Troilus and Criseyde

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TROILUS AND CRISEYDE

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

GEOFFREY CHAUCER was born in London, the son of a vintner, in about 1342. He is known to have been a page to the Countess of Ulster in 1357, and Edward III valued him highly enough to pay a part of his ransom in 1360, after he had been captured fighting in France.

It was probably in France that Chaucer’s interest in poetry was aroused. Certainly he soon began to translate the long allegorical poem of courtly love, the Roman de la Rose. His literary experience was further increased by visits to the Italy of Boccaccio on the King’s business, and he was well-read in several languages and on many topics, such as astronomy, medicine, physics and alchemy.

Chaucer rose in royal employment, and became a knight of the shire for Kent (1385–6) and a Justice of the Peace. A lapse of favour during the temporary absence of his steady patron, John of Gaunt (to whom he was connected by his marriage), gave him time to begin organizing his unfinished Canterbury Tales. Later his fortunes revived, and at his death in 1400 he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The order of his works is uncertain, but they include The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde and a translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae.

PROFESSOR NEVILL COGHILL held many appointments at Oxford University, where he was Merton Professor of English Literature from 1937 to 1966, and later became Emeritus Fellow of Exeter and Merton Colleges. He was born in 1899 and educated at Haileybury and Exeter College, Oxford, and served in the Great War after 1917. He wrote several books on English Literature, and had a keen interest in drama, particularly Shakespearean. His translation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is also published in Penguin Classics. Professor Coghill, who died in November 1980, will perhaps be best remembered for this famous translation which has become an enduring bestseller.

But how although I kan nat tellen al,
As kan myn auctor of his excellence,
Yit have I seyd, and god toforn, and shal,
In every thing the gret of his sentence;
And if that I at loves reverence,
Have any thing in eched for the beste,
Doth therwithal right as youre selven leste.

Troilus and Criseyde, III. 201.

Introduction

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

GEOFFREY CHAUCER was in his early forties when he began Troilus and Criseyde, and it seems to have taken some four or five years to complete. There are reasons, as will be seen, for dating it between 1382 and 1386 or 7. He wrote it in the spare time of a busy professional life in the King’s service, for Geoffrey, by profession, was a courtier. It is his greatest poem; The Canterbury Tales, which he wrote later, is unfinished, and so remains a splendid assembly of poems of a widely ranging nature, their unity, in terms of the pilgrimage, suggested rather than achieved. But Troilus and Criseyde is complete, and, to the last Amen, in perfect unity with itself. It also has a concentration and a depth never reached in The Canterbury Tales. It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful long poem in the English language; but, to test the full truth of that, and for other reasons too, it is best to read it in the original.

In those years he was reaching the first crest of his career in the royal world of the Plantagenets, into whose service, by astonishing good fortune, he had been enlisted as a page many years before; his name first appears in the household accounts of the Countess of Ulster (daughter-in-law to Edward III) in the year 1357. He must then have been in his early teens, for by 1359 he was thought old enough to be sent on active service to France; the Hundred Years War was, like a wounded snake, dragging its slow length along, and it swallowed young Geoffrey for some four months. He was taken prisoner almost at once, and ransomed in March of the following year. King Edward contributed sixteen pounds to redeem him. We must multiply this by at least fifty to get his approximate value at the time, in terms of our own currency.

He was, however, of humble bourgeois origin, a Londoner. His father was a wine-seller in Thames Street, not far from the Tower of London, and had once risen to the position of Deputy Butler to the King. The Court connexion had somehow been maintained, and so his son was elevated to the position of a royal page. Pages in royal households were often themselves young noblemen; they were given an excellent and useful education there, especially in manners, languages and horse-mastership, and they did useful menial jobs like making beds, and, when they rose to Squire, reading aloud to their betters, for their entertainment and instruction, especially from martial chronicles (according to the Liber Niger of Edward IV). Chaucer was, later, to do still better and read them his poetry.

