Jameson S. Workman, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal. \"The Runaway Gods of the Manciple's Tale.\"

$Page 1: Jameson S. Workman, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal. \"The Runaway Gods of the Manciple's Tale.\"$
CHAPTER 3

THE RUNAWAY GODS OF THE

MANCIPLE’S TALE

If the Pardoner’s Tale and Miller’s Tale tell stories that kick God out of the world, the Manciple’s Tale tells a story that kicks God out of heaven.

“It is significant,” writes Marijane Osborne, “that the tale features a euhemerized Apollo, his deity almost entirely suppressed.” 1 Put simply: In the first two stories, the men try to become like gods. The Old Man would defy death. First in the bed of Eos and centuries later by killing Death and making sure the Fall stays put, that nothing comes to replace it. The Miller’s narrators attempt, to use Strohm’s words, an “unfettered attack on all forms of transcendence,” 2 and pool their resources in order to collapse the universe into a single empty signifier. Both poetic worlds try to mean more than they can and they destroy each other, either one drunk at a time or one “poure scoler” at a time. The Manciple’s Tale is an opposite movement for similar ends. The gods try to become like men.

Insofar as it recounts the jailbreak of a promiscuous and pagan Phoebus, the gimmicky bedsheet rope was furnished by a promiscuous and pagan tendency in the medieval mind. É douard Jeauneau writes, “according to William of Conches, the ladder of Jacob was nothing other than the golden chain mentioned by Zeus, father of the gods, in Homer’s Iliad .” 3 In her discussion of the Knight’s Tale , Ann Astel observes in Chaucer the same, for lack of a better phrase, ‘ecumenical broadmindedness’ on the topic of poetic eternity. “Starting at Saturn’s height, Chaucer does not conclude a pattern of ascent, but rather initiates a pattern of descent. Whereas Dante’s Paradiso uses Jacob’s Ladder as an emblem of the monastic saints climbing up scala perfectionis . . . Chaucer introduces the Neoplatonic “faire cheyne of love” (I.2988) as an emblem for the order of being, ‘descendynge so til it be corrumpable’ (I.3010).” 4 I happen to believe we shouldn’t attach too much importance to the difference between moving down or up when

C H AU C E R A N D T H E D E AT H O F P O L I T I C A L A N I M A L52

both take place on the same imaginary Golden Ladder and “ bele chaene doree ” 5 that connects heaven to earth vertically and classical paganism to medieval Christianity horizontally. Where two poets admit the rea-sonableness of such a ladder I see a difference in temperament and not metaphysics. In the Manciple’s Tale , the major significance in the idea of art “descendynge” the magical ladder and “faire cheyne of love” “so til it be corrumpable” is indeed metaphysical. Here too it repurposes rather than refutes the enquiries of an Italian poet. Jamie C. Fumo describes it as “Apollo’s ontological degeneration from god to man to beast.” 6 “The golden chain of Homer” writes Macrobius, is one that “God ordered to hang down from the sky to the earth . . . even to the bottommost dregs of the universe,” with ref lected images “degenerating step by step in their downward course.” 7 Earlier I called it a “pulp romance.” To a certain extent, that’s what it is – a short story about a guy with a sidekick who falls in love with the wrong girl. Sidekick tells him she’s a cheating dame; guy shoots her dead; never speaks to the sidekick again. Where it deviates from pulp it borders on science fiction. Because it turns out the ‘guy and his sidekick’ are from outer space.

It may be part of the reason why the poem has never been the darling of Chaucerian criticism. F.N.M. Diekstra writes, “I am not going to argue that it is one of Chaucer’s more brilliant tales. It is not. It is obviously a lightweight thing. ” 8 “As a narrative,” Fumo argues, “the Manciple’s Tale is hardly compelling. As a fabliau, it is profoundly unfunny.” 9 Derek Pearsall strikes a diplomatic tone: “The Manciple’s Tale is in many respects a peculiar performance.” 10 It’s not an operatic poem, at first glance. There’s no Flood coming to ravage it. It is a minimalistic history of the gods and its minimalism is almost scientific in effect. And perhaps it is scientific. For Augustine, literature is the “scientific knowledge” of falsehood 11 and Chaucer’s poem is about a bird that tells a truth that isn’t true. Even so, narrative minimalism is an unusual literary conduit for this mode of literary epistemology. Plato, Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Alain de Lille, none of the great marble busts of the school were writing haikus. The clipped diction is especially unusual here, in a poem that serves as a spiritual sequel to the Metamorphoses , one that self-consciously invokes classical linguistic traditions, and one that parades the famous Platonic aphorism from the General Prologue for an encore. The poem is episodic because it’s a series of f lashbacks. Like us, it remembers its childhood by montage. Unlike us, its childhood was thousands of years ago. The Manciple’s Tale only seems small because it comes at the end rather than the beginning of a very long story. I think a more helpful starting point is Loren C. Gruber’s position: “The Manciple’s Tale . . . seems for the most part to either have been little appreciated or but partially understood.” 12

T H E RU N AWAY G O D S O F T H E M A N C I P L E ’S TA L E 53

Despite its somewhat surprising unpopularity it is one of Chaucer’s most sophisticated, and certainly most focused, philosophical warning shots concerning speaking in art. The poem continues the Ovidian tradition of ‘poetic judgment.’ Poetry is memory but it is also judgment. It’s an Old Man who asks for eternal life without eternal youth. It’s rowing boats with someone else’s wife on the bloated river about to drown the world. 13 It’s also the augural bird that follows its god from Elysium to earth and gets left behind.

The Manciple’s Tale exhibits all the features of an ‘in-house’ discus-sion, or at least an inside joke. It assumes prior knowledge. That prior knowledge is an entire literary tradition: metamorphosis—poetic judg-ment by transformation. If Ovid is still the gatekeeper, in Chaucer’s era he was more like the gate itself. And he guarded a large world. Ovid begins at the beginning: “I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, (since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things,) inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.” 14 For all transformations in the Metamorphoses , poetics stalks the narrative dressed as gods, ready at the feeblest provocation to make monsters out of failed artists and con-stellations out of great ones. Metamorphosis is aetiology. It is not simply the story of men changing into monsters and constellations. It is the story of how and why our monsters and constellations came to be. In Plato’s sun that never sets: “From them sprang thereafter the race of the cicadas” that “sing from the moment of birth till death . . . and after that go to the Muses.” 15 In Chaucer’s chiaroscuro: “Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake, / Ne nevere sweete noyse shul ye make” (299–300). In this and other senses, the Manciple’s Tale is unique in Chaucerian poetry, the majority of whose relationship to Ovidian literature is based in the mis-appropriated love rhetoric of the Amores and Ars and not the aetiological transformations of the Metamorphoses . It is a wonderful and precise poem, but it is a homesick poem.

To argue that its principal inspiration is the Metamorphoses is a phil-osophical exercise and not one simply based in source study. There is a tremendous amount of good scholarship concerning the cosmetic and narrative relationship of the Manciple’s Tale to its sources, especially to Ovid’s work, the Ovide Moralis é , and Guillaume de Machaut’s Le Voir Dit . 16 J. Burke Severs argues, “Chaucer’s poem is much closer to the vul-garizations of the story, especially the Ovide Moralis é , than to the original Latin,” while going on to say, “The important fact, however, is that his version is quite different from that in any of the analogues. It is by no means a mere retelling of any of them.” 17 In Pelen’s evaluation, “A study of the sources cannot resolve Chaucer’s own poetic attitude, let alone the


baff ling “moral” of the tale.” 18 Another method begins in transhistorical space. Here, criticism is ectothermic, cold-blooded, and should always find the hottest rock to live on. We could follow the joyride of Phaeton, where “the earth bursts into f lame,” “Mount Athos is on fire,” “Etna blazes with immense redoubled f lames,” 19 and recognize in Chaucer’s poem the nervous energy and troubled histories of Ovid’s. We could work backward where a figural genealogy of Phoebus and the crow from Metamorphoses I and II to the Manciple’s Tale tells the cyclical tale of Apollo abandoning his divinity and falling to earth. We’d find something like Jonah’s midnight run from God. After a descent into the sea and full-scale personal revolt he unwillingly converts Nineveh. Apollo, too, kicks against the goads, plunges “to the bottommost dregs of the universe,” 20 and accidentally upholds the world of symbols he no longer wants to gov-ern. Chaucer’s poem is an exercise in linguistic pessimism set to the tune of artistic optimism. The condemnation of Apollonian and avian antipo-etry affirms a poetry proper. Put another way, metamorphosis ‘ judges the judgment’ of the gods.

