The Columbia History of British Poetry (10 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 38
becomes a stupid interlocutor of the dream authority, Holy Church, then when he finally joins the actionfirst tiptoeing up behind Piers Plowman and the Priest to find out what they are arguing abouthe is by turns captious, cocky, obstinate, and bad-tempered. He is throughout very nervous about the role of poet as entertainerminstrels are dubious characters in the poemand about writing of sacred things. The minstrels in the Prologue who "geten gold with hire gleegiltless, I leeve" are at first carefully distinguished from a lower kind of entertainer, "japeres and jangeleres, Judas children" who "feynen hem fantasies" (B.Prol.3436); in the later version they are all lumped together as those who ''fyndeth out foule fantasyes and foles hem maketh / and hath wytt at wille to worche yf thei wolde" (C.Prol.3537).
Langland's character Ymaginatif is definitely not a villain, and the human faculty of speech is described as "God's gleman, and a game of heven" (B.ix.102); but Ymaginatif rebukes the dreamer for writing poetry, "thow medlest thee with makyngesand myghtest go seye thi Sauter . . . for ther are bokes ynowe / To telle men what Dowel is" (B.xii.1618), and professional storytellers who embark on religious themes "gnawen God with the gorge whanne hir guttes fillen" (B.x.57). Lords are exhorted to maintain at their tables the deserving poor instead of minstrels. Langland seems to reserve the word "poetes" for wise scholars who interpret the significance of the natural world; they, as magi, were honored at the nativity of Christ, "to pastours and to poetes appered the aungel" (B.xii.149), and they explain the moral symbolism of birds and beasts.
The narrator in
Piers Plowman
is learned, but not quite a priest; an entertainer, but not quite a minstrel. His quest is that of every Christianthe need to save his soulbut his religious learning and his poetic skills impose a complex social responsibility upon him. His reading of religious texts frequently causes him to clash with the official guardians of the texts, the clergy, and often lures him into diatribes against clerical inadequacy and hypocrisy. His own role of poet, set against the absolute dictates of Christianity, is a problem: an overpowering need to say what he believes with no easy aesthetic to justify it. Hence he readily destroys some of his most effective bits (such as the tearing of the pardon) in later versions because they do not get the meaning right. Langland perhaps has more in common with the attitude of mystical writers of his day: confronted by the absolute truth of God, all language was inadequate and figurative; hence the figurative-
 
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ness of the poets could, by its very suggestiveness, take the audience farther towards truth than direct statement.
Langland's work was far more widely read than that of the other alliterative poets. He is much more approachable than any of them;
Piers Plowman
is difficult in essence, but most of its lines are easy to understand. Langland's desire to account for the whole state of man manifests itself in a comprehensiveness not only of his sympathies but also of his language: it encompasses the vivid and colloquialvoices off calling "hot pies," the dead Emperor Trajan bursting in shouting "Ye, baw for Bokes!," Holichurch's rebuke, "Thow doted daffe! . . . dulle are thi wittes!" and Dame Studie's dismissal of anyone who attempts to pry into divine secrets, "I wolde his eighe were in his ers and his fynger after'' (B.x.125). The language in which Christ's passion is recounted is liturgical and celebratory, woven with Latin phrases and chivalric imagery. There are a very few barren passages of medieval logic chopping, but many vigorous and moving reinterpretations of biblical history, such as Moses' appearance as a scurrying scout spying out the land, clutching his stone letters of promise that need only the seal to be affixed. Characters traditional in medieval writing (such as the four daughters of God) appear, speak, and act in ways that are unique to Langland. Langland mixes modes: the opening scene of the field full of folk features laborers behaving in a lifelike manner complete with vocal effects; it is suddenly interrupted, in the B version, by an angel calling out a message in Latin from heaven, followed by the sudden entrance of a crowd of mice and rats, who conduct a lively debate on the problem of belling the cat.
Langland's allegorical figures, in defiance of their ontological status, develop and change: the deadly sins burst into tears at the realization of their wrongdoing, Scripture loses her temper, Holy Church is distinctly snappish, and the chief guide and key, Piers Plowman himself, is by turns simple, baffled, authoritarian, and deceived, yet somehow turns into Christ and is the only hope for humanity at the end. It is a poem full of curious outbursts of bad temper, where characters insult each other and storm off in fits of rage and bafflement. The poet, in the happy words of one critic, has the habit of burning his narrative bridges as soon as he has crossed them: it is all work-in-progress, and the progress of the poem is never finished for either poet or dreamer. Modern as this sounds, the poet is yet convinced that there is such a thing as revealed truth; what exercises him is the extreme difficulty of express-
 