After his brief and inglorious campaign as a soldier, he was taken on by Edward III as a valet (‘dilectas vallectus noster’); by 1368 he was an Esquire, one of the thirty-seven in the royal household, and he began to be sent abroad from time to time as a kind of King’s Messenger, with letters, and later, as an assistant negotiator in matters of trade and the King’s business.

At home – or, rather, at Court – he presently met with a domicella – that is, a young lady – in the service of Queen Philippa. Her name was Philippa too, Philippa de Roet. By 1366 she had become Philippa Chaucer. Nothing is known of their courtship or of their married life; if he ever wrote a poem to her, which is unlikely, it has not come down to us. She lived long enough to have heard her husband read his Troilus and Criseyde to the Court, for she was still alive in 1387; but that was the last year in which her pension was paid her; from which it is safe to infer that she was dead.

Of Chaucer’s journeys abroad, those most important to us were his mission to Genoa and Florence in 1372–3, and to Lombardy in 1378. Until then he had only made contact with French culture and poetry, which is everywhere reflected in his earliest, most dawn-like work as a poet; especially in his translation of the Roman de la Rose, a poem in which Troilus and Criseyde is deeply drenched, though it is not its main source. In the same French manner is his own first large-scale poem, The Book of the Duchess, a dream-elegy for the Duchess of Lancaster, who died in 1369.

But his contact with Italy broke him out of the dreamlands of poetry, and gave him new and increasing power as a writer about the waking world. It put him in touch with the Divine Comedy of Dante (1265–1321), with the sonnets (and other work) of Petrarch (1304–74), one of which he took and turned into a love-song for Troilus; but his most exciting discoveries were in the works of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) whose Teseida was the source of Chaucer’s grandest short story, The Knight’s Tale, and whose II Filostrato, under Chaucer’s hand, became Troilus and Criseyde.

As he rose to power in his poetry, so, on a smaller scale, he rose to position as a courtier; his main official work was as a Customs Officer at the Port of London. In 1374 he had been appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidies of Wools, Skins and Tanned Hides; he had to keep the books in his own hand and do his duties in person. In 1382 he was promoted to the office of Comptroller of Petty Customs, and was allowed a deputy. In 1385 he became a Justice of the Peace for Kent and in 1386 he sat as a member of Parliament for that County (one of two) probably nominated as a member of the King’s party (Richard II). It was a stormy session and, so far as is known, Chaucer kept his mouth shut. The scene may have come back to him as he was writing of the stormy scene in the Trojan Parliament in the Fourth Book of his poem.

This success story of the steady rise of a young nobody to a position of authority at the elbow of majesty, seems due to three certain, and one probable cause: the luck or cunning by which his parents got him into a royal household at an early age; his native intelligence, diligence and efficiency (which is well attested) in the royal service; and the unfaltering support of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (whose mistress and, later, third wife was Katherine Swynford, née de Roet, and sister of Philippa Chaucer). The Duke was the most powerful and cultivated of the uncles of Richard II, and the father of his deposer, Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV. It was to him that Chaucer addressed what is probably his last poem, an ironical complaint to his empty purse. In addition to these reasons for Chaucer’s success as a courtier we may probably count his work as a poet. So far as we know, he was never paid for any of it, but the fact that he read much of it aloud to the Court (and often composed it, as is manifest from his occasional asides, for that purpose) must have contributed enormously to his standing there; but it did not prevent him from losing all his jobs between 1386 and 1389, during which John of Gaunt was out of the country, battling in Spain. However, on the Duke’s return, Chaucer was restored to even greater office as Clerk of the King’s Works.

Notwithstanding his busy public life and his life as a writer, he found time for his life as a reader, and a man of science. He was perhaps the best-read layman of his day and what he read he remembered tenaciously and used in his own poetry. Fluent in French and Latin, he became fluent enough in Italian too. He was also a distinguished amateur mathematician, astronomer and astrologer (astrology counted then as a science) and wrote a learned work on the astrolabe for the instruction of ‘lyte Lowys my sone’. He was very well informed in medicine and psychology; psychology was already, then, an abstruse and elaborate quasi-medical subject, much concerned with the nature of dreams and their interpretation; there are two significant (prophetic) dreams in Troilus and Criseyde. There is also an important astrological passage, as we shall see.