Apollo on Earth

Once upon a time—from time to time—the god of poetry and omens lives on earth with a human lover. This time her name is Coronis and she is, by divinity’s dumb luck, the loveliest woman in Thessaly. Apollo’s best friend is a talking raven, an augural being, once human, now entrusted with “the harmony of the revolving spheres, and things strange and unknown to mortals before,” 21 a magical bird in an age of magical birds. An age when “Saturnia, in her light chariot drawn by painted peacocks, drove up through the clear air.” 22 Like no raven on earth, Apollo’s is a “bird with silver-white plumage, equal to the spotless doves, not inferior to the geese, those saviours of the Capitol.” 23 Even equal to the swan, “the lover of rivers.” 24 One day the bird witnesses a sublunary truth and catches the loveliest woman in Thessaly in bed with one of her own kind: a young, human Thessalian. The “pitiless informer hurried to its master, determined to reveal her guilt.” 25

A second bird enters, this one a talking crow with the same weakness for the steamy details. She stops Apollo’s raven mid-f light, “wanting to know everything.” 26 When the raven tells her, she looks as though she’s seen a ghost. And in a sense she has. Hers lives in a mirror: “This journey will do you no good: don’t ignore my prophecy! See what I was, see what I am, and search out the justice in it.” 27 She was once “a king’s daughter, wooed by rich suitors.” 28 “But my beauty hurt me.” 29 On her last after-noon of human life, Neptune spots her walking the shores alone. The


sea-god “grows hot.” 30 When “f lattering words” fail, he “tries force.” 31 “Then I called out to gods and men. No mortal heard my voice, but the virgin goddess feels pity for a virgin and she helped me. I was stretching out my arms to the sky: those arms began to darken with soft plumage. I tried to lift my cloak from my shoulders but it had turned to feathers with roots deep in my skin.” 32 The beauty of metamorphosis—here, the gift of the gods. “I lifted from the ground, and soon sailed high into the air. So I became an innocent servant of Minerva,” 33 a f lying oracle, ser-vant to the goddess of wisdom, possessed of the power of speech, spared from lust and cruelty—a winged Daphne. But she faltered. “Pallas hid a child, Erichthonius, born without a human mother, in a box made of Actaean osiers.” 34 Minerva “entrusted this to the three virgin daugh-ters . . . and ordered them not to pry into its secret.” 35 The crow watches from “the light foliage of a leafy elm.” 36 Two sisters obey the command and keep Minerva’s secret. The third, Aglauros, opens the chest. “That act I betrayed to the goddess. And this is the reward I got for it: no longer consecrated to Minerva’s protection.” 37 No longer human, now no longer a prophet, even “ranked below the Owl, that night-bird!” 38 “My punishment should be a warning to all birds not to take risks by speaking out.” 39

We’ve already seen how seriously poetry takes the secrets of the gods. The fate of many worlds hangs in the balance, even the extinct ones just waiting to be summoned back into being. Yes, for whatever pon-derous sea of reasons, whatever meager slice of “pryvetee” belongs to a goddess of wisdom, Minerva did not mean for the contents of the chest to be revealed. But what happens here is less orchestral. In fact it’s all rather technical. Aglauros commits the crime. She continues quite hap-pily into later panels. We hope she lives life to the fullest, up to the very last minute before Hermes turns her to stone in an unrelated incident. 40 Clearly, the “truth” is not the event, the thing that happened. The rage of Minerva passes over the doorway of Aglauros and lands on her personal omen, the servant to her secrets, and a life she once spared in wisdom. “Truth was my downfall.” 41 What terrible “truth” turns the augural birds out of Elysium?

Apollo’s raven takes it pretty well, “I hope your attempts to hold me back may recoil on your own head! I have no time for your futile pre-dictions!” 42 So off he f lies like doom to deliver the news to his god. At the sound of another augural bird’s terrible truth, “The wreath of laurel slipped from [Apollo’s] head, his face changed, his colour ebbed away, and the plectrum fell from his fingers.” 43 In a “fever of a swelling rage” 44 he takes up a bow and shoots Coronis in the heart. Her last wish? “Let me give birth first: now two will die in one.” 45 Things have gone


wrong for Apollo. Some sickness took root in the runaway god during his time on earth. “Even though she cannot know of it, the god pours fragrant incense over her breast, and embraces her body, and unjustly, performs the just rites.” 46 “He employed his healing art without avail, his aid came too late.” 47 Next, something happens that always happens in the story. The god prepares to go home. He recovers from the hallu-cination of human life. He rights a few wrongs. An unborn does what he was ‘born’ to do: judge the poem in which he lives. He tears open the dead mother’s womb and saves his son, Aesculapius. A superhuman god delivers a half human infant to “the cave of Chiron the Centaur, who was half man and half horse.” 48 “The semi-human was pleased with this foster-child of divine origin, glad at the honour it brought him.” 49 In Pindar’s fifth century bc version, “he found his child, and snatched it from the corpse . . . and gave it to the Magnesian Centaur to teach it how to heal mortal men of painful maladies.” 50 Apollo abandons his grisly career change and relinquishes the project of bodily healing to bodily beings. There is no successful comingling of art and nature, no monistic co-ontology. The bridges failed poets build across the canyon of being come down in the end. It may seem mean-spirited. It may seem like plain moral failure. But the Flood was a rather nasty way to reinforce the onto-logical order of the universe, too. Finally, Apollo turns to his bird, “who had hoped for a reward for telling the truth.” 51 But he only turns to say goodbye. It was there “he stopped the Raven . . . from living among the white birds.” 52 Many times since the bird has relived the day when it was first said: “Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake” (299).

I called the crow-princess a “winged Daphne.” That’s what she was, for a while. Daphne never ‘lost’ her leaves, or at least they never made the Frostian stumble from gold to green, but she found them in the same place the bird found feathers: running for dear life from the escaped rap-ists of Olympus. Neptune, Ovid’s sea-god that “grew hot,” 53 couldn’t have been nearly as hot as this sun-god grown hot. Apollo’s taste for earth women is a recurring theme. Before he met Coronis, he met Daphne. “Phoebus’s first love was Daphne.” 54 It is the early age of Metamorphoses I . The gods have barely learned to walk, but they do know how to give a good chase. According to Ovid, Apollo was, quite literally, breathing “on the hair f lying round her neck” 55 when:

Her prayer was scarcely heard when a deep languor took hold on her limbs, her soft breast was enclosed in thin bark, her hair grew into leaves, her arms into branches, and her feet that were lately so swift were held fast by sluggish roots, while her face became the treetop. Nothing was left of her, except her shining loveliness. 56


What happens next, we’ve seen before. Rogue Phoebus. Act II: Necrophilia. An undying being sees something die and can’t interpret it. Apollo overcompensates for the lack of understanding between immor-tality and mortality. Apollo as a man is worse than a man. Over Coronis, he “unjustly, performed the just rites.” 57 Here, “Even as a tree, Phoebus loved her . . . Embracing the branches as if they were limbs he kissed the wood: but, even as a tree she shrank from his kisses.” 58 Then comes Act III: End of the Human Hallucination. Next he declares, “As my head is ever young, my tresses never shorn, so do you also, at all times, wear the crowning glory of never-fading foliage.” 59

Thus ends Apollo’s latest devastation of the romance genre. He resumes his post as the god of poetry, resting beneath the laurels of the transformed Daphne. The peace and quiet of a rebalanced poetic uni-verse return. He makes a wreath for himself seated in her shade and wears it the rest of his neverending life: “My hair, my lyre, my quivers will always display the laurel.” 60 An age of men later the same “wreath of laurel slipped from his head” 61 when he murdered Coronis. This struc-ture and the simple fact of its conclusion survive the long journey to the Canterbury Tales intact. Apollo can dissipate all he likes. He can attempt every other week to live according to a natural order of meaning. But a renegade Apollo will pass judgment according to the supernatural laws of his homeland. At its essence, the Manciple’s Tale is a poem about those laws, laws that sometimes knit crowns in the shade and laws that some-times turn white crows black.

As for the victims, driven from divinity the rusticated crow-prin-cess keeps her feathers but loses her visions. She’s exiled to the middle ontology of non-oracular talking bird. Daphne could have transgressed the gods after Metamorphoses I . She could have become a natural plant and ceased to be the halo of Apollo. But she passed her first test as a poetic icon. “Even as a tree she shrank from his kisses.” 62 It’s not a moral victory—Ovid tooting chastity’s trumpet—but it does suggest her branches cast a stranger and more elemental shadow over Elysium than Apollo’s phallus. The crow told a truth wasn’t true enough to maintain her life as an oracle. She didn’t “shrink” from whatever invisible kisses came to “unjustly, perform the just rites.” 63 It is Africanus’s rebuke of Scipio, “‘How long,’ he asked, ‘do you propose to keep your eyes fastened down there upon that world of yours? Look up, instead, and look round at the sacred region into which you have now entered.’” 64

We should linger on necrophilia just a moment longer. It’s not all fun and games. For these poems, there’s something in it that suggests the foggy shape of where the gods go wrong in art. The Orpheus panel of Metamorphoses X is a typically bleak exploration of poetry’s incapacity to


save us from physical death. Ovid’s imagery is persistent. In another mar-riage of questionable ontology, Orpheus, the half-human son of Oeagrus and the Muse, Calliope, descends into the underworld to save a dead nature nymph named Eurydice. Ovid gives the rather heavy-handed clue that the story does not adhere to the more elegant expectations of the descensus ad inferos , a literary tradition about which Bernard F. Dick writes, “In myth and fairy tale, the descent to the underworld was the highest form of the supernatural, surpassing omens, dreams, and prodigies . . . it afforded a loftier vision of reality.” 65 In Ovid’s “loftier vision of reality,” Orpheus makes the rather frank request to the deities of the lower world, “I ask as a gift from you only the enjoyment ( usum) of her.” 66 Orpheus’s mastery of the lyre earns him the brief return of Eurydice. Then in vio-lation of the gods he turns his head for a glimpse and she dies a second death. When he sneaks a look to make sure the wife he ‘sang back to life’ is keeping pace on the short walk out of Hell, the underworld judges him for it. Orpheus, born of art, and servant to Apollo doesn’t trust art to nego-tiate life and death. He expects it to marshal life and death. Ovid’s matter of fact report is that a grief-stricken Orpheus henceforth “preferred to centre his affections on boys of tender years, and to enjoy the brief spring and early f lowering of their youth: he was the first to introduce this cus-tom among the people of Thrace.” 67

Plato retells the Orpheus myth in the Symposium but with a philo-sophically precise obfuscation. The underworld gods merely present to Orpheus an image of Eurydice rather than the woman herself. Plato is a writer who found his literary voice warning against images in caves. Let it refine the irony. “But Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, they sent back with failure from Hades, showing only a wraith of a woman for whom he came; her real self they would not bestow.” 68 Let it also reinforce the ungenerous rules of fantasy: The Old Man’s “moodres gate,” opens. The ground upon which he knocks with his “staf, bothe erly and late” and screams, “Leeve mooder, leet me in!” 69 lets someone through. Orpheus enters the terrifying heaven under the world, a world with Apollo’s laws written on its walls, and dedicates his craft to the reinvigoration of body. He wants art to buy more time , to give up our dead. Eurydice always sinks back to the bog of eternity, safe from his reach. In Plato, she never shows up at all.

