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
And
as a crueel
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 oblique
way’ 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 slay Death:
“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,
2 Aldous Huxley: Chaucer:
Modern Essays in Criticism Ed. A. S. Cairncross,
3 B. H. Bronson: In
Search of Chaucer,
4 Nevill Coghill:
The Poet Chaucer,
5 B. H. Bronson: In Search of Chaucer, Toranto. 1963. p. 11.
6 B. H. Bronson: Op. Cit, p. 15.
7 Ibid., p. 16.