A History of English Poetry, Chapter Two: The Big Lie

Histories of English literature generally begin with a whopping lie. They say that English literature begins in the 7th Century, or thereabouts, it flowers in the great Old English elegiac poems – The Wanderer, The Seafarer – and culminates in Beowulf, the great national epic, the first masterwork of English. Or maybe it flowers with Beowulf and culminates in the elegies -- people still quarrel about the dates of these things. But that's the general idea.

The only trouble with this is that it is wholly untrue. There is no linguist in the world who would identify Old English as the same language as English, if she met them without knowing their historical relationship. Old English is no more English than Latin is French. The two languages are not mutually intelligible. You could make a much stronger case for Dutch being the same language as English than you can for Old English: its grammar and vocabulary are much closer.

Well, giving up that position, you could retreat to this: it may not be the same language, exactly, but it's the same literature. Middle English literature grew out of Old English literature: there's an organic relationship between the two.

But in fact there is no literary relationship. The Middle English poets, so far as we know, were utterly ignorant of Old English. There is no evidence in the whole corpus of Middle English literature of a single reference to Beowulf or any other Old English poem. Old English literature did not grow into Middle English literature. It was completely destroyed by the Norman conquest. It was as dead, by the year 1300, as Hittite or Akkadian. The first important English poet who could read any Old English – and he certainly didn't read Beowulf – was Milton, in the 17th Century. You could speculate that there was a living ballad tradition, which both the sophisticated Old English poets, with their utterly different metrics, and the Middle English poets, with their French verse-forms, were familiar, although the Old English poets never mentioned it and Chaucer mocks the ballads with devastating parodies – but we could speculate all kinds of things. Perhaps they all studied message-in-a-bottle Chinese poetry too, without ever mentioning it. This is not the stuff of literary history.

There is a historical linguistic relationship. The West Saxon dialect of Beowulf is a sort of linguistic uncle (not father) to the Middle English of Chaucer's London. Old English did grow into Middle English, and if you believe that a literature mystically transmits its national soul, by way of the blood of language – and people after all have believed much sillier things -- then you can say that Beowulf begot the Canterbury Tales. But that's the only demonstrable relationship there is. The only thing they have in common beyond that is that they were written on the same island.

The truth of the matter is that the tradition of English poetry begins in the 14th Century, with Chaucer and Gower. And their mentors were not the Beowulf-poet and his ilk: they were above all the Latin poets that they studied in school. Chaucer himself lists them off in the envoy to Troilus – his greatest work, in his own estimation and mine, and the one on which he staked his reputation:

Go, litel book, go litel myn tragedie,
Ther god thy maker yet, er that he dye,
So sende might to make in som comedie!
But litel book, no making thou nenvye,
But subgit be to alle poesye;
And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius. Now, if you've had a modern literary education, you go along just fine with Virgil, Ovid, and Homer. Sure. We read 'em too. But at the end of the line we get a little shaky. Lucan? Maybe we've heard of him. Wrote about the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, right? Fell afoul of Nero? Right, got it. Not that we've read him, but at least we have him placed. But Stace? Who's Stace? Someone who was just brought in because his name rhymed with pace?

No, Stace in fact is Statius, who wrote the Latin silver-age epic, the Thebaid. Chaucer refers to him a lot, in fact; he clearly read him closely and thought highly of him. We have never heard of him, and rightly so: his poetic merits are meager. But he was in Chaucer's pantheon of poets. Chaucer was daring to hope to rank with him.