To simplify necrophilia in Ovid: When art fails to reanimate biolog-ical life, failed poets rush in to enjoy the next best thing. Poems refract ideas through a linguistic identity. Necrophilia, like all poetic content, awaits its appointment with poetic form. When poetry calls its number, it too will become a hermeneutic. There is a dead body over which failed poets, the great army of rogue Apollos, “unjustly, perform the just rites,” 70


and employ “healing art without avail.” 71 It is language; language, whose limp limbs the natural art of poetry tries to sonically restore. Some poets can’t tell the Phaedrus ’ dead rhetoric from the living. It is Heathcliff hov-ering over Catherine’s grave. “I got the sexton to remove the earth off her coffin-lid, and I opened it . . . I saw her face again—it is hers yet!” 72 For Chaucer, language will only be “sung back to life” as silence, as the resurrection and second birth of its absence.

Apollo is not the Promethean champion of sex and death. According to Genesis 3, we are. In De planctu naturae , Nature stands before the sec-ond birth:

By me man is born for death, by Him he is reborn for life . . . I, Nature, am ignorant of the nature of this birth . . . It is with difficulty that I see what is visible, she in her mirror understands the incomprehensible. I walk around the earth like a brute beast, she marches in the hidden places of heaven. 73

Alain’s crystalline aporia ends up with a black eye and a missing tooth in Chaucer and Ovid. But the point is the same. Apollo expatriates to the mor-tal sphere, he tumbles from “the hidden places of heaven” to “walk around the earth like a brute beast” in search of a natural birth for himself and supernatural lifespan for his lovers. According to Apollodorus, Aesculapius succeeded as a half-human where Apollo’s “healing arts” couldn’t. Then he failed to accept his half-humanity. “And having become a surgeon, and carried the art to a great pitch, he not only prevented some from dying, but even raised up the dead.” 74 So Zeus “smote him with a thunderbolt.” 75 Reach forward in time for a Christian context to the irony of gods and reanimated corpses. Where it sheds the sexual deviance of classical art it plumbs other depths. Apollo’s attempt to revive the dead fails to negotiate the paradox that “It is appointed unto men once to die” 76 with the fact that “Ye must be born again.” 77 Even Lazarus had to be supernaturally “born from above” 78 in order to survive the divine gift of a second death with his soul intact. “Stunned by the double loss of his wife, Orpheus wished and prayed, in vain, to cross the Styx again, but the ferryman fended him off.” 79 In that sense, art in the epoch of the new theology ratifies this phi-losophy of the old mythology but comments on it with greater precision and economy. The Old Man, Orpheus, and Phoebus, even his half son, Aesculapius, it turns out, were on a fool’s errand. But the errand is only foolish in retrospect because literature had yet to invent the most gonzo dimension to the problem. It was only a minor miracle that Lazarus lived for a second time. The major miracle is that he still lives today.

What does this have to do with birds? Sometimes poetic laws are rather like human laws. They lack humanity. They dispense punishment


without regard to scale. In Ovid, they are more Javert than Valjean. “The anger of the Gods,” says Proclus, “is not an indication of any passion in them, but demonstrates our inaptitude to participate in their illumi-nation.” 80 In Ovid’s words, “the faces of the heavenly gods cannot be touched by tears.” 81 Orpheus exits the cave of abomination and lives a life of adventure in Thrace. For what seems a trif le, Arachne is transformed into a spider. In this claustrophobic violation of Helicon customs is the unreasonable truth of the matter. If art is justice, it is not jurisprudence. The temple is booby-trapped for mice and elephants. There is nothing quite so naturalistic and soul-denying as rape and necrophilia. But there are also things just naturalistic enough for the Muses not to be able to tell the difference. In Metamorphoses VI , Arachne retells the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods in the language of nature. “All these incidents were correctly depicted, people and places had their authentic features.” 82 “Arachne wove a picture of Europa, deceived by [ Jupiter when he presented him-self in] the shape of a bull. You would have thought that the bull was a live one and that the waves were real waves.” 83 For this technical mas-tery, for painting Eden’s forbidden fruit in the mouthwatering language of hungry stomachs, they damn Arachne. They demote her to technician instead of artist, a weaver of webs for survival instead of a weaver of tap-estries that would praise the power of poetry. Arachne wove the wrong Jupiter. In moments of self-righteous outrage people speak of certain acts as ‘violation of the laws of nature.’ The cross-section of Ovid’s poetry says that nature itself is the violation. Girls turn into trees in the fight against nature. Eurydice is left to die in peace when a man demands she be revived for usum .

The Manciple’s Tale is Ovid in focus. It blurs the background to bring other things into view and does away altogether with positive transfor-mations. Art dooms the techn ê of Arachne’s photorealism by the author-ity of epist ê m ê . There is a story that yawns across literary history about speaking what she weaves. According to Ovid, “His speech condemned him. Because of his ready speech he, who was once snow white, was now white’s opposite.” 84 It occurs in the same story in which a god slinks away from heaven in the night and tries to pass himself off as human. In the blurry background, art will try and mate with a corpse.

For Minerva’s crow, “Truth was my downfall.” 85 Apollo’s raven “had hoped for a reward for telling the truth.” 86 Centuries later, Chaucer’s Phoebus hears the same truth and calls it “thy false tale” (293). One won-ders what the gods hear when these birds speak the “truth.” What inau-dible breach of poetry, what challenge to the purity of their being and undetectable disease caused the great orphaning of the augural birds? Answering those questions requires less Elysium and more Middle


England. Hemingway understood the principle: “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.” 87 The point is the same for Chaucer, a poet who writes best about Elysium from pubs in Flanders, blacksmith shops in Oxford, and the cabbage patches of chicken coops. Because part of the answer has to do with the heights from which things fall. In the curious case of the cursed birds of Phoebus who once soared above the mountains of heaven, it was a very long fall.

Phoebus in the Suburbs

Ovid’s purple sunset fades into the distance and row houses appear. “Whan Phebus dwelled heere in this erthe adoun, / As olde bookes maken mencioun” (105–106). And this Phoebus doesn’t gambol across sylvan Italy. He lives in a “hous” (130). Of the atmosphere of the Manciple’s Tale , Pearsall writes, “Chaucer has removed or not exploited those ele-ments in the tale which might have given it human interest as a story, or poignancy, or a sense of reality or meaningful conf lict.” 88 To be sure, Chaucer’s version of the myth does admirably little to expand the elegant aesthetic of Ovid’s, nor does it attempt in any very generous way to ori-ent readers to the literary history of Apollo and the raven. But Chaucer’s poem answers a question. And sometimes answers lack the thrill of ques-tions. The question, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” 89 is the sound of the universe linking arms. Whoever discovers the answer should have their face stamped onto our coins but it will read like a trip to the dentist. If it is pulp romance, it is also film noir. And in film noir, prepare to spend the last fifteen minutes in captivity to Sam Spade’s 90 lecture on causation. The history of Apollo and the raven remains a silent force, save for a glib but dense mention of “olde bookes.” If the Manciple’s Tale wastes no time establishing an old metapoetic conf lict, it also wastes no time explain-ing it. The opening drama of Metamorphoses —‘the gods living among us’—f lattens into matter of fact. Ovid’s story of god and his bird begins: “The gods of the sea nodded their consent. Then Saturnia, in her light chariot drawn by painted peacocks, drove up through the clear air.” 91 For Chaucer: ‘Phoebus lives on earth. Just like in the old books.’ It is said without pause and said as perfect reasonableness: The god of poetry lives in Cleveland. He’s done it again. Pelen writes,

Implicitly, the Manciple has resurrected an old ploy that Plato and Ovid have ridiculed, to the effect that human failings can be attributed to, or justified in, divine failings. But with the dramatic system of religious irony in the Metamorphoses, we observed the fate of poets or artists like Arachne, who conceived of the gods in human terms. 92


Chaucer is a good enough writer not to give away the ending. I’m not. Prepare yourself for any number of horrors in this fresh breach of Phoebus’s post as the patron of poetry.

