Canterbury Tales and Other Poems, Geoffrey Chaucer [good fiction books to read txt] 📗

Nature, “there is no more to say; Then would I that these fowles were away, Each with his mate, for longer tarrying here.”

And said them thus, as ye shall after hear.

 

“To you speak I, ye tercels,” quoth Nature; “Be of good heart, and serve her alle three; A year is not so longe to endure;

And each of you pain him in his degree strive

For to do well, for, God wot, quit is she From you this year, what after so befall; This entremess is dressed for you all.” dish is prepared

 

And when this work y-brought was to an end, To ev’ry fowle Nature gave his make,

By even accord, and on their way they wend: fair agreement

And, Lord! the bliss and joye that they make!

For each of them gan other in his wings take, And with their neckes each gan other wind, enfold, caress Thanking alway the noble goddess of Kind.

 

But first were chosen fowles for to sing,—

As year by year was alway their usance,* — *custom To sing a roundel at their departing,

To do to Nature honour and pleasance;

The note, I trowe, maked was in France; The wordes were such as ye may here find The nexte verse, as I have now in mind: Qui bien aime, tard oublie. <45>

 

“Now welcome summer, with thy sunnes soft, That hast these winter weathers overshake dispersed, overcome Saint Valentine, thou art full high on loft, Which driv’st away the longe nightes blake; black Thus singe smalle fowles for thy sake: Well have they cause for to gladden* oft, *be glad, make mirth Since each of them recover’d hath his make; mate Full blissful may they sing when they awake.”

 

And with the shouting, when their song was do, done That the fowls maden at their flight away, I woke, and other bookes took me to,

To read upon; and yet I read alway.

I hope, y-wis, to reade so some day,

That I shall meete something for to fare The bet;* and thus to read I will not spare. *better Explicit. the end Notes to The Assembly of Fowls

 

1. “The Dream of Scipio” — “Somnium Scipionis” — occupies most of the sixth book of Cicero’s “Republic;” which, indeed, as it has come down to us, is otherwise imperfect. Scipio Africanus Minor is represented as relating a dream which he had when, in B.C. 149, he went to Africa as military tribune to the fourth legion. He had talked long and earnestly of his adoptive grandfather with Massinissa, King of Numidia, the intimate friend of the great Scipio; and at night his illustrious ancestor appeared to him in a vision, foretold the overthrow of Carthage and all his other triumphs, exhorted him to virtue and patriotism by the assurance of rewards in the next world, and discoursed to him concerning the future state and the immortality of the soul. Macrobius, about AD. 500, wrote a Commentary upon the “Somnium Scipionis,” which was a favourite book in the Middle Ages. See note 17 to The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.

 

2. Y-nome: taken; past participle of “nime,” from Anglo-Saxon, “niman,” to take.

 

3. His grace: the favour which the gods would show him, in delivering Carthage into his hands.

 

4. “Vestra vero, quae dicitur, vita mors est.” (“Truly, as is said, your life is a death”)

 

5. The nine spheres are God, or the highest heaven, constraining and containing all the others; the Earth, around which the planets and the highest heaven revolve; and the seven planets: the revolution of all producing the “music of the spheres.”

 

6. Clear: illustrious, noble; Latin, “clarus.”

 

7. The sicke mette he drinketh of the tun: The sick man dreams that he drinks wine, as one in health.

 

8. The significance of the poet’s looking to the NNW is not plain; his window may have faced that way.

 

9. The idea of the twin gates, leading to the Paradise and the Hell of lovers, may have been taken from the description of the gates of dreams in the Odyssey and the Aeneid; but the iteration of “Through me men go” far more directly suggests the legend on Dante’s gate of Hell:—

 

Per me si va nella citta dolente,

Per me si va nell’ eterno dolore;

Per me si va tra la perduta gente.

 

(“Through me is the way to the city of sorrow, Through me is the way to eternal suffering; Through me is the way of the lost people”) The famous line, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate” —

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here” — is evidently paraphrased in Chaucer’s words “Th’eschewing is the only remedy;” that is, the sole hope consists in the avoidance of that dismal gate.

 

10. A powerful though homely description of torment; the sufferers being represented as fish enclosed in a weir from which all the water has been withdrawn.

 

11. Compare with this catalogue raisonne of trees the ampler list given by Spenser in “The Faerie Queen,” book i. canto i. In several instances, as in “the builder oak” and “the sailing pine,”

the later poet has exactly copied the words of the earlier.

The builder oak: In the Middle Ages the oak was as distinctively the building timber on land, as it subsequently became for the sea.

The pillar elm: Spenser explains this in paraphrasing it into “the vineprop elm” — because it was planted as a pillar or prop to the vine; it is called “the coffer unto carrain,” or “carrion,”

because coffins for the dead were made from it.

The box, pipe tree: the box tree was used for making pipes or horns.

Holm: the holly, used for whip-handles.

The sailing fir: Because ships’ masts and spars were made of its wood.

The cypress death to plain: in Spenser’s imitation, “the cypress funeral.”

The shooter yew: yew wood was used for bows.

The aspe for shaftes plain: of the aspen, or black poplar, arrows were made.

