Chaucer and The First Great English Poem

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour,

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne…

Geoffrey Chaucer

Thus begins the first great English poem. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1343-1400) wasn’t the first poem in what we call Middle English, nor did it cause English to become the official language of the British Isles. What it did do, says author Peter Ackroyd in his modern English prose translation, was mark the emergence of English as the language that was becoming what most people spoke. The royal court still conducted its business in French, but that, too, was changing.

It is a work that stopped as a work in progress. Chaucer completed the General Prologue and less than a third of the planned 120 tales, stories told by a group of pilgrims traveling to and from St. Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral. The pilgrims represent virtually all levels of society – merchants, knights, religious figures, tradesman, lawyers, doctors, and more. Chaucer didn’t confine himself to men – in fact, the Wife of Bath is one of the most memorable characters in the entire poem, and with a prologue that is the longest of any of the tales.

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

What a Book Can Do

The Greater St. Louis Book Fair has been held annually since 1950. It’s the granddaddy of all the book fairs in St. Louis, “the big one,” the one every book lover, collector, and dealer looks forward to. Dealers, in fact, come from all over the world for this one, four days usually at the end of April.

The reason for the fair’s popularity is straightforward. St. Louis was once a very wealthy city, and a considerable portion of that wealth was poured into culture and education. And both private and public libraries.

The 1957 edition

I attended the book fair every year for about 15 years, the last time in the late 1990s. I’d always go on opening night, which involved a reasonable entry fee; after that no fee was charged. I’d go an hour or two early (like all the other fanatics), find the closest place I could to park (usually two to three blocks away), and wait in line until the tent opened. For years the fair was held in the parking lot of a department store in the central suburb of Clayton (also the county seat for St. Louis County); more recently it’s been at a shopping mall in Des Peres, about four miles west of where I live.

My browsing interests generally fell into two areas – books about speeches, and literature.

The fair always furnished unintended events and entertainment. We’re talking serious book fanatics here, and people thought nothing of browsing through other customers’ boxes, swiping a volume form someone’s hand, elbowing people out of the way to get a better position, and stepping on toes (literally). Once a confrontation almost came to blows.

No book, no matter how valuable I thought it, was worth a fist fight.

The 1963 edition - the one I had in 1968-69

One tear, as I was looking through the literature table, I recognized a book called England in Literature, published by Scott Foresman. It was a fairly standard textbook in high schools in the 1960s. In fact, it was my textbook for my senior English class.

I loved that book. I loved that class. The teacher was about 60, loved literature, and loved it so much she had forsaken her original degree in physics, gone back to college, and gotten a second degree in English. She was a legend at our all-boys public high school, having taught English there for virtually her entire career.

Seeing that old textbook on the literature table, I had to buy it. For a book in excellent condition, it was all of $1. It turned out that this particular book had seen service for seven years at Kirkwood High School in the school district where I live in St. Louis. The students’ names are written in the textbook record inside the front cover. It might explain the book’s condition that six of the seven names are those of girls.

It was first published in 1957; my textbook in 1968-69, which was staring at me on the book sale table, was published in 1963. The covers changed over the years, and by the 1980s, different editors were assembling it and the contents had somewhat changed.

This was the book that introduced me to Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Gulliver’s Travels, and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. This was where I read In Memoriam by Tennyson. Here was Milton and Pepys, and the Romantic poets in fairly good depth. Here was Kipling, Hardy, Stevenson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here’s where I was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and was so enthralled then I went out and bought Four Quartets. This is where I first found the World War I poets like Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen.

The 1989 edition

This was the book on my desk as I had to stand and recite the dagger speech from Macbeth (we were required to memorize a soliloquy from Shakespeare; “You are not educated until you can recite a Shakespeare soliloquy,” our teacher said). This book stayed close-at-hand while we spent six weeks in general world literature and I absorbed Don Quixote.

And this was the book that convinced me to take English literature instead of American literature for my college English requirement. It was me and all the English majors. They were there because they had to be. I was there because I wanted to be.

So, yes, I put down my buck and bought England in Literature. Nobody tried to grab it form my hands or wanted to fight over it.

I still read from it. It’s filled with wonderful poems, stories, plays, excerpts, biographies and histories. For all of a dollar, I walked with the resurrection of youth, of memories I’d forgotten, and a remembrance of my favorite class in high school.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

England in Literature

A few years ago, I was known to haunt used book fairs and come home with bags chock full of what I called “great buys” and my wife called “more books?!” I would usually look for two kinds of books – texts about speeches and speechwriting, and old literary classics, both fiction and poetry.

At one of those fairs, my eye fell on a piece of my own educational history: England in Literature, originally published in 1963 by the Scott Foresman Company. My high school didn’t get the book until my senior year (1968-69), which was the year for taking English literature (with one six weeks period devoted to world literature, which in the case of our class was Don Quixote by Cervantes).

But there it was, sitting in a pile of other textbooks, with its distinctive cover photo of waves crashing upon rocks. It was priced at all of $1.

Yes, I bought it.

I took it home, sat in a quiet spot, and began to look through it.

I was back in Miss Shorey’s 12^th grade English class.

Miss Shorey lived with her sister on one of the wealthiest streets in New Orleans, in a large red-brick colonial with white columns in front. She had an undergraduate degree in physics, but she loved literature, and she eventually gained enough tenure to teach what every English teacher in our all-boys public high school wanted to teach – 12^th grade English Lit. She was in her early 60s and was all of 5’2”. Her dresses were always high-necked, with a lace collar.

She also wore white gloves.

She spoke very precisely, enunciating each word perfectly in her (very) slight New Orleans accent. She believed it was important to set an example for speaking properly for her students – classrooms full of 17- and 18-year-old boys with last names like Boudreaux, Melancon, Guidry, Sanchez, Gonzales and Hebert (pronounced A-bear). And one named Young.

She led us through Beowulf, helping us to imagine fighting Grendl. She had us read a censored version of Chaucer. And Shakespeare, of course. “No one can be considered educated unless they have memorized at least one soliloquy from Shakespeare.” That is a direct quote from Miss Shorey. We were required to memorize and recite one; I chose the dagger speech from Macbeth and still remember most of it today. (The textbook included Hamlet; the class also read Macbeth.)

And she introduced us to the English poets – Sidney and Spenser, John Donne, Herrick and Lovelace, and Milton (she liked Milton; the class didn’t), Gray, Burns, Blake, and all of the Romantics. And Tennyson and the Brownings. She didn’t neglect the 20^th century, either: the World War I poets, and Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas. And we read Pygmalion by Shaw.

I leaf through this old textbook today, and I see what gave me an abiding love for literature, and why I tool English literature in college with the English majors when everyone else took the American literature classes. I know why old editions of certain books sit on my bookshelves, like Eliot’s The Hollow Men (bought for a project for Miss Shorey’s class), and the Poems of Rupert Brooke, and several volumes of G.K. Chesterton, and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

And Don Quixote. She required the class to read only the abridged version; she said she simply couldn’t force teenaged boys to read the unabridged with its close to a thousand pages and no pictures. But two of us read the whole thing – Jesse Stephenson and I. I remember how we talked ourselves through it, and say at lunch discussing it, and kept each other on track to finish it.

England in Literature. I loved the book. I loved the class. And Miss Shorey.

MacBeth, Act 2, Scene 1

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and wither’d murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace.
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.