And whoever speaks next seems to have read Geoffrey Chaucer. Nicholas was an astrologer who made love in secret. Phoebus “was the mooste lusty bachiler / In al this world, and eek the beste archer” (107–108). Without the specter of the Metamorphoses , the poem’s coupling would perhaps strike us as a mere curiosity. Conjure Apollo’s romantic past and appreciate a poem stating a plain fact: When Phoebus lapses into a “mooste lusty bachiler,” archery comes in handy. In a right state of being, “My quivers will always display the laurel.” 93 In a state of dis-associated fugue, 94 Apollo’s bow tries to shoot like Cupid’s. It is divine role-playing. Apollo in human drag. The god of omens wants to cash in his laurels for the putti’s wings. Apollo’s ‘arrow’ is broad comedy, too. Then he starts shooting pregnant women in the heart. This composes a silent antinomy. The arrow of physical love that becomes the arrow of physical death is nearly a cunning condemnation of failed love poetry’s inability to negotiate artistic eternity. But the contentual opposition is not an opposition. Physical death is not of a superior order to physical love. Physical love belongs to the necrophilic rhetoric of physical death. Killing “wyf” only brings Phoebus another inch closer to the deathless world to which he always returns in the end.

The narrator speaks of many “noble worthy dede / He with his bowe wroghte, as men may rede” (111–112). The Manciple’s Tale is another archer’s tale that “men may rede” in the long history of Apollo. Ovid’s poem narrates from the bench and gavel. In Chaucer’s poem, many hands make light work. The work is a euhemerist strategy. Gaze upon the vari-ous lands laid waste by Phoebus’s bow. “He slow Phitoun, the serpent, as he lay” (109), Python can harm us no more. In mythology, it is the story of young Apollo rising, Apollo Begins . Here: “He slow Phitoun, the ser-pent, as he lay / Slepynge agayn the sonne upon a day” (109–110). Ah, so it turns out Python was asleep. Apollo clubs a sleepy reptile to death during its nap. Diekstra notes the “touch of smug simplicity in the way he [Chaucer] chooses to reduce the heroic feat of killing the Python.” 95 Why invoke Apollo’s victory over Python to reduce it? It is part of Chaucer’s method. We’ve seen it before. Canterbury narrators summon by sneer what is most dangerous to their antipoetry. Whether a Flood or a Python, it’s a good general rule in matters of persuasion to seek out the truth of your opponent’s straw men. Straw men begin their careers as artifacts of true terror before their incarceration by cartoon. In cartoon form, any suggestion of a tax increase might now be derided-in-pantomime as “Marxist.” Rewind to the era of clown tribunals and a “Red Scare.”


Rewind further to the rise of American Labor and a New Deal. Go back far enough and you might stumble upon the idea that the “‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production” transform “the mass of the population into wage labourers,” into “free labouring poor,” 96 and that “capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” 97 The straw man was once the bogeyman. Add the full f lesh to the stick figure and you have the hulking form of something that’s come back to feed on your worldview.

Asleep or not, Python’s creation partook of every wild and powerful element in classical myth. In the early days after the Flood, choked by the vapors of a global marsh, a waterlogged Mother Earth gives birth to a monster. Ovid writes, “When Tellus [Gaia the Earth] deep-coated with the slime of the late deluge, glowed again beneath the warm caresses of the shining sun, she brought forth countless species, some restored in ancient forms, some fashioned weird and new. Indeed the Earth, against her will, produced / a serpent never known before, the huge / Python, a terror to men’s new-made tribes.” 98 Python was appointed to guard the oracle at Delphi. Entire epochs of omens fell under his protection. The Manciple’s poem says, “He slow Phitoun, the serpent, as he lay” (309). To that effect, his bed was the Omphalos, a stone that was the mythical cen-ter of the earth and the spiritual shrine of humanity, bundled against the cold by Clotho’s chord in a bedheaded tangle of original lifeline. When Apollo arrives to Delphi, he finds the snake guarding the blind justice oracle, the one that always shows up when there’s something important to do in a poem. 99 The spawn of great mother earth guards Themis, the goddess who told the last humans left after the deluge to “throw behind you the bones of your great mother!’” 100

This is a story of regime change in the universe of myth—twilight of the tectonic forces. “The Primal Chaos” 101 and “The Separation of the Elements” 102 give way to new gods. Python is one of the last of his kind. In some versions, he is simply a snake that terrorizes the ashy, underfed survivors of a cosmic catastrophe. In others, “Python, offspring of Terra, was a huge Draco who, before the time of Apollo, used to give oracular responses on Mount Parnassus.” 103 Python becomes part of the oracle he guards. “Death was fated to come to him from the offspring of Latona. At that time Jove lay with Latona.” 104 Python does not go quietly into the night in service to the Fates. “When Python knew that Latona was preg-nant by Jove, he followed her to kill her.” 105 A servant to divine secrets refuses to accept the divine secret of his own death. He fights to reinter-pret pryvetee’s interpretation of his life by protecting his life. “But by order of Jove the wind Aquilo carried Latona away, and bore her to Neptunus. He protected her, but in order not to make voice Juno’s decree, he took


her to the island Ortygia, and covered the island with waves. When Python did not find her, he returned to Parnassus.” 106 Safeguarded by the non-rapist Neptune, Latona gives birth to a son and daughter, “Apollo and Diana, to whom Vulcanus gave arrows as gifts.” 107

Only four human days have passed since his birth when a fully grown Apollo “exacted vengeance for his mother.” 108 The arrow sails into one of the last beating hearts of the primordial age. In Ovid’s retelling, “the archer god,” never admired for subtlety and the diaphanous ‘notes he doesn’t play,’ essentially ‘pumps him full of lead’: he “destroyed the crea-ture . . . with a thousand arrows, almost emptying his quiver.” 109 Art’s fresh-faced and shortfused world soul takes the oracle from the serpent son of the postdiluvian material world. Thus begins the unbroken rule of Apollo at Delphi. Earlier I stated “poetic eternity occurs on the ruins of time rather than as the apotheosis of time. According to Ovid, “The oracle and festival of the god were then named Pytho and Pythian from the rotting (pyth ô ) corpse of the beast.” 110 This tireless and, for the most part, absurd antagonism between two spheres of meaning is something like a first principle for this species of poetry. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” 111 Which isn’t to say that the distance between the two is inf lexible, even if the idea of “distance, as such” is. I’m no expert, but I’d imagine both good jug-glers and great ones rarely drop a ball. The difference between the two is that the good juggler makes it look easy and the great juggler doesn’t. Given the same general skill set, the one in constant crisis is probably the true professional. The Metamorphoses recounts these first Pythian games. The winners were “honoured with oak wreaths. There was no laurel as yet, so Phoebus crowned his temples, his handsome curling hair, with leaves of any tree.” 112 The subheading of the panel in which this takes place? Metamorphoses I: 438–472: “Phoebus kills the Python and sees Daphne.” 113

Lulled into a false sense of security by the apocryphal story of Python snoozing, the Manciple’s poem continues to develop its naturalistic re-ontology of Phoebus. “Thereto he was the semelieste man / That is or was sith that the world bigan. / What nedeth his fetures to discryve? / For in this world was noon so faire on-lyve” (119–122). Phoebus’s fig-ural beauty is physical beauty. Poets can successfully realign the semiotic properties of metaphor with their empirical referents. It’s Rhetoric’s new sun on the backward path to life as a stick 114 and the euhemerist’s boast: make way for natural criteria in the poetic arena. Phoebus is the seemli-est man since the world began (119–120). The governing principle is time. The human past. Phoebus possesses finer features than anyone on earth (121–122). The governing principle is physical comparison (plus time).


Now, “on-lyve”: the available “faire fetures” on earth at present. Deploy traditional modes of cognition from the material world of extension. Let them illuminate poetry’s particular contribution to human knowledge.

Here, too, there is a Python in the grass. Phoebus’s singing is with-out compare. “Certes the kyng of Thebes, Amphioun, / That with his syngyng walled that citee, / Koude nevere syngen half so wel as hee” (116–118). Amphion, whose singing “was thought to wield occult pow-ers over the natural world,” 115 is an expert foil to a logical series of nat-ural comparisons. He and his twin brother Zethos were sons of Zeus. Of the two, Amphion was rather the sensitive type. In the Library of Apollodorus, “Now Zethos paid attention to cattle breeding, but Amphion practiced minstrelsy, for Hermes had given him a lyre.” 116 “The robust Zethus blamed Amphion for his passionate addiction to music and urged him to abandon it for what he deemed the more manly pursuits of agriculture . . . and war . . . one advocating the practical life and the other the contemplative or artistic. “The gentle Amphion yielded to these exhortations so far as to cease to strum the lyre.” 117 According to Horace’s speaker in the Odes , “We see that Amphion let his brother have his way; [Therefore] respect your friend’s position . . . when he’s going to the fields and takes his dogs . . . get up, lay aside your melancholy, antiso-cial Muse and earn your food by work . . . Roman men care about hunt-ing; it gives them fame, health, and physical stength.” 118 The day comes when Zethos and Amphion assume rule of Thebes and they take it upon themselves to fortify the city walls with entire mountains. Zethos, the Marlboro Man, staggers under the load. “Amphion strolls along draw-ing a cliff twice as large after him by singing to his golden lyre.” 119 He builds a city out of mountains with song. 120 It is “the feebleness of brute strength by comparison to the power of genius.” 121 Euripides writes in The Phoenician Women , “In days gone by, the sons of heaven came to the wedding of Harmonia, and the walls and towers of Thebes rose to the sound of Amphion’s lyre.” 122 For a moment, Art itself was gathered inside Thebes. When an army gathers outside it, Antigone asks, “The walls that Amphion made with music, do they hold fast?” 123 The strategy to demys-tify Phoebus requires the demystification of all literature—the breach of its musical walls and the grounding of its f lying cliffs.

