhuge 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.
The Canterbury Tales are not included in this volume. There are five or six poems from Chaucer. I’ll post today his three part-er “Merciless Beauté”. There are other versions out there where his English is “corrected’. I think much is lost in such a translation. If you read this out loud, it becomes certainly clear enough, and also an important glimpse of a language in flux, a language erupting forth into something entirely new.
Merciless Beauté
I. CAPTIVITY
Your yën two wol slee me sodenly.
I may the beauté of hem not sustene,
So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene.
And but your word wol helen hastily
Mt hertes wounde, whyl that hit is grene,
Your yën two wol slee me sodenly.
I may the beauté of hem not sustene.
Upon my trouthe I sey yow feithfully,
That ye ben of my lyf and deeth the quene;
For with my deeth the trouthe shal be sene.
Your yën two wol slee me sodenly.
I may the beauté of hem not sustene.
So woundeth hit through-out my herte kene.
II. REJECTION
So hath your beauté fro your herte chaced
Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;
For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.
Giltles my deeth thus han ye me purchaced;
I sey yow sooth, me nedeth not to feyne;
So hath your beauté fro your herte chaced
Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne
Allas! that nature hath in yow compassed
So greet beauté; that no man may atteyne
To mercy, though he sterve for the peyne.
So hath your beauté fro your herte chaced
Pitee, that me ne availeth not to pleyne;
For Daunger halt your mercy in his cheyne.
III. ESCAPE
Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;
Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene.
He may answere, and seye this or that;
I do no fors, I speke right as I mene.
Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene.
Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat,
And he is strike out of my bokes clene
For ever-mo; ther is non other mene.
Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene.
Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene.