In philosophy he made his mark by translating The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (A.D. 470 (?)–525), one of the most regarded authorities of the Middle Ages, and he made impressive use of his Boethian understanding of the universe, and of Tragedy, in Troilus and Criseyde.

In a stormy age of war, plague, revolution, schism, and regicide, he led a quiet life at the centre of things in London, in the Aldgate, in Greenwich and in Westminster; but he was really a citizen of the world, or at least of Western Christendom, at home in its culture and languages. His last high appointment was to be Clerk of the King’s Works (1389–91). This put him in close personal touch with the other towering genius in the arts of his Age, Henry Yevele, who built the naves of Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. It is pleasing to think of these two working together in their old age, quietude and fame, chief among the builders of our first civilization. They died in the same year, 1400.

John H. Harvey, Yevele’s biographer, rightly says of him: ‘He did for our architecture what Chaucer did for our language, giving to it a special character which was altogether national, even though it was a part of a common European heritage.’

TROILUS AND CRISEYDE: THE DATE (1382–6 OR 7)

Two intriguing passages have helped to fix the date of our poem; the first was noted in a flash of insight by the late J. L. Lowes, who drew attention to a passage in the early part of the work:

Criseyde, the passage says, stood first in beauty just as, nowadays, A is the first letter of our alphabet. We all know that A is the first letter of the alphabet, but Lowes reminded us that A was also the first letter of Anne – Queen Anne of Bohemia, beloved wife of Richard II. They had married in 1382; they were both rising sixteen and of great personal beauty. It was a charming, ephemeral compliment to her; but it has survived to show that the poem cannot have been written before 1382.

This is the astrological passage I have already referred to. This conjunction of the new moon with Saturn and Jupiter in the sign of Cancer, as R. K. Root and H. N. Russell have pointed out, is of great rarity, astronomically speaking. Its last occurrence before the birth of Chaucer was in the year A.D. 769. But it occurred again in the Spring of 1385. It was noted as a portent in contemporary chronicles; Chaucer, as an astronomer and astrologer, could not but have been very well aware of it. We may certainly infer that he was still at work on the poem when he wrote of it; it must have been in 1385 or 6, for his next poem, The Legend of Good Women, which cannot be later than 1386 or at latest 1387, mentions Troilus and Criseyde as one of his completed works – one indeed for which he ought to be ashamed of himself (says the Legend) for having dared to suggest in it that a woman could be false in love; here we must again suspect a glance at Queen Anne, who is said to have imposed the writing of the Legend on him, as a penance for this heresy. From all this we may date Troilus and Criseyde with some certainty (1382–6 or 7).

THE SOURCES OF TROILUS AND CRISEYDE

The Troy story was a part of our national myth in the Middle Ages; it derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100(?)–54), who declared on what he believed to be good authority that our island, originally called Albion and inhabited by giants, was invaded by Felix Brutus, a Trojan Prince, and great-grandson to Aeneas (Virgil’s hero), in the year 1116 B.C. Brutus landed at Totnes, defeated the giants and renamed the country after himself. In Chaucer’s day this was so flourishing a tradition that there was a movement during his lifetime to rename London Troynovant – New Troy. All that concerned Troy and the Trojans was therefore of patriotic and poetic interest to us.

Homer, being Greek, was not known to Chaucer except by name; so far as Chaucer was concerned, the matter of Troy had descended (more or less directly) from two somewhat fabulous writers, Dares the Phrygian and Dictys the Cretan, supposed eye-witnesses of the Trojan War. What purported to be their accounts of it had survived in Latin prose translations of the fourth and sixth centuries A.D., respectively.