In the sixteenth century, Juan Luis Vives attempted by accident to logically reinforce Chaucer’s Manciple on this particular subject. In De causis corruptarum artium , he writes: “enraged against nature, about which they know nothing, the dialecticians have constructed another one for themselves . . . Platonic ideas and other monstrosities which can-not be understood even by those who have invented them” (VI, 190–191). 124 Granted, Vives’s direct targets, says Charles Fantazzi, were the


“pseudodialecticians of Paris” 125 and not Amphion of Thebes, save for the following unsolicited humbug in his notes to Augustine’s Of the Citie of God. “Pliny saith he inuented Music . . . Amphion built Thebes (saith Solinus), not that his Harp fetched the stones tither, for that is not likely, but he brought the mountaineers, and highland-men vnto ciulity, and to help in that work.” 126 Of course it’s possible that an otherworldly, total fabrication like a race of hardworking highland giants “brought vnto ciuility”—something no one’s ever heard of—may be ‘likelier’ as an explanation for the miraculous construction of a Greek city-state than a “magical harp.” The difference is that a “magical harp” is something everyone’s heard of because every sane poet since Euripides felt it their duty to mention it in connection to Amphion. “The tradition . . . was readily available to Chaucer and his contemporaries and was one that the poet knew well . . . Chaucer himself alludes to Amphion’s prowess as a harpist in ‘The Merchant’s Tale.’” 127 This in no ad hominem against Vives, who was ahead of his time. He was right that “peasants and artisans know nature far better than many philosophers.” 128 Every peasant and artisan understands the soterial and supernatural point of music moving moun-tains because it’s common sense philosophy. No one except a philosopher understands the philosophy of Amphion building cities with Nephilim slave labor because it’s complex and absurd. And the juggernauts would have never accepted the terms. There’s no good version of the story—not that there couldn’t be—where the giants “put their dreams away for another day” 129 and just go through the motions, punching time cards at a prehistoric construction job. Giants either live in mountains, 130 create mountains by fighting the gods, 131 destroy them by fighting each other, 132 or they fell asleep one day and became mountains. In the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, “All about they saw the monstrous forms of Earth’s chil-dren, that once made war on heaven, the Giants, whom in compassion their mother had clothed with rocks, trees, crags, and piled up to heaven new-shaped as mountains.” 133 At least music exists. Who knows what it’s capable of? Plato said it created the universe. 134 Giants are syphilitic hallucinations. Deploying them as a rationalist to rationalize the child-hood of myth is counterproductive because they only ever existed in the childhood of myth.

In the same way, deploying Amphion and the childhood of Thebes to rationalize Phoebus’s music is going to create more problems than it solves for the empirical method. All of which is to say that when a natural series takes a supernatural turn, whether by blissful ignorance of or will-ful mutiny to the rules of the classical fantasy he’s rewriting, the narrator concludes the argument with a natural turn: “This Phebus, that was f lour of bachilrie” (125). Here decorative rhetoric praises poetry’s co-ontology


with existence, according to which, the social category of human chiv-alry is sufficient to describe the metaphorical nobility that belongs to the patron of art. One way to “unjustly, perform the just rites” 135 is to pour the human honey of little-“r” rhetoric over the corpse of language. Honey has enjoyed a long but controversial career in mummification. Legend says Alexander the Great was mummified in honey. “The last record of his appearance was that by Octavius (Caesar Augustus) nearly three centuries later, who touched the body and inadvertently broke off Alexander’s nose.” 136 These are the simple and straightforward metapoetic ‘facts’ of mummification: that it’s all one drastic measure to wield power in eternity and it leaves something brittle behind. No one can accuse the ritual of not having its “heart in the right place” as a bold interrogation of the afterlife, especially since the heart was the only organ that wasn’t packed away in canopic jars. At the same time, no self-respecting critic of human rituals can really do their job without wondering if allow-ing the heart, “Which Egyptians regarded . . . as the essence of being,” to remain “in place” and decay in this world before it was, quite liter-ally, weighed for its stories against a single feather isn’t something like a tacit admission of defeat for the relative power of physical signs as they pass beyond the rational universe. 137 “In Ramses’s case, burial surgeons removed the heart and then stitched it back into its original location, using golden threads.” 138 Assuming that Ramses’s gold brocaded heart would have weighed more rather than less when it faced off against the feather of Anubis, it’s difficult to imagine any chance of success unless the entire collection of stories stored inside, spanning a life, made it somehow lighter than its own history.

“Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a crowe” (130). Inside this white bird are two from Ovid: a crow-princess once enlisted into the league of Minerva’s augurs and Apollo’s personal messenger, a raven with “silver-white plumage . . . not inferior . . . to the swan, the lover of rivers.” 139 This crow, “Which in a cage he fostred many a day, / And taughte it speken, as men teche a jay. / Whit was this crowe as is a snow-whit swan, / And countrefete the speche of every man” (131–134). It is the same species of voice that naturalizes the “universal light of the great world” 140 into a sharpshooting bachelor. Now a “spotless” 141 Raven who “was once snow white” 142 and “spurned empty prophecies” 143 lives in a birdcage. The thorny singularity of his “speche” is a mere technicality. The dual move-ment to ground augury is this: First the god “taughte it speken” (132). The gods do not teach birds to speak in the Metamorphoses. Augury is a gift. Strictly speaking, poetic form is not taught, it is remembered. Ovid’s positive transformations impart anamnestically reoriented powers. The first feather of transformation carries with it the f luent language of gods.


As such, you don’t find many training sequences in metamorphic myth. The human music lovers of the Phaedrus didn’t become a little buggier with each passing day. They sang themselves to death and woke up as bugs with a new song. It turns out that “the end or goal for the sake of which they have been constructed” 144 was “Beauty,” a “final causality that moves all things from within,” 145 and an unteachable “inner, nonde-liberative purposiveness.” 146

Next, Phoebus simply teaches the crow to imitate human language, “as men teche a jay” (132). The path goes from oracles, to the learnt techn ê of language, to something even lower: augury as ‘nature’s mir-ror.’ It is the language of Arachne’s tapestry. “You would have thought that . . . the waves were real waves.” 147 But there are no “real waves” in art. There’s only “the down-f lowing water of the Styx, which is the greatest and most dread oath for the blessed gods.” 148 As Janet Coleman argues, “Augustine believed that nothing in the material world ( signifi-cata ) that is external to the mind can, in the last resort, be regarded as the source of its knowledge.” 149 The world “external to” or beyond the waters of eternity’s “greatest and most dread oath” 150 can’t support the augur, because, “above grow the roots of the earth and unfruitful sea.” 151 The Manciple claims the crow’s speech has no “sentence,” that it is only the dry carcass of counterfeit sound. In that sense, it is truly language. And it isn’t Apollo’s. Margaret F. Nims writes that metaphor is “a word carried out of its normal semantic range into foreign territory.” 152 In the Manciple’s poem, metaphor returns from “foreign territory,” rejoins “its normal semantic range,” and completes the transformation back to “a word.” The only step that remains is to limit the anagogical possibility of “a word,” and conclude the matter. The argument is gaining momentum. If the realities that Platonic Realism describes exist beyond the reach of a physical system of signs, then a crow that imitates sound as sound —as a mimetic and acoustic candidate of natural language—has not qualified in its bid to join the ranks of the augurs. At this point in the poem, the representation of the augural birds of art as pets that imitate their owners’ speech goes unchallenged except by secret supernatural history.

Or, it goes unchallenged until the narrator challenges it. “Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale / Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, / Syngen so wonder myrily and weel” (136–138). The song of this bird is identical to its augury. We can test this idea. Later Phoebus proves it by lament. When and how does he “syngen” like a “nyghtengale”? “He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale” (135). This new logic is the old logic: relativize the augural crow by comparison to biological birds of this world instead of the one from which he came. Here the comparatio is unstable. Nothing except a general rule can stop a philosopher of art. And as a


general rule: any ‘crow’ that tells stories and sings more beautifully than nightingales is probably a ‘magical crow’. From Aesop forward, crows have been clever. In some cultures they are ghosts. They have even been messengers to Odin. Rarely have they replaced the nocturnal concert of the nightingale—those “light-winged Dryad of the trees” 153 —outside the window of young love. The ability of interlocutory strategies at the level of content to contain the crow’s powers of speech to mere imitation becomes increasingly difficult in the poem. The bird is no imitator. He seems to think perfectly well for himself when he delivers the bad news to Phoebus. He has a will. He also has a history. We know where this bird ‘learned’ to prophesy. The narratological wish that the crow’s language would divest itself of noumenal matter comes true in the end, but it hap-pens by accident. In Orwell’s phrase, for a lack of what is called, “quite frankly, ‘reality control.’” 154

2.5 Kids and a Mortgage

This philosophy must, at all costs, convert poetic objects back into their original ontological designations. If up to this point the narration calls into question the aporetic distinctions between metaphor and literal lan-guage, it now attempts a full merging. “Now hadde this Phebus in his hous a wyf / Which that he lovede moore than his lyf” (139–140). The movement now is from naturalization to domestication. Phoebus, god of poetry, lives in a house on earth. He has a human wife and a pet bird. Cosmetically, we are far from the fields of the Metamorphoses and the sunny afternoons of Apollo’s f lings. The desire for art to merge with human concerns is more energetic. So Phoebus is married to “wyf.” There is no luxurious introduction for “wyf.” She doesn’t have a name. She never speaks. “Wyf” is a function inside an argument about Phoebus. Once she was the prettiest girl in Thessaly. She was about to be a mother when an alien gunned her down. 155 What little we know about the skeletal romance we gathered from circumstantial evidence. There is no indica-tion that she was putting f lowers in his curly hair and watching him sleep. She seems to have been thrust into this situation against her will. Prior to the Manciple’s Tale , Wyf was unmarried. She seems to be in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend, “lemman.” In this poem Wyf does not meet “lemman.” She sends for him. “His wyf anon hath for hir lemman sent” (204). To her everlasting detriment, she was a homeowner. One day god and his bird arrived to her doorstep for reasons beyond her dimen-sional interest. The place could have used sprucing up, sure, but Phoebus liked it well enough. “Show me to the bedroom, human.” For his winged miracle, the birdcage in the corner would do. Such presumptuousness is


not out of character for the rogue gods. Jupiter handed Europa a never-ending trough of troubles. 156