This passage is just as interesting for the people it doesn't mention. (You will notice not a peep about any balladeer or Old English poet). Chaucer was fluent in French as well as Latin. He translated a fair amount of French poetry, and in fact adopted most of his English verse-forms from it. He may or may not have known Italian, but he knew either the originals or translations of Dante and Boccaccio: he probably borrowed more from Boccaccio than from any other writer. But he declines to mention any of them. He knows them, he's willing to use them, but he has no intention of kissing their footsteps. Earlier on he's mentioned precisely one English poet – his friend and contemporary Gower. The two of them intend, together, to put English poetry on the map.*

For all the apparent humility of this stanza, the gist is not humble at all. His tragedy, he's asserting, is on the same staircase as the great poems of antiquity. Chaucer is well known for his charming self-deprecation, poking fun at his waistline and his bumbling in love, but as a poet he takes himself dead seriously. He knows how good he is. And he knows that he is creating a new national literature. If you read the Hous of Fame and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women you can see him hammering it out. But this is really the clearest statement. He's written a great tragedy, and now he must write a great comedy. He was to spend the last years of his career taking running starts at a great comedy, groping this way and that in the Canterbury Tales, not quite grasping that it was precisely the mismatchedness, the out-of-control-ness, the centrifugal force of the Tales that would be his lasting contribution to world literature. No sooner did he mount a narrator than the narrator ran away with him: and those runaway narratives, those careening voices, are what we really read Chaucer for: the drunken Miller interrupting the Knight, the wife of Bath justifying her marital strategies, the Pardoner explaining his cons. Chaucer never finished it, and he even tried to take it back, but actually he'd succeeded beyond his dreams.

* Yes, I've read Langland. No, I don't think his poetry is important, either in itself or as part of the English tradition.

Making Sense of Things

Morning. The trees peering sleepily into their mirrors to see how they look in their new leaves.

There are six ways to order three different objects; twenty-four ways to order four. I had forgotten how to figure that out – I came late to that branch of mathematics, and it doesn't stick very well – but I was able to think my way to the algorithm, using my old programmer habits (start with the simple cases, and look for the patterns) and visualizing the objects as a row of buttons. I still can't remember the names for these things. But the formula is enchantingly simple. The number of ways to order 3 things is 3 x 2; the number of ways to order four objects is 4 x 3x 2, five is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2, etc. The solution came to me so easily that I must have remembered something about it. I wonder what. Those ghostly memories fascinate me. Did I remember only that the solution was simple and easy to remember? Did I remember an image of a row of buttons? Or did I only remember that the problem had a solution, that I once knew? That would be enough to keep me confidently gnawing at it till I got it.

This is how I thought about it. Two buttons – lets call them Fred and George – can only be ordered two ways: either Fred comes first or George comes first. So now we're going to introduce a third button. Call her Amy. Say Fred and George are standing like this:

(Fred) (George)

Button Amy has three different places she can stand: before Fred, in between Fred and George, or after George.

(Amy?) (Fred) (Amy?) (George) (Amy?)

So there are three possible orders with Fred and George standing this way. But Fred and George could also stand the other way around, with George first. In that case Amy would, again, have three different choices about where to stand, making six possible orders (3 x 2) in all. And whenever you're going to add a button, it will be just the same. If you have a 20 buttons, there will be 21 slots the new button can take, so the formula for the number of orders of 21 buttons can take will be 21 x (however many orders the other 20 can take.)

Easy to fill in the parenthesis. You'd figure out 20 buttons the same way: 20 x (however many orders the other 19 can take): so it's 21 x 20 x (however many orders the other 19 can take.)

And you figure out 19 the same way, of course. 19 x (however many the other 18 can take), which gives us 21 x 20 x 19 x (however many the other 18 can take). At this point of course the pattern is obvious. And now you've solved the problem for any number of buttons, be it billions, or trillions, or even a large number, such as the number of pennies in the national debt. Lovely!

I didn't learn this stuff until I was in my thirties – I have a rather odd educational history – so I remember clearly my delight in it when I first came across it. And the counter-intuitive knack, which you use all the time in calculus, of deferring the working out of the actual solution until after you've understood the pattern. The pattern is (the number of slots) times (the number of orders of the rest). Once you understand that clearly, the only problem you actually have to solve, at the end of the series, is: how many orders can two objects take? And even my soggy old over-fifty brain can do that by dead reckoning. It's Fred first and then George, or George first and then Fred. No other option. Two different orders.