In the second half of the twelfth century, a vigorous but long-winded French poet, Benoît de St Maure, basing himself partly on Dares and Dictys, composed his tremendous Roman de Troye, 24,500 lines long, in which the seed of the story of Criseyde’s faithlessness lies; he called her Briseida. In the thirteenth century this French poem was taken up by Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian judge, who translated it in turn under the title Historia Trojana, and it was this work that led Boccaccio to his own poem; he fastened upon the episode of Briseida and elaborated it into a kind of novel-poem, which he named Il Filostrato, a title which it is supposed he intended to mean The Man Struck down by Love.

The affirmed purpose of this work was to show, through the sufferings of his Troilo, the sufferings he himself was undergoing at the hands of his own mistress, Maria d’Aquino, Fiametta, the Little Flame. This was the story Chaucer set himself to translate, helping out his knowledge of Italian with his knowledge of French, by using a translation of Boccaccio’s poem, probably made by Beauveau, Seneschal of Anjou. Professor Pratt (Studies in Philology, Vol LIII, pp. 509 ff.) has shown that Chaucer had Boccaccio and Beauveau texts to work from, sometimes following them line for line and word for word (often choosing Beauveau’s word rather than Boccaccio’s) and sometimes soaring off into pure creations of his own, so entirely fresh as to change the whole tone and purpose of the poem.

The most beguiling, and, at first sight, the most apparent change is in Chaucer’s handling of the character of Pandarus. In place of Boccaccio’s fashionable young man, cousin of Criseyde, and in no sense a striking personality, he offers us her worldly-wise and witty uncle, of unstated age, a man of fond affections, not only for her and for an imaginary lady-love of his own, to whom he constantly refers as a sort of stock joke against himself, but who never appears in the poem in person, but also, and perhaps even more so, for Troilus, to whose love-affair he dedicates his whole imagination and effort. He is full of stratagems, proverbs, jokes and fibs, a character memorable in the ways in which a Shakespeare or a Dickens character is memorable. He is the first great study in idiosyncrasy and personality in modern English literature.

A still more important change is borne in upon the reader as he becomes aware of Chaucer’s own presence in the poem. He does not appear as Boccaccio does, identified with Troilo and his anguish; he makes no personal application of the story to himself; on the contrary, he continually disclaims all knowledge of the experience of love; he is to be the spokesman of lovers, the servant of the servants of love, knowing nothing of it himself, but having, or seeming to claim, a particular vocation for expressing their blisses and their griefs.

By this ironic declaration Chaucer achieves a grave but smiling personal detachment from his story, identified with none of his characters, yet retaining a total sympathy in his understanding of them all, and, at the end, enabling him to beg our compassion for his heroine, because she was so unhappy for her betrayal of Troilus. He does not seem to sit in judgement over them, yet is perfectly and fascinatedly aware of their self-contradictions, self-deceptions, absurdities and attitudinizings, just as he is tenderly aware of their charm, beauty and idealisms, their romantic feelings, their eloquence, their moments of melodrama, the poetical plane of their adventures; through it all there bubbles his feeling for comedy. All this became possible for Chaucer by his exchanging personal detachment for the personal involvement of Boccaccio. With utmost modesty, not daring to be of their element, he watches the servants of Venus as they rise and fall on the wheel of Fortune.

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

Essentially in this poem, Chaucer is meditating the nature of Love, and mainly human love, as it enraptures and afflicts us in this sublunary world, which is under the government of Fortune. Fortune, good and bad, is common to all; each may be bound in his turn to her great wheel; as she turns it, he rises; he reaches the top; Fortune turns on; he begins to fall, he is cast off the wheel and falls to a miserable end; the following hexameter shows the pattern for her victims:

A world governed according to this ticklish pattern is a brittle place for a world-without-end affection. For if, in the name of human love, an attempt for such an affection is adventured, it can, by a stroke of misfortune lead to utter loss, as the world counts loss. A lover may lose his lady, as a king his kingdom; both may end wretchedly, and this wretchedness (says Boethius) is the work of Fortune, and is the true subject of tragedy:

Chaucer was so much impressed by this passage as he translated it that he added a footnote of his own:

It was the first time the word Tragedy had ever been used in English. He fastened upon it to describe the poem he was at work on:

In a world that knew neither Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, nor Shakespeare, his claim could stand; his poem was tragic in form and substance, by Boethian definition, though not by the Aristotelian; for though it stirs pity, there is no terror in it. The Poetics of Aristotle, however, had not then been rediscovered, and the demand that Tragedy should terrify was unknown.

