Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Cosmic Perspective in Chaucer

N. Ramakrishna Rao

Chaucer’s art is, by its very largeness and objectiveness, extremely difficult to subject to critical analysis. Confronted by it, Dryden could only exclaim, “Here is God’s plenty.” “This calls up a vision of prodigal earth, of harvest fields, of innumerable beasts and birds, of teeming life.”1 His references to natural objects are incidental and conveyed in simile or parenthesis for the most part. They vivify our sense of appearances, or they serve to localise action, but they are seldom introduced for their own sake. When Palamon and Arcite engage each other in mortal combat:

Thou myghtest wene that this Palamon
In his fightyng were a wood leon,
And as a crueel tigre was Arcite,
As wilde bores gonne they to smyte,
That frothen whit as foom for ire wood.

Like Shakespeare, Chaucer does not protest; he accepts. He has no desire to reform fellow human beings. He is a happy spectator looking at the faults and foibles of men, their prejudices and predilections. He finds human beings noble and beastly, but, on the whole, wonderfully decent. He takes life as it comes and even trivial incidents of life exhilarate him. He delightfully observes the way the Canon sweats:

A cloote-leaf he had under his hood
For sweat, and for to keep his head from heat.
But it was joye for to see him sweat;
His forehead drooped as a stillatorie
Were full of plantain or of peritorie.

The Canon is the very type and idea of perspiring humanity and, therefore, he is admirable and joyous to behold.

The Pardoner with his charlatanism is perfect and deserves admiration:

Mine handes and my tonge gon so yerne,
That is joye to see my busynesse.

Aldous Huxley rightly writes of Chaucer: “He looks out on the world with a delight that never grows old or weary. The sights and sounds of daily life, all the ravish beauty of the earth fill him with a pleasure which he can only express by calling it ‘a joy’ or ‘a heaven.’ He is moved by the beauty of ‘young, fresh folkes, he and she’; by the grace and swiftness of living things, birds and animals; by flowers and placid, luminous park-like landscapes.” 2

Chaucer does not merely give us the clear light of day and real life but a shaping vision which he presents through various contrivances. Dream is an important device. He uses dreams always dramatically, making them fit his context. In the Nun’ s Priest’s Tale Pertelote gives a positive physiological reading of dreams, while Chaunticleer is equally certain that he is being forewarned. It is observed that Chaucer uses dream-visions as a device to launch his poems and to reach the abstract. But Chaucer employs it for a more dynamic purpose, making it an integral part of his poem. To Chaucer, reading seems to be a natural gateway from the active life to the contemplative, from waking to dreaming, In the Book of the Duchess, he takes a romance to help him pass a sleepless night, considering it better amusement than any other pastime. Similarly in the House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer sets himself apart as a reading man. Among the four vision-poems The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women, the first provide the nearest approach to a parallel between book and dream.

            The Parliament of Fowls is a love-vision surprisingly unorthodox. The perplexities of love are the subject announced in the opening stanzas; love and its complexities are the subject matter of the birds’ debate. He wished to show love from various points of view, masculine and feminine, high and low to exhibit the refined idealism of courtly love, and unreality and egoism. To bring these all together was a practical difficulty. Allegory, therefore, was essential. Chaucer circumvented all these difficulties by personifying all these conflicting points of view as types of birds. “A vision would liberate from the inconveniences of verisimilitude and would give the ironic imagination much freer play. The same sort of ironic picture is drawn with greater fullness and humorous complexity, of Chaunticleer and Pertelote in double exposure, where the personification and the natural interact with mutual entertainment, so that we can hardly decide which is the personification and which the actuality, which sense and which symbol. Whether birds are personified as man and wife, or humanity gallinised as cock and hen”. 3

There is, however, a deeper significance in Chaucer’s use of allegory. In Book IV of Troilus and Criseyde, he lifts life to a mythic pattern. Troilus speaks:

“ ...but down with Proserpyne,
Whan I am deed, I wol go wone in pyne,
And there I wol eternally compleyne
My wo, and how that twinned be we tweyene.”

It is the allegorical device which converts characters into abstractions or personifications. The man in black in The Book of the Duchess is not just a being but a universal or a personification:

“For I am sorwe and sorwe is I”  

It is through allegory or ‘the obliqueway’ that Chaucer conveys “important mysteries, intuitions, passions and feelings.” 4 A dominant religious and mystical reality in the Middle Ages was Death. In the Pardoner’s Tale he conceives Death:

“And as they satte, they herde a belle clinke
Biforn a cors, was caried to his grave.”

The victim later in the poem takes on the qualities of Death itself. First the rioters seek to slayDeath:

“Ne deeth, allas! ne wol nat ban my lyf;
Thus walke I, lyk a restelees caityf,
And on the ground, which is my modres gate,
I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late
And seye, ‘leve moder, leet me in
Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin!
Allas! whan shul my bones been at reste?...

