Had to share this. I'm reading an excerpt from the Canterbury Tales for the first time. It's reminding me of reading The Decameron in my first year of college. Both are a collection of tales from different characters. The Canterbury Tales are from pilgrims headed to Canterbury Cathedral. An innkeeper tells them he'll drive them, and they'll pass the time on the road by telling their stories.
First of all, like Dante when he wrote The Inferno, Chaucer uses the vernacular to write his long poem, which no one else had done. He was writing in the 14th century, three hundred years after the Norman invasion of Britain when French was still the language of literature on the isle. He is, therefore, the first English poet.
I love what Joan Acocella writes here about why what Chaucer has done in one of these tales is interesting:
First of all, like Dante when he wrote The Inferno, Chaucer uses the vernacular to write his long poem, which no one else had done. He was writing in the 14th century, three hundred years after the Norman invasion of Britain when French was still the language of literature on the isle. He is, therefore, the first English poet.
I love what Joan Acocella writes here about why what Chaucer has done in one of these tales is interesting:
And then, everything is concrete. In the Merchant’s Tale, an old man, after his wedding night, sits up and croaks out a song: “The slack skin around his neck shook.” Another man, in love with a married woman, Alison, calls her his cinnamon stick. Here, in a translation by Colin Wilcockson, is how the narrator of that tale, the Miller, describes Alison:
This young wife was beautiful, and moreover her body was delicate and slender as any weasel. She wore a belt with silk strips, and, on her lower half, an apron as white as morning milk. . . . She had plucked her eyebrows so that they were fine, and they were arched and as black as a sloe. She was lovelier to look at than the early pear-tree, and softer than ram’s wool. . . . Moreover, she could skip and play like some kid or calf following its mother. Her mouth was as sweet as ale-and-honey drink, or mead, or a heap of apples set out in hay.
What is so witty here is that this woman is characterized, ravishingly, in terms of humble country matters—morning milk, the early pear tree, a heap of apples, a weasel—which is what the Miller, a man of the countryside, would think of as beautiful. Apples, weasels: this is not the pinnacle that English metaphor will achieve—it is not Queen Mab—but it is foremost among the reasons that people love Chaucer.
We haven't even discussed Chaucer in class yet, but this is exciting. I am eager for class tomorrow.
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