This all started because I was walking down the street and saw a business logo – four squares arranged in a big square, with one letter in each square – and I wondered which way you were supposed to read them: right to left and then top to bottom? Or top to bottom and then right to left? And then my eye started playing with different paths, and that brought me to wondering: how many different paths through these letters are possible? How many orders are there, anyway?

I frowned, thinking, I know I knew this once. So I set to work to recover the knowledge, and after walking a couple blocks I had it back.

My mind does this sort of thing all the time. It's always ferreting about for intelligibility, playing with patterns. Letters and numbers magnetize me, fascinate me. There are few pleasures more intense to me than that of figuring out a simple solution to something apparently confusing and complex. Knowing enough of Old English, Old Norman French, and the laws of phonetic change that English spelling actually makes sense is a daily gratification. I find the sort of mind that can rest easy with a spelling such as “knight” baffling. How can you accept such a thing? How can your mind not ache? How can it not ask: what 'k'? why is the 'i' long? what are that 'g' and 'h' doing there? How can this have seemed like the right way to spell this word to somebody?

Even more baffling to me: how can you be proud of knowing how to spell the damn word, without understanding why it's spelled that way? How can you lord it over someone who tries to spell it in a way that actually makes sense? Someone who writes “nite” is at least using systematic rules, is bringing his or her intelligence to bear on the problem. Every day I read people sneering at examples “illiteracy” which seem to me far more admirable than the obedient memorization of a set of opaque facts.

I don't want to just know the right answers. I want to understand the answers.

It all comes down a respect and tenderness for other human beings. An Anglo-Norman monk sat in his English scriptorium, on a day when the new leaves were just coming out, faced with an impossible task. He was keeping legal records, depositions: he was supposed to write down, for the sake of our Lord Christ, the noises the Saxons made in saying their word for the seigneur -- that click at the beginning of the word, the cat-like hiss in the middle. What to do? Well, 'k' would do for the click, but what about that horrible throat-clearing sound? 'g' at least put it at the back of the throat. Throw in an 'h' to suggest the hissing. What else can you do? He dipped his pen in the ink and carefully began to write.

The man did his best with what he had. A few centuries later the click and the hiss were gone, worn away with the rub of the years: the only sign of them left was the lengthening of the 'i' into a diphthong – what we call “long 'i'” – to compensate for the lost hiss. But the nonsensical spelling was enshrined in writing now. It was “correct,” and everybody had to use it, other people just as hapless, children sitting in schoolrooms on days when the new leaves were just coming out, and they ached to be outside playing.

It's not the rules, not the rules that count. It's not the correctness. It's trying to make sense of things. And the new leaves. Those are what count.

The Difference Between Chaucer and Shakespeare

Language Hat quoted a letter that appeared in The New York Times, in which one Andrew Charig said,"Shakespeare wrote before English was standardized; Chaucer before it was English at all."

This was so breathtakingly wrong-headed that I decided to write a bit about it here. Chaucer is indeed English. I don't think any scholar of linguistics or of English would deny that. Mr Charig's error is just a silly one, and doesn't deserve to be belabored for its own sake. Perhaps he was dimly remembering someone saying that Beowulf was not really English (which I would pretty much agree with), and mistook Old English for Middle English, which happens all the time: any Chaucer scholar is used to patiently correcting people who speak of Chaucer's language as "Old English." But the perception that Chaucer is far more difficult and foreign than Shakespeare, and that there's a sort of watershed divide in the two centuries between them, is common. That's what I want to talk about.

Let's actually look at some. Here are two fairly typical stanzas, one from Chaucer's time and one from Shakespeare's. I picked these by opening books at random. They are both, as is common for both periods, on Roman topics: the first is about the rape of Lucrece, and the second about Saint Cecilia. Read them both and see which you think easier. The squiggles above the 'e's in the last line of the first selection, by the way, are simply an early way of writing a letter 'n'; and I've used 'f's as the closest approximation I have for the "tall 's'" used in manuscripts (for an 's' that is not final.)