The laurel divine: So called, either because it was Apollo’s tree — Horace says that Pindar is “laurea donandus Apollinari” (“to be given Apollo’s laurel”) — or because the honour which it signified, when placed on the head of a poet or conqueror, lifted a man as it were into the rank of the gods.

 

12. If Chaucer had any special trio of courtiers in his mind when he excluded so many names, we may suppose them to be Charms, Sorcery, and Leasings who, in The Knight’s Tale, come after Bawdry and Riches — to whom Messagerie (the carrying of messages) and Meed (reward, bribe) may correspond.

 

13. The dove was the bird sacred to Venus; hence Ovid enumerates the peacock of Juno, Jove’s armour bearing bird, “Cythereiadasque columbas” (“And the Cythereian doves”) —

“Metamorphoses. xv. 386

 

14. Priapus: fitly endowed with a place in the Temple of Love, as being the embodiment of the principle of fertility in flocks and the fruits of the earth. See note 23 to the Merchant’s Tale.

 

15. Ovid, in the “Fasti” (i. 433), describes the confusion of Priapus when, in the night following a feast of sylvan and Bacchic deities, the braying of the ass of Silenus wakened the company to detect the god in a furtive amatory expedition.

 

16. Hautain: haughty, lofty; French, “hautain.”

 

17. Well to my pay: Well to my satisfaction; from French, “payer,” to pay, satisfy; the same word often occurs, in the phrases “well apaid,” and “evil apaid.”

 

18. Valentia, in Spain, was famed for the fabrication of fine and transparent stuffs.

 

19. The obvious reference is to the proverbial “Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus,” (“Love is frozen without freedom and food”) quoted in Terence, “Eunuchus,” act iv. scene v.

 

20. Cypride: Venus; called “Cypria,” or “Cypris,” from the island of Cyprus, in which her worship was especially celebrated.

 

21. Callisto, daughter of Lycaon, was seduced by Jupiter, turned into a bear by Diana, and placed afterwards, with her son, as the Great Bear among the stars.

Atalanta challenged Hippomenes, a Boetian youth, to a race in which the prize was her hand in marriage — the penalty of failure, death by her hand. Venus gave Hippomenes three golden apples, and he won by dropping them one at a time because Atalanta stopped to pick them up.

Semiramis was Queen of Ninus, the mythical founder of Babylon; Ovid mentions her, along with Lais, as a type of voluptuousness, in his “Amores,” 1.5, 11.

Canace, daughter of Aeolus, is named in the prologue to The Man of Law’s Tale as one of the ladies whose “cursed stories”

Chaucer refrained from writing. She loved her brother Macareus, and was slain by her father.

Hercules was conquered by his love for Omphale, and spun wool for her in a woman’s dress, while she wore his lion’s skin.

Biblis vainly pursued her brother Caunus with her love, till she was changed to a fountain; Ovid, “Metamorphoses.” lib. ix.

Thisbe and Pyramus: the Babylonian lovers, whose death, through the error of Pyramus in fancying that a lion had slain his mistress, forms the theme of the interlude in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Sir Tristram was one of the most famous among the knights of King Arthur, and La Belle Isoude was his mistress. Their story is mixed up with the Arthurian romance; but it was also the subject of separate treatment, being among the most popular of the Middle Age legends.

Achilles is reckoned among Love’s conquests, because, according to some traditions, he loved Polyxena, the daughter of Priam, who was promised to him if he consented to join the Trojans; and, going without arms into Apollo’s temple at Thymbra, he was there slain by Paris.

Scylla: Love-stories are told of two maidens of this name; one the daughter of Nisus, King of Megara, who, falling in love with Minos when he besieged the city, slew her father by pulling out the golden hair which grew on the top of his head, and on which which his life and kingdom depended. Minos won the city, but rejected her love in horror. The other Scylla, from whom the rock opposite Charybdis was named, was a beautiful maiden, beloved by the sea-god Glaucus, but changed into a monster through the jealousy and enchantments of Circe.

The mother of Romulus: Silvia, daughter and only living child of Numitor, whom her uncle Amulius made a vestal virgin, to preclude the possibility that his brother’s descendants could wrest from him the kingdom of Alba Longa. But the maiden was violated by Mars as she went to bring water from a fountain; she bore Romulus and Remus; and she was drowned in the Anio, while the cradle with the children was carried down the stream in safety to the Palatine Hill, where the she-wolf adopted them.

 

22. Prest: ready; French, “pret.”

 

23. Alanus de Insulis, a Sicilian poet and orator of the twelfth century, who wrote a book “De Planctu Naturae” — “The Complaint of Nature.”

 

24. The falcon was borne on the hand by the highest personages, not merely in actual sport, but to be caressed and petted, even on occasions of ceremony, Hence also it is called the “gentle” falcon — as if its high birth and breeding gave it a right to august society.

 

25. The merlion: elsewhere in the same poem called “emerlon;”

French, “emerillon;” the merlin, a small hawk carried by ladies.

 

26. The scorning jay: scorning humbler birds, out of pride of his fine plumage.

 

27. The false lapwing: full of stratagems and pretences to divert approaching danger from the nest where her young ones are.

 

28. The sparrow, Venus’ son: Because sacred