Still, at the heart of Troilus and Criseyde there lies the seed of tragic terror, in the notion of fatality; Fortune, in Chaucer’s poem, is more than a personification of chance. She is ‘executrice of wyerdes’ (III, 617), the Power that puts into action the dooms of the Almighty; she is equivalent with the Fates or Parcae, who seem to take over from her in the last Book, that opens so majestically with:

These glimpses of a supernatural hierarchy ordering the lives of men and women must cast doubt on the existence of human Free Will, which seems to be manifestly in conflict with Predestination. That this conflict intrigued Chaucer can be seen by his handling of it, in a comic vein, in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale;, here, in our poem, it appears in full formality in Troilus’ temple-soliloquy (IV, 953–1082), where he concludes

The argument uttered by Troilus is taken straight from the Fifth Book of Boethius, and he stops short at the point I have quoted, convinced that he has no Free Will and lives in a determinist world. This, of course, is not Boethius’ opinion. Boethius takes the argument further, and would persuade us, if he could – persuaded himself at any rate – that the contradiction between Free Will and Predestination is resolved if we take the problem out of Time and contemplate it in Eternity, where God sees Past, Present and Future in one timeless, eternal act of awareness. But we are not shown Troilus nearing eternity until the very end of the poem, when he is taken up into it. A new perspective then begins to dawn on him.

THE NATURE OF LOVE

[Never was man or woman yet begotten unapt to suffer the heat of celestial love, or else of natural love]: the contrast intended is that between a supernatural and a natural human love.

In an age when a normal alternative to matrimony was a monastery or a convent, this was a truism. Until the last moments of the poem, Troilus and Criseyde is a poetical study of natural human love, fully romantic, fully sexual; but in the last moments, in what is called ‘the palinode’ this sexual human love is suddenly placed in the context of a higher love, the love of God. With this goes the rejection of the gods of the Ancients.

Human love is subject to fashion, as Chaucer was well aware; its fashions changed just as language itself changed over a period of a thousand years:

Aware as he was, Chaucer nevertheless boldly attributed the fashions in love current in fourteenth-century Christendom, to his Trojan lovers, just as he pictured his fighting men as Knights in coat-armour. He often also slips into the way of making his characters speak of God as though they were Christians, with souls to save and salvation to swear by. It gives a great fourteenth-century naturalness to the dialogue of the poem; at the same time they talk Christian only, as it were, in accidental conversation; their formal religion is most carefully classical, and is everywhere interwoven with their behaviour; for instance the first thing Troilus does when he finds himself at last in Criseyde’s bed, with her in his arms, is to utter a rapturous and beautiful prayer of gratitude to Venus, Cupid and Hymen.

The great advantage of the classical setting to his story was that Christian ethics in sex did not apply; the only ethic that applied was that of what is often called the code of ‘Courtly Love’. Another lucky feature of the story, from Chaucer’s point of view, was that Criseyde was a widow; this meant that the story was not complicated by a husband, or by a reader’s misgivings about adultery; also that it was not complicated by virginity in her. Virginity had a mystical value in the fourteenth century that would have made the seduction, or even the free self-gift of Criseyde, a complication that must have clouded his central theme, the free love of a man and woman outside matrimony. The lovers retain and live by such religion as they know, or could be supposed to know, in Pagan times; so there is no offence here; they lived and loved according to their lights, at least until Criseyde proved false; and this she did when Fortune forced her out of Troy. Until then her love had been pure and constant some three years. But Fortune took her out of that security and put a demand upon her character which it could not meet. We are told ‘she was the ferfulleste wight that myghte be’ (II, 450–51); she was frightened. She took another protector. She was false. She had not the strength which the code demanded of her. She was a part of the brittleness of this false world:

in which free human love cannot be safeguarded, whatever the conventions. Human love by itself is not strong enough.