Wyf is silent in a poem about the way poetry and life sound to each other. She and her house are the living symbols of the literal world, the human family Phoebus’s rhetoric would like to inhabit. The linguis-tic epistemologies of history and art are unable to communicate with each other without serious philosophical concessions. Once in a while, Phoebus is willing to make these concessions. Wyf, what little we can divine, seems to have little interest. Perhaps she just wants him to leave, or chip in for rent. The more thrilling possibility is that she doesn’t see him, doesn’t know he’s there. For “lemman” and those closest to her, she was taken before her time by a sudden heart attack. Because even if Phoebus is willing to trade his symbol for her language, the question remains whether it is possible. By the time life and art give enough of themselves away they’ve already become the other. Look at what hap-pened to Rhetoric’s wooden stick in the Anticlaudianus . Watch what hap-pens to Phoebus’s crow when he figures out how to do what Wyf can’t: speak her language out loud in a poem, within earshot of the god of poetry.

Wyf could be a real chatterbox in her own world. But whenever Phoebus sets foot in a room, he turns it into a cosmic myth. The truth of life broadcasts on a different wavelength than the underfunded twenty-four-hour public radio that plays Macrobius’s singing spheres, “thilke speres thryes thre,” which Chaucer calls “That welle . . . of musyk and melodye / In this world heer, and cause of armonye” ( Parliament of Fowls , 61–63). Perhaps it’s for the best the god doesn’t live in the poem where he could hear what she mutters under her breath. The Manciple’s Tale is another of Chaucer’s experimental worlds, a world that counterbalances the experimental irony of divine failure with the surer knowledge that Phoebus is on the run from and not to his true home. That is to say, the language of the poem is only represented according to the postlapsarian epoch. If its share in that epoch was substantial instead of representa-tional, we may have been able to hear wyf speak. When poetry bends the note of history in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , it will snap the string. Here, the house of Phoebus cannot contort to fit the shape of the “hous” of man.

Nevertheless, Phoebus does his best to contribute as a literal rather than metaphorical lover. “This worthy Phebus dooth al that he kan / To plesen hire, wenynge for swich plesaunce, / And for his manhede and his governaunce, / That no man sholde han put hym from hir grace” (156–159). It is an uncomfortable conversation, but we may as well have it. The Art of Love is not the act of love. In the deepest sense possible, it’s all talk. This new version of the Coronis myth is no ringing endorsement


of the god of poetry. But neither was the last. Clearly Phoebus-Apollo is no tiger in the sack. Every time he tries out with what he hears humans call ‘the rough stuff ’, Coronis-Wyf ends up in bed with a younger man. The narrator rushes to Phoebus’s aid. Perhaps the poem’s voice of natu-ralism finally sees in Phoebus one of its own.

“But God it woot, ther may no man embrace / As to destreyne a thing which that nature / Hath natureely set in a creature” (160–162). Pet birds in a gold cage glutted on “mete and drynke” and “deyntees” will still prefer the forest and its worms (163–174). After a lifetime spent in debauch on a “couche of silk,” the ungrateful housecat will chase a mouse and leave the dish of cream (175–180). Such is the wild, thankless nature of a pet Wyf. The gods can’t leave them alone in their own house for a minute without some human ending up in their place. Of course this string of red herrings fails to address the central theoretical dilemma of the non-relationship: relegate Wyf to nature and she’ll be natural. Phoebus’s art of love will never satisfy her physically. Can we blame her? At least the cat was given a dish of cream. Chaucer’s Pheobus is more like a ghost castrato. His invisible phallus doesn’t work as well as the tempo-rary one Ovid gives him. In Ovid’s stories it atrophies like a plover’s in time for the migration home. For Wyf, the rustle under the sheets was a metaphor. The central engines of meaning in poetry are meager building materials for sexual ethics. Phoebus’s marital failures march in step with the epistemological failures of the Manciple’s thesis, a thesis whose attrac-tiveness seems never to fade to the “lusty bachiler” of Metamorphoses I, II , and the Manciple’s Tale.

The poem participates with relish in the literary tradition that says art will not produce a stable system of metaphor about physical pleasure, unless it first dismisses it as part of an ontological aporia. Whether it’s ‘true’ that “art will not produce a stable system of metaphor about phys-ical pleasure” matters less than the following fact: It’s true that a literary tradition said it was true. The “Alle poesye” 157 where Chaucer sends his books is really ‘ some poesye’. But it is that kind of “poesye” that tests itself by fire, that wants to discover what “poesye” is and is not. Kissing “the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan and Stace” 158 is more like running the gauntlet. “Alle poesye” is a prettier way to say that not all poems are poetry. Of course in that sense, “alle poesye” is “alle poesye.” It is a love letter to all men that have walked on the moon.

There are other steps to kiss in the history of poetry, traditions based in opposite philosophies that would, for instance, witness the monistic elision of two souls into One in the northward trajectory of John Donne’s “compass.” “If they be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are


two . . . It leans, and hearkens after it, / And grows erect, as that comes home . . . Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.” 159 The metapoetic integration of physical and spiritual ecstasy depends upon a co-ontological description of mind, body, and soul. Such a poem, and such a tradition, belong to the current of Western ideas that Chaucer’s interlocutors champion in irony as they skip like a stone across “the unfruitful sea” of poetic materialism. Phoebus-Apollo has tried since the classical age to write these sorts of poems and reinvent himself as a love poet of experience rather than intuition, but always by story’s end he is unable to persuade even his reinvented self that the proper judge of artistic speculation is the ‘truth’ of natural bliss.

“Wise Plato seith”

After a small diversion in which nature trumps nurture, buttressed by various proofs of housebroken animals behaving like the little Judases they really are, it’s time to bring the correlations home to the lawless lust of the human “she-wolf” (183). And so the monologue ends, “Alle this ensamples speke I by thise men / That been untrewe, and nothyng by wommen. / For men han evere a likerous appetit” (187–189). Yes, the choplogic “ensemples” were about men. Arnold E. Davidson writes, “In fact, by assessing the Manciple’s inconsistencies, the careful reader can discern that there is a definite logic to the muddlement that this character attempts to perpetrate upon his audience.” 160 Next the poem expands a judgment of male hedonism for the next four lines, proves Chaucer’s point by accident, “That we ne konne in nothyng han ple-saunce” (195), and returns to the story with another change of heart about the “likerous appetit” of men: “This Phebus, which that thoghte upon no gile / Deceyved was, for al his jolitee” (196–197). All men are “liker-ous.” Phoebus is a man. Therefore, Phoebus is not “likerous.” Before you can say “Phoebus is not a man” the poem adds, “Therefore Phoebus was deceived by a woman.”

Very well. The newly guileless (196) Phoebus leaves with Wyf ’s checkbook to go grocery shopping for three (203). While he’s away, she leaves the back gate unlatched. “His wyf anon hath for hir lemman sent” (204). But someone else sneaks in before. He arrives by invitation. “Hir lemman? Certes, this is a knavyssh speche! / Foryeveth it me, and I you biseche” (205–206). To that effect, one rather thorough way to seek abso-lution for the things we say is to prove that language is meaningless. And so the naturalist narrator turns to Plato, John of Salisbury’s “prince of all philosophy.” 161


The wise Plato seith, as ye may rede, The word moot nede accorde with the dede. If men shal telle proprely a thyng, The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng.

(207–210)

In the Platonic maxim, borrowed from the General Prologue , “wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” ( General Prologue , 742). “Wyf/wenche/lemman” are empty signs that depend on external objects for mean-ing. “There nys no difference, trewely, / Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degree, / If of hir body dishonest she bee, / And a povre wenche, oother than this” (212–215). One must concede this sociolinguistic point to the Manciple. Words evoke reality but they share no identity with it. Nims writes, “A word standing alone has an element of un-definedness anal-ogous to that of prime matter. It is, to be sure, a unit of meaning, but much of its meaning is held in suspension, in potency, until its position in discourse stabilizes its grammatical form and elicits the relevant areas of its meaning.” 162 In a literal semiotic system language derives its meaning from empirical reality.