---

This is Lucrece addressing a nightengale after her rape.

And for poore bird thou fing'ft not in the day,
As fhaming anie eye fhould thee behold:
Some darke deepe defert feated from the way,
That knowes not parching heat, nor freezing cold
VVill wee find out: and there we will vnfold
To creatures ftern, fad tunes to change their kinds,
Since mẽ proue beafts, let beafts bear gẽtle minds.

---

This recounts a Life of Saint Cecilia. She was an early saint, intensely committed to preserving her virginity.

This maiden, bright Cecilia, as her life sayeth,
Was comen of Romans, and of noble kind,
And from her cradle up fostered in the faith
Of Christ, and bore his gospel in her mind.
She never ceased, as I written find,
Of her prayer, and God to love and dread,
Beseeching him to keep her maidenhead.

---

The second is much easier to read. But I've played a bit of a trick on you, by letting you assume they're in chronological order. They're not. The first is Shakespeare, but in the original spelling: the second is Chaucer, in modernized spelling.

There are only two grammatical tip-offs here, which I'm betting only English scholars would catch: the participle "comen," (in the second line of Chaucer's stanza) which Shakespeare would not have used, and "knowes not" in the fourth line of the Shakespeare -- Chaucer would have said "knoweth not."

My point is that the chief reason Chaucer looks so much older to us is because of the universal editorial decision not to modernize his spelling. The grammatical differences are trifling. What really makes it look old is the Middle English spelling -- which is essentially the same as Elizabethan spelling.

Shakespeare is actually, in my opinion, more difficult to read than Chaucer, for a modern English reader: not because of any spelling or grammatical differences, but because the Elizabethans are far more fancy and ornate in their poetry. Look how straightforward Chaucer is! Of course, this is mature Chaucer -- The Legend of Good Women -- and that's immature Shakespeare -- The Rape of Lucrece. But they're both typical of their times. Shakespeare is by no means the most flowery of Elizabethan writers, and Chaucer is no simpler than most Middle English writers (Gower, for example, his main rival, is even easier.)

The only very important difference between Shakespeare's English and Chaucer's English is in pronunciation. The great vowel shift happened in between them -- that somewhat mysterious alteration that moved the sounds of all the English vowels away from the common European sounds for them. A second change was that 'e' in final position became silent: "name" became a one-syllable, not a two-syllable word. (Chaucer said "nahm-uh," Shakespeare said something quite like what we say.)

But neither of these changes is apparent on the written page. Nor are more minor changes, such as the fact that in Chaucer's English the 'k' and 'gh' in a word such as "knight" had not yet fallen silent. In fact, written Elizabethan English and written Middle English look very much alike: it takes more linguistic sophistication than the general reader usually has to tell them apart -- unless an editor has decided to modernize the spelling of one and not the other. Then they look very different indeed.

Here's the two passages as you'd see them in standard editions, for a college course:

---

'And for, poor bird, thou sing'st not in the day,
As shaming any eye should thee behold,
Some dark deep desert, seated from the way,
That knows not parching heat nor freezing cold,
Will we find out; and there we will unfold
To creatures stern sad tunes, to change their kinds:
Since men prove beasts, let beasts bear gentle minds.'

---

This mayden, bright Cecilie, as hir lyf seith,
Was comen of Romayns, and of noble kynde,
And from hir cradel up fostred in the feith
Of Crist, and bar his gospel in hir mynde.
She nevere cessed, as I writen fynde,
Of hir preyere, and God to love and drede,
Bisekynge hym to kepe hir maydenhede.

---

In Which I Unsubscribe from a List

Sometimes you don't know how hard you're holding onto something till someone tugs at it. I