The code by which we are invited to understand and judge this love, commonly called ‘Courtly Love’ has been much discussed, especially since the publication, in 1936, of the late C. S. Lewis’s masterly book The Allegory of Love. This book sheds a flood of understanding on Troilus and Criseyde, as well as on many other works of medieval poetry and thought in this field; it has been followed by many further studies and the subject is so delicate, complex and extensive that it would be an impertinence to attempt even a brief summary of what has been thought about it in this introduction. I shall therefore confine myself to a few of the underlying notions of the code or cult, particularly those which are manifested in Troilus and Criseyde.

First must come the principle that in this way of love the lover is in total and voluntary submission to the lady he has chosen to serve, by an irrevocable choice. He is a worshipper, and he worships her with his body and soul; to worship is to do honour. What he demands of her is the privilege of being received into her grace, to be accepted as the man who has the unique privilege of serving her. That is all the return he dares demand. If he should fail her in any way (and she is the judge of failure) she may punish him, even to death. He must at all times and in all places obey her lightest word, or whim.

Next to service, fidelity. But this was binding both on lover and beloved, once the lover had been accepted. Suspicion of unfaithfulness was liable to provoke mad jealousy, but jealousy was often held to be a proof of love.

Next to fidelity, secrecy. Because in ‘courtly love’ an illicit or even adulterous relationship was so often envisaged, the need for secrecy was paramount; but apart from the more practical aspect of this need for secrecy, in that it was a protection against the risk of a husband’s discovery, it was also a protection against gossip – ‘wicked tongues’. To be talked about was shameful; no one must ever suspect that your mistress is your mistress; it must never get about. For the same reason, boasting of one’s conquests, real or imaginary, is absolutely forbidden. Liar and braggart are one, for inasmuch as a lover brags of his success with a lady, he gives away a secret he has sworn to preserve.

Worship, service, fidelity, secrecy; these add up to a general ideal of personal integrity in love, called ‘truth’. Shakespeare’s Troilus has it, like Chaucer’s before him; he is an absolute pattern of lover’s truth:

Truth may be called the lover’s general virtue in the way that ‘honour’ is the lady’s. To guard his lady’s honour is the first duty of a ‘servant’. Her honour is not an easy thing to define; she loses no honour in yielding herself bodily and spiritually to an accepted lover, provided it is kept secret; her honour is not the same as her chastity; but if the secret is let loose and she is talked about, that is loss of honour. But unfaithfulness in her is loss of honour too, and Criseyde is unfaithful; in the end she breaks her word to Troilus and gives her body to Diomede; Chaucer refuses to say she gave him her heart as well, for that would be a total, a virtually inexcusable loss of honour in her; but others say she did, he sadly tells us.

Although the lover, whatever his service, cannot demand anything as of right from his lady, some yielding of sexual favour may be expected of her; Criseyde kisses Troilus after she has accepted his first declaration; but it took Pandarus to get them into bed. When at last Troilus calls upon her, as she lies in his arms, to yield, she answers that had she not yielded long before she would not now be where she was.

The ground on which the code claimed to be morally defensible was that love created virtue in the lover. It made him brave, generous, dependable, courteous, friendly, noble and chaste. No other woman might he touch; as for nobility, only noble natures are capable of love or friendship. Love ennobles them, if they have the capacity for it. A man may be noble in this sense, even if he is a peasant, a villein. A nobleman, not noble in this sense, is spiritually his inferior. To be ‘villein’ is in any way to be dishonourable, boorish, mean, insensitive, bloody-minded, animal. Troilus, of course, is never less than princely in his behaviour, but we are told how startlingly he increased in virtue as soon as he began to have hopes of Criseyde:

One exception was allowed to the rule of secrecy. A lover might reveal his love to a trusted friend who could be of service by passing their messages between them and arranging assignations; also, by talking to his friend about his lady, a lover increased his passion for her. This was a role for Pandarus.