Literal language came into being in order to name the world of sense-experience. Bees ‘bzzzzz’ before they ‘buzzed’. “The long period of use of onomatopoeia in the predicative function serves as the starting-off ‘plat-form’ for the emergence of verbs.” 163 Travis discusses the work of phi-lologist Charles Nodier, “whose Dictionnaire des onomatop é es and Notions é l é mentaires de linguistique advance the thesis that only a ‘slight effort’ is needed ‘in order to arrive . . . at the belief that the imitation of animal noises was the main element in the beginning of natural languages.’” 164 “For Nodier the child’s maturation toward articulate speech repeats the growth of the species . . . ‘His linguistic expression was at first simply vocal, like that of the animals . . . bellowing, mooing, bleating, cooing, hissing.’” 165 Sounds grew up into words. We made them “cousin to the deed.” By force of will and popular consensus we attached them to the objects around us. Next we named ideas. One day we finished labeling the entire natural universe and hadn’t come closer to erasing the original contradictions at the heart of language. The foundational link between words and things was arbitrary. Everything outside of us had a name but not everything inside of us. That arbitrariness and that desire to outgrow the world of the senses is precisely what is at stake. Could language gener-ate the artistic solution to its own instability? Could, as Édouard Jeauneau writes, “the science of words . . . and the science of things . . . come together harmoniously?” 166


Here, Plato’s “dede” is the natural object at which we first hissed until our palate gave way to something better. But language is still hiss. Stewart Justman writes,

His tale is in fact an ironic attack on speech; to say “ther is namoore to sayn” is in keeping with the moral of the tale, which is “Kepe wel thy tonge.” If punning reduces words to sounds, the Manciple reduces reality to silence. His tale perfects the attack on symbols in the Canterbury Tales . It is a verbal attack on words. 167

True enough. But, if cornered, I couldn’t imagine a better way to describe literary Platonism generally and Chaucer’s particular contortions within it than to call the whole project one giant “ironic attack on speech” that “reduces reality to silence.” I think the difference between the Manciple’s ground level hatchet-work and Plato’s aerial bombardment has to do with the fact that only one of them is a “verbal attack on words.”

To “perfect the attack on symbols in the Canterbury Tales ” one has to control the identity of Plato’s “dede.” It is useful to inquire at the level of method upon the evocation of the same Platonic aphorism in both the General Prologue and the Manciple’s Tale. If it was simply to establish the blood relationship and linguistic co-identity of the Canterbury Tales with the rest of the human catalogue—words set adrift from the decid-uous ontology of deeds in the natural world—then the Manciple’s thesis becomes the lean hermeneutic key to the entire collection. Language is an acoustic absurdity and a historical accident. What the Manciple doesn’t seem to realize is that he’s peddling ‘controversies’ in a room full of good-humored anarchists, all of whom would accept such prem-ises as homespun reasonableness. It’s the conclusion they’d find tiresome, that, therefore, poetry has no special status or access to a vista that isn’t grounded in historical being. Or that the history of language is the mean-ing of language. Because, strictly speaking, those are the questions.

Ralph McInery writes, “As for the sensible things around us, John (of Salisbury) agrees with Plato that they ‘await no naming due to their instability.’” 168 This is the difference between anti-language and pre- language. One’s a categorical opposite and the other’s an alternate history. In Chaucer’s poetry, the philosophical challenge to language is essentially mythic. For Pelen, “The particular conjunction of the Ovidian legend and the Platonic aphorism in the Manciple’s Tale may afford us now an approach to Chaucer’s poetic irony in his overt use of contradiction and paradox.” 169 What if the “dede” to which words must be united does not belong to the epistemological power of the natural objects? What if, to borrow from Rousseau, “figurative language was the first to be born” and “at first only poetry was spoken”? 170 In order for the theater to reclaim


mythic powers, Artaud advocated “the abolition of the rupture between thing and words.” 171 All of Chaucer’s sources for the maxim belong to a world-denying philosophical current: Calcidius, Boethius, Jean de Meun. The aphorism shares the spirit of its philosophical models. In the Consolation Lady Philosophy states what she thinks is obvious: “There is no reason for you to wonder, since you have learned under Plato’s author-ity that words should be akin to the things spoken about.” 172

In the General Prologue , some other power is at work in the very medi-eval elision of Christ and Plato. “Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ, / And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. / Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” ( General Prologue , 739–742). Even a short examination of Christ’s speaking suggests a more elusive vision of linguistic reference. “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, ‘Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?’” 173 Later in the Gospel of John: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every [branch] that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.” 174 If the word is to accord to the deed in the manner of “hooly writ,” then the deed is probably located somewhere in that temple he raised up in three days. And in the story of human death and the accidental naming of the world, that temple turned out to be larger than the entire natural universe. The “dede” of poetry is foreign to language. More precisely, it is ‘prior’ to language. Put simply, Christ is not a vine, but that is exactly what he is, with roots stretching forward and backward to the interrupted gardens of eternity. Christ’s body is an “invisible instrument” that serves as “a scandalous countersign to anarchic discord of the human city,” staging a utopian integration of the “heterogeneous strings of the city of man into the transcendent unity of the sign of Christ in anticipation of history’s end.” 175 Poetry is lan-guage “straining to outgrow the limits.” 176 Ultimately, as Pelen argues,

Chaucer’s cousin to the deed is therefore a highly-charged comment, comparable perhaps with Chaucer’s oft-expressed interest in Macrobian dreams. The “cosyn” comments on the ultimate function of poetry, which is to speak of the eternity (cousin) beyond literal language (deed) that Plato’s myths address. 177

The Sound of Arachne

For the Manciple, the wrong Plato enters the “hous” of man, which means that “Plato” entered. “But for I am a man noght textueel, / I wol noght telle of textes never a deel; / I wol go to my tale, as I bigan


(235–237). In the time it takes to retire from the contest to define poetry’s “dede,” Wyf and Lemman already finished theirs. “Anon they wroghten al hire lust volage” (239). From a prison within a prison, a white crow silently observes. “The white crowe, that heeng ay in the cage, / Biheeld hire werk, and seyde never a word” (240–241). When Phoebus returns, the augur and oldest friend of god speaks. Earlier, we wondered what the gods hear when these birds speak the “truth.” This is an old story. It took a long time for a poet to zero in on an answer. “This crowe sang “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” (243). For the first time in their many adventures, Phoebus cannot understand his prophet. “What, bryd?” quod Phebus. “What song syngestow? / Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge / That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge. / To heere thy voys? Allas, what song is this?” (244–247). The fallen patron of poetry was not asking much of his bird in these latter days of domestic bliss. Even so, ‘home’, the memory of its laws and the old forgotten rage comes rushing back. Inside the rage are two obvious truths hardly worth stating. This is a story about a crow that’s never ‘crowed.’ He belongs to a god whose being is so bound up with poetic justice that not even a made-up Wyf can shake it from him.

Perhaps the bird languished too long on earth, went native, forgot its own history. It’s possible he lost touch and came to accept the poem’s reinterpretation of his identity. It was the exhaustion of life in a cell. Then daily summons to the court of illiteracy, presided over by a tin ear whose philosophy couldn’t discern between prophets and parrots. In another life, the Manciple might have been a wartime bore, wondering where in the world the grumpy old man in the polka-dot bowtie learned to mumble things like “beaches” and “landing grounds.” Lately, the bird believed Phoebus taught him to speak. It wasn’t how he remembered it happening, but art is memory and, here, art is the memory being wiped. One day the idea took root that all Phoebus taught him to do was imitate human speech. His eyes readjusted to dimmer lights. He could see the vis-ible world. Like the first men, the crow begins the great natural catalogue of the world. In imitation, he hisses the sound of the first natural object worth naming. Some of the old magic remains. That onomatopoeic rasp-berry is the sound of the future. Augurs don’t go down without a fight. Tithonus chirps every morning in protest of sunrises. This orphan of Elysium will “evere crie agayn tempest and rayn” (301). When he does, he’ll shout the last thing he remembers about the one who left him there. It is the natural name of the god behind the tempest. That’s what we call him here: “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” (243).

Coley writes, “Obvious punning aside, the crow’s outburst . . . might nonetheless be understood as nonsensical birdsong, as vox rather than dictio , sound rather than sense.” 178 “However,” he continues, “the crow


eliminates all ambiguity . . . the statement, after all, is subordinated to a stable truth (the wife’s infidelity).” 179 But “Wyf ’s” infidelity and Pheobus’s life on earth aren’t the “stable truth” to which the poem “subordinates” sound and sense. Whether the Cokewald-God is a cuckolding “wyf” or the “housbonde” of one, “An housbonde shal nat been inquisityf / Of Goddes pryvetee, nor of his wyf” ( Miller’s Tale , 3163–3164). Neither cos-tume allows “pryvetee” to remain intact. The augur goes out of business when etymology exerts more power than eschatology. For the Manciple, the Friday of the Fall is moveable feast and if it sticks to the ribs of the poetic cosmos, “ Etymologia [becomes] the principal means of recovering meaning [“immanent to the word”] since it is the grammatical activ-ity which discovers the causes of language in the forms of words.” 180 The “terrible truth” that hitchhikes across three beaks and survives the empire that thought it up is the sound of something when it slips out of art. It is the sound of a crow kicked to the curb. “And out at dore hym slong” (306). Transgress the language of Phoebus and you’ll fall under ours. We never found a better name for these creatures than the one we first gave by natural “dede.” We were just learning to speak then. Still, the technology improved. Men invented livelier expressions. We grew out of calling pigs “oinks” and frogs “ribbits.” There must be some secret to why we never stopped calling crows, “crows,” even if it’s not a very breathtaking one, since I suppose what they actually do is “caw.” Cocks crow. And Chaucer’s crow “Cokkows.” “The etymologist,” argues Mark Amsler, “proceeds backwards in time as far as he can until he can no longer be certain about how a word was imposed.” 181 The argument here is that the poet “proceeds backwards in time as far as he can” until he reaches a point before any words were imposed.

Above all else, this poem tries to be precise about myth. Acts II and III of the Apollo-on-earth storyline get a good washing behind the ears. There’s very little to say here that hasn’t been said, but there is definitely less to say and less time to say it as Amphion’s musical walls close in around the tale. The last frenzied minutes of the crow’s Elysian employ-ment go like this. “By God,” quod he, “I synge nat amys” (248). It isn’t mere imitation, “as men teche a jay” (132). It is self-defense. To cover his tracks, the crow pours the human honey over the language of his extinc-tion. “Phebus,” quod he, “for al thy worthynesse, / For al thy beautee and thy gentilesse / For al thy song and al thy mynstralcye / For al thy waityng blered is thyn ye” (249–252). John J. McGavin writes, “There is no doubt that the crow’s explanatory speech to Phoebus is rhetorically structured.” 182 It is the difference between Rhetoric’s initial act and her final act in the Anticlaudianus. First she “bespangles” a piece of wood. 183 This is what the crow attempts. By the time she finishes, the piece of


wood is the “true day and the actual day grows dull.” 184 That is what the crow forgets how to do. In the Manciple’s Tale , rhetoric as a technology will never make the leap from decorative to Delphic. Only Rhetoric as a philosophy will. Both need to be reversed to a time before they existed. And so the honey runs out. “The fact is that the speech modulates into report . . . The crow informed Phoebus of the adultery using irrefutable evidence and words of assured certainty.” 185 The bird finds his sea legs in the language of sense perception. He speaks what he “saugh with his yen.” “By sadde tokenes and by wordes bolde, / How that his wyf had doon hire lecherye, / Hym to greet shame and to greet vileynye, / And tolde hym ofte he saugh it with his yen” (258–261). “Viewed within the context of augural practice,” writes Fumo, “instead of suffering pun-ishment for divulging the hidden designs of the gods to men, Chaucer’s crow is cursed for revealing the secrets of men to a god.” 186

Here’s the story of a divine serial killer. On a desert island in early prehistory, a soon to be mother of two was on the run from the great primordial dragon. “There Latona, clinging to an olive tree, bore Apollo and Diana to whom Vulcanus gave arrows as gifts.” 187 “His bowe he bente, and sette therinne a f lo. / And in his ire his wyf thanne hath he slayn” (264–265). Her son would spend the rest of his life learning and unlearning that his lyre and quivers would “always display the laurel.” 188 “Phoebus-Apollo spoke out among the deathless goddesses: ‘The lyre and the curved bow shall ever be dear to me . . . ’ and began to walk upon the wide-pathed earth.” 189 In the Metamorphoses , “the plectrum fell from his fingers.” 190 Here, “For sorwe of which he brak his mynstralcie, / Bothe harpe, and lute, and gyterne, and sautrie, / And eek he brak his arwes and his bowe” (266–269).

The Manciple’s Tale is a poem that reduces the palate of myth in order to answer the questions of myth. One crow for two. Wyf is childless: too much blurring of the poem’s ontology in half-born gods. More to correct in the end. Draw with cleaner lines. This is about languages at war. Not gods and humans. Act II: Necrophilia. Visually distracting. Chews up the scenery. Language is the corpse. So resurrect the dead with rhetoric. “O deere wyf! O gemme of lustiheed! / That were to me so sad and eek so trewe” (274–275). Rewrite Wyf ’s history and carry a different person out Eurydice’s cave. “Traitour,” quod he, “with tonge of scorpioun, / Thou hast me broght to my confusioun” (271–272). There, finally: “con-fusion.” The f lapping fish of Apollo. The epileptic and suffocating god of poetry washed up on the beach of man. Shout to the back of theater that we should never kill our wives without good evidence. “Ne trowe no thyng withouten strong witnesse” (284). Let him kick and scream. Let the Manciple write the definitive anthology of Phoebus on earth. The


bird’s evidence wasn’t bad evidence. It was great evidence. He saw it with his own eyes. And in the last sovereign roar, someone that will live for-ever threatens to kill himself: eternity threatens suicide. “Allas! For sorwe I wol myselven slee!” (291). Good Friday, every Friday.

Finally, Act III: End of the Human Hallucination. Apollo prepares to go home. Chaucer’s emptied the poem of anything unessential—only one wrong to right this time. Phoebus turns to his bird to say goodbye. “I wol thee quite anon thy false tale” (293). He does something that Ovid should have done a long time ago.

Now shaltow, false theef, thy song forgon, And eek thy white fetheres everichon, Ne nevere in al thy lif ne shaltou speke. Thus shal men on a traytour been awreke; Thou and thyn ofspryng evere shul be blake, Ne nevere sweete noyse shul you make, But evere crie agayn tempest and rayn, In tokenynge that thurgh thee my wyf is slayn.

(295–302)

Ovid’s poem turns a bird black. Chaucer’s poem turns one mute. Ovid’s orphaned birds were ejected from a private club. “Divinity only.” They’re still rather remarkable creatures. Bad judges of art, sure, but they speak and remember; they even ruminate on the tough lessons of life. “Truth was my downfall.” 191 The hard evidence of the senses: true everywhere but art. Watch the descent to natural bird. “Ne nevere in al thy lif ne shal-tou speke” (297). “Ne nevere sweete noyse shul you make” (300). What remains for the failed prophets of the Canterbury Tales ? Something replaces the “sweete noyse” of omens. There’s a warm seat next to Nicholas and the knowledge of “whan that men sholde have droghte or elles shoures” ( Miller’s Tale , 3196). A place just big enough for a bird that will “evere crie agayn tempest and rayn” (301), the dime store prophecy that Chaucer can’t get enough of.

Onomatopoeia is not just the origin story of human language. It is the deconstructed history of metamorphosis. Poetic judgment by transfor-mation. It matters only a little that Phoebus plucks out the white feathers, one-by-one, so that black blood quills can grow in. Any Ovid can tell us “And for this caas been alle crowes blake” (308). Sometimes it takes a Chaucer to tell us why they “made hym blak, and refte hym al his song” (305). “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone


else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” 192 Chaucer lends a hand to one of his heroes, even if it means brief ly concentrating the “shoures shoote” of Parnassus into the misanthropic jet of a fire hose and simpli-fying the impressionistic epistemology of an epic into the leaner beats of a screenplay. “Only a ‘slight effort’ is needed ‘in order to arrive . . . at the belief that the imitation of animal noises was the main element in the beginning of natural languages.’” 193 That first “Cokkow!” was the last language the birds of Elysium would ever speak but it was humanity’s second. The “heigh ymaginacioun” 194 of oracles expires. State your name as you enter the “lif present.” 195

“Kepe wel thy tonge”

Apollo is on his way home, but here in the “hous” of man, language has become too much to bear. It was funny when someone called a magical bird a bird. Why did he have to go and become a bird? The bird said he told the truth and the narrator believed him. The god said the bird lied. The narrator believed him. Even his mother believed him. “My sone, thenk on the crowe, a Goddes name! / My sone, keep wel thy tonge, and keep thy freend” (318–319). It is, according to V.J. Scattergood, “the lon-gest moralitas among the Canterbury Tales ,” comprising fifty-four lines. 196 For Fumo, a “self-defeatingly chatty moralization against chatter.” 197 In the Anticlaudianus , Alain de Lille writes, “How language, subject as it is to Nature, is dumbfounded when it tries to express things divine, loses its power of communicating and tries to take refuge in its old meaning.” 198 Isn’t this what happens? Natural language “dumbfounded”: salvage the poem by a “taking refuge” inside a moralitas . This was a poem about eth-ics all along, not language. Don’t kill “Wyfs” and don’t tell lies. Better yet, don’t tell lies that kill “Wyfs.” “Ne telleth nevere no man in youre lyf, / How that another man hath dight his wyf” (311–312). In fact, let’s stop talking altogether. “My sone, spek nat . . . Dissimule as thou were deef” (346, 347). Retreat. The moralitas says the same thing fifty-four times: language is dangerous—better to remain silent. “Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe” (362). Subject a fifty-four part sin-gle point sermon to the Latin figure repetitio and you have the poem’s final antiphrasis. The opposite of literal speech is literal silence. But the silence of poetry is full and not empty. “The silences of heaven’s music, of Cicero, Aristotle, Virgil, Phronesis, and Dante, ref lect reason’s inability to fathom and language’s inability to express the mysteries of God.” 199 “No poet is a poet unless he has felt the temptation to destroy language and create another one, unless he has experienced the fascination of


non-meaning and the no less terrifying fascination of meaning that is inexpressible . . . The Word has its roots in a silence previous to speech.” 200 This is a poetic truth for which Chaucer’s poetry could give a long list of thanks: to Augustine, to the ‘school’ of Chartres, to Boethius, a heritage that ultimately owes to long Latinate reappraisals of linguistic perspec-tives in Platonic dialogues. Boethius writes, “‘Now do you recognize that I am a Philosopher?’ To which the first very cuttingly replied: ‘I should have, had you kept silent.’” 201 It is an old idea that poetry is silent to language. It is an idea too rich for the Manciple and one that forms a tradition very dear to Chaucer.

As we approach the final chapter, perhaps we have a clearer idea of what to expect. Chaucer has a career-long habit of drawing interlocutors that would scrub the universe of every last trace of eternity. How this is attempted is less important than the attempt itself. Either heaven needs to share a house with an earthling or heaven needs to cease existing alto-gether. And it is not a problem of religion; it is a problem of language. In one vision God “is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech.” 202 In another, “grammar lives and gener-ates worlds because there is a wager on God.” 203 In the Nun’s Priest’s Tale , another bird carries all of this in him and faces the choice of whether he will dream and “syng” rather than “Cok! cok!” 204 for his survival.

Documents

Jameson S. Workman, Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal. \"The Runaway Gods of the Manciple's Tale.\"