In the two passages and their interinanimation in the poem Chaucer succeeds in uniting mystery with reality and mystery with feeling.

What interests him on the surface of this earth is primarily man, not his physical environment. Though Chaucer acknowledges the “noble goddesse Nature” is most beautiful, and, as the “Vicaire of the almighhty Lord” yet it is not awe-inspiring as it was to Wordsworth:

“Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air.”

B. H. Bronson writes with significance and percipience.

“Such open questions as the supernatural, and its immanence in earthly affairs; the heavenly bodies, and their influence on human life; the idea of external nature and its closeness to the divine; human nature and the operations of the mind of man, all these stirred the imagination of Chaucer.” 5

In his Astrolabe information given to his ten year old pupil, probably his son, Lewis, Chaucer expresses some of his beliefs in Astrology:

“A fortunate ascendent clepen they whan that no wicked planets, as Saturn or Mars or Elles the Tayl of the Dragon, is in the house of the ascendent, ne that no wicked planets have noon aspect of enemyte upon the ascendent.”

Chaucer’s Doctor in the Canterbury Tales proceeded on these principles, for Astrology in those times was regarded as a useful handmaid of medicine:

For he was grounded in astronomye
He kepte his pacient a rul greet deal
In houres by his magyk natureel
Wel coude he fortunen the ascendent
Of his ymages for his pacient.
Much is made of the planetary influence in the Troilus poem. We recall that it was the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter and Luna in Cancer that caused the downpour which kept Criseyde at Pindarus’ house on the fatal night. Elsewhere Chaucer declares:

“And also blisful Venus, wel arrayed
Sat in hire seven the hous of hevene tho,
Disposed wel,and with aspectes payed,
To helpe sely Troilus of his Woe.
And, soth to seyne, she nas not al a fee
To Troilus in his nativitee;
God woot that wel the sonner spedde he.”

There is no doubt that Chaucer believes in the influence of stars on the lives of human beings. Many of his characters in moments of crisis appeal to the same powers for assistance or to lay their misfortunes to the same account. Troilus of course is full of illustrations. When Arcite hears Palamon cry out in the prison which they share, he tries to comfort him thus:

“Fortune has yeven us this adversitee.
Som wikke aspect of disposicioun
Of Saturne, by som constellacioun,
Hath yeven us this, although we hadde it sworn;
So stood the hevene whan that we were born.

Chaucer uses astrological material for purposes of his own. He was interested in those subjects and the audience of the times understood and believed in their validity. Astrology had a functional value: “Such allusions are there not with the idea of raising mirth, or mere poetical flourish; not to diminish the action of the characters in esteem but to give a greater dignity and a sense of cosmic perspective to their conduct. We must remember that most aspects of life were linked in diverse ways to these ideas: the order and stability of the Universe, the elements and their correspondent properties, the ideological structure of the natural kingdom, and of humorous, microcosmic man.” 6

The evidence at any rate seems to show that Chaucer and his contemporaries raised their eyes to the heavens as they lowered them to the earth. The continual references to the movement and positions of heavenly bodies far outweigh his allusions to the natural scene as of significance to men’s lives. “A tree, a mountain, flowers–excepting symbolic daisies–beasts and birds–unless they could talk–had slight influence on man’s conduct, his moral life, his spirit, otherwise than in generally increasing seasonal enjoyment of living.”7 Not for nothing, in his noble ballade on Truth, does Chaucer enjoin his friend:

“Know thy country, look up!... ...
Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gest thee lede.”

Things beneath the moon, apart from the soul of man, were of the earth, earthly, subject to time and fortune; things above the moon were timeless and eternal.

The influence of the stars and heavenly bodies which dominate life in the Middle Ages, continued in tradition, to Shakespeare with his reference “When beggars die, there are no comets seen” (Julius Caesar)and to Milton with his geo-centric acceptance of the Copernican theory. These beliefs have a poetic value, they intensify the mystery of life without which life would be just peddling in life’s thoroughfares (last stanza: Yeat’s A Prayer for my daughter). What is factual in Chaucer’s poetry is the way in which he climbs up the stairway to the Cosmic. He does it, stage by stage, from real life to dream, from dream to allegory, from allegory to personification or the abstract, and from personification to the realm of the supernatural.

1 Aldous Huxley: Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism Ed. A. S. Cairncross, London. 1952. p. 2.
2 Aldous Huxley: Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism Ed. A. S. Cairncross, London. 1952. p. 8.
3 B. H. Bronson: In Search of Chaucer, Toronto. 1963. p. 58.
4 Nevill Coghill: The Poet Chaucer, London. 1961. p. 13.
5 B. H. Bronson: In Search of Chaucer, Toranto. 1963. p. 11.
6 B. H. Bronson: Op. Cit, p. 15.
7 Ibid., p. 16.

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