There is one element in Chaucer’s vision of romantic or courtly love that I have not found elsewhere in poems or treatises of the time, such as the romances of Chrestien de Troyes (c. 1175), the Libri Tres De Amore of Andreas Capellanus (c. 1185), in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1240–80) or elsewhere, and that is Chaucer’s full awareness that a romantic hero is often ridiculous, especially at his most romantic; but he is not in the least the less sympathetic for being so. Infatuation is simply funny, because it takes itself so seriously; but it is very endearing; for instance when Chaucer gravely records how Troilus, having heard the shrieking of the owl ‘Escaphilo’, prepares for his own death and burial with tragic solemnity. In that he is like the Duke in Zuleika Dobson. It is remarkable too how often Chaucer refers to his hero as ‘this Troilus’, as though he were an exhibition piece; I have not dared in this translation to use this phrase as often as he does, for I think it is more noticeable now than it would have been to Chaucer’s audiences. But Chaucer is making what I think is a modern point, in seeing the ridiculous included in the sublime. But the comedy is kindly, and like so many of Chaucer’s ironical observations, is offered au grand serieux.

THE PALINODE

I consider the Palinode to be among the nearer approaches to sublimity in the secular literature of our language. If, as I fear, this is not apparent from the version here offered, I beg the reader, for his joy, to turn to the original, using my version (if he needs one) for a crib; it is close enough to the literal meaning for that.

The palinode occupies the last twelve stanzas of the poem, beginning (I would think) with Chaucer’s formal Envoy; it is wonderfully surprising, yet inevitable. We are allowed to follow Troilus, after his ‘tragedye’ is over, out of this world, and to look down with his new awareness at those who are so busily weeping his death; Troilus laughs within himself to see them doing so, and condemns all that we do on earth in following blind desire, which cannot last; in which there is no ‘full felicity’. Human love is thus suddenly lifted into the context of divine love, taken out of Vanity Fair; and the poet in his most splendid stanzas calls us home to the love of God, in a prayer with which the poem ends:

Every reader will make what he can of this volte-face that is of such astonishing poetic force and simplicity; for myself I cannot see that Chaucer in any way un-says what he has so long and understandingly been recounting – the feverish desires, the tendernesses, the anguish, the ecstasy, the pledges, the false hopes, the racks of doubt, the risks of Fortune – every human experience of the affections from despair to bliss and back again to despair, that arise in the story he has told us. They are all part of the overwhelming experience of human love, and have their own beauty, virtues and weaknesses, and suffer from their tragic impermanence. Such is ‘the love of kind’; but it has, as it were, an elder sister in celestial love, compared with which human love is a feigning; that is ‘eterne on lyve’, and will ‘falsen no wight’. Many will say this is no resolution of the paradox, just to be advised to relinquish the vanities of the world, to reach for the substance, not the shadow. But Chaucer seems to say that these are his conclusions, and I do not see that he says more; the love of Troilus is never condemned outright, never condemned by him as sin; but as sorrow, the double sorwe of which the poem set out to tell us. We live in an insecure and sorrowful world.

Acknowledgements

I owe much help from many friends who have kindly and carefully read my versions through at one time and another, and offered criticisms which I have often profited by; in particular I am grateful to Mr Christopher Scaife and Mr Francis Warner, both poets themselves, who have given me many helpful suggestions. I would also like to record my gratitude to the late Stephen Potter, who directed the first version I made of the poem in 1948, on the Third Programme, and to Mr Raymond Raikes, who directed my second version, on the Third Programme, in 1969; their help, advice and interpretation were most stimulating. The present version here published is a blend of the 1948 and the 1969 versions.

Geoffrey Chaucer