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ing it in human language. It is the opposite of cynical: whatever the poet's despair over the vices of his society, he still believes there is a truth to attain. The difficulty of expression compromises the poet's mission, and the lack of authority with which the poet speaks undermines his confidence. The crisis of the poem is reached in the Crucifixion scene (B.xviii), where we are shown what makes sense of Langland's world: the Christian paradoxes of death and life, sin and redemption, time and eternity all come together and enact (the scene is often compared to a medieval religious play) a drama that resolves the emotional issues of the poem without in any way solving its problems.
Piers Plowman
is a highly personal, somewhat tormented poem, which uses the anguish of the half-mad narrator to ask radical questions about the nature of knowledge and the value of learning. Time and again, Langland confronts the problem that although medieval Christianity was a religion of learning, bookish and university-based, it also had to be acknowledged that salvation did not depend on learning or literacy, but on faith and love. At the very end of the poem, after all the dreamer's searching, he repeats his question:
"Counseille me, Kynde," quod I, "what craft be best to lerne?"
"Lerne to love," quod Kynde, "and leef alle othere."
                                                                          (B.xx.207208)
Neither learning nor poetry saves souls, which is what really matters in this world.
Langland's problem with learning is not felt so acutely in any other medieval author. Those in the Chaucerian tradition hold a more genial assessment of the value of books and writing, although they still downplay the role of the poet. It becomes a convention of authors to claim that they write their books to try to make something profitable instead of merely wasting time. Chaucer and Gower seem to have provided a psychological protection for them: if these could do such splendid and improving things in English, there could be no harm in trying to follow their tracks, showing due deference to their preeminence. The general didactic aim of literature could be interpreted loosely enough (if you were not too Platonist or austere) to make almost anything moderately worthwhile: Caxton asks his readers to approach Malory by taking "the good and honest actes in their remembraunce / and to folowe the same . . . for herein may be seen noble chivalrye / Curtoyse / Humanyte frendlynesse / hardynesse / love / frendshypp / Cowardyse / murdere /
 
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hate / vertue and synne. Do after the good and leve the evyll and it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee." There were other authors besides Caxton who fell back upon St. Paul's statement, lifted right out of context, "for what things soever were written were written for our learning" (Rom. 15:4).
Chaucer's friend and contemporary, John Gower, distinguished by the epithet "moral" in the epilogue to
Troilus and Criseyde
, wrote large and overtly serious works in Latin, French and English. His English poem,
Confessio Amantis
(
The Lover's Confession
), was written at much the same time as
The Canterbury Tales
, and it is similarly a framed collection of stories. Gower's technical expertise in handling his smooth octosyllabic couplets is unobtrusively masterful, and his stories, taken from a variety of sources, are woven together with playfulness and wit. The tales are recounted in the course of a long confession made by the lover to Genius, priest of Venus; they are organized as telling examples to illustrate the seven deadly sins, at least insofar as the sins apply to the crimes and follies of lovers. The work displays an extraordinary ingenuity: a fundamentally serious religious ethic is consistently viewed aslant through the monomania of love, and encumbered with enormous and fascinating digressions that serve to delay the inevitable progression to the most interesting sin of all, lechery. Gower teases his audience with surprising turns and twists on the themes of love and virtue, before summoning Venus at the very end to dismiss the lover, disqualified from her service by his impotence and old age. But the poet frames the
Confessio
with a stern indictment of the contemporary world: the prologue evokes a golden time when men truly knew how to love, and contrasts it with the degeneration of corruption, violence and lust in the world of Richard II. It is hard to hold all the elements of the
Confessio
together: Gower offers it as a combination of profit and pleasure ("lore" and "lust"); but its analysis of human love in all its manifestations from comic to sublime, its playful wit, fierce denunciations of vice, earnest pleas for peace and charity, and splendid portrayal of a mutable and treacherous world in inevitable and irresistible decline almost pull it apart. If Chaucer offers us a world without comment, Gower offers us something more like an encyclopedia with a moral commentary; not as risqué as
The Canterbury Tales
, but not in need of apology or retraction either.
Chaucer's most famous follower was John Lydgate (d. ca. 1449), a long-lived monk whose enormous output has earned him much jocular
 
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abuse. Lydgate does not have any of the qualities which make Chaucer fresh for every generation that reads him; he is instead a much more typical product of his age, and was in consequence accorded an admiration even higher, in some cases, than that offered to Chaucer. Lydgate is above all a storyteller, and he undertakes to extend and enlarge the body of stories in English verse. He adds a tale to
The Canterbury Tales
, and embarks on some enormous translations: the
Troy Book
(from Guido della Colonna's Latin and a French translation) and the
Fall of Princes
(from Boccaccio's Latin and a French translation). These works show the medieval preoccupation with complete systems: the
Fall of Princes
is a giant catalogue of the downfall of notable people since the world beganthe first story is that of Adam and Eveshowing the domination of Fortune over our world with the general didactic message not to trust to earthly things.
The
Troy Book
gives the whole complete story of Troy, which is far removed from Homer's partial (in all senses) account. The story of Troy for the Middle Ages began with Jason and ended with the death of Ulysses at the hand of his own unrecognized son by Circe. It provided a nostalgic paradigm for the downfall of civilization in the sacking of a great city: a reverberating image of loss. Lydgate ties his own translation to the English wars with France, but there must have been few times in the Middle Ages when this tale of hopeless valor, betrayal, and destruction was not all too appropriate. The story had grown steadily; minor characters like Troilus and Criseyde developed their own parts within it; the nations of Europe traced their origins back into it; it became everyone's history, combining the appeal of national epic and continuing soap opera. It is a mark of the distinction between Chaucer and Lydgate that Chaucer (like Homer before him) chose to focus on a tiny episode within the giant history, whereas Lydgate tried to encompass the whole thing systematically in serial style. Lydgate's verse is pedestrian but serviceable, and the story he tells has an undeniable power: the whole course of the war is traced from the initial insult offered to Jason and reaches its climax in the savage slaughter of the innocent Polyxena: a kind of moral sweep that judges even as it describes the course of events.
But Lydgate cannot let it rest there: he goes on patiently to provide accounts of the rest of the lives of all the participants; to him the whole story is more important than the literary climax. In the Troy legend the medieval blurring of the boundary between fiction and history is most

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