The Enduring Appeal of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – at one time a staple of college reading for English Lit majors – has a curious history. The author was roughly contemporary with Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400). The poem ranks as one of the two great poems of the period, with Chaucer’s Troilus and Crisedye being the other.  

The author’s identity, however, remains unknown. He used an English dialect representative of the Midlands area of England (Chaucer’s English was London through and through). Some scholars have suggested it some of its scenes would situate the poem in Staffordshire in west-central England. It exists in a single manuscript, together with Pearl and two Bible stories entitled Purity and Patience. The poems are written in the same hand and the same English dialect. 

 

The manuscript was unknown until it surfaced in the library of Henry Savile (1569-1617), who lived in Bank in Yorkshire. The manuscript is now with the British Library in London.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Bernard O’Donoghue and “The Seasons of Cullen Church”

I hadn’t read the poetry of Bernard O’Donoghue before his most recent collection, The Seasons of Cullen Church. And yet, reading these poems, it seemed that I’d been reading him all of my life.

The poems O’Donoghue includes are poems of reflection and revisiting. No, you can’t go home again, but you can consider home in memory, and a life in memory, and understand what was important then is less so now, and what is important now was barely discernible then.

The Seasons of Cullen Church is a consideration of a life.

What does it mean for a grandfather to die at a young age, before his grandchildren will ever know him except by story and the memories of others? Or why did that copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary smell like cigarette smoke? Or remembering the insemination of dairy cows? Or seeing the nameplate on the school you attended? Or perhaps what it’s like to be traveling and arriving in an unfamiliar town?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Bernard O'Donoghue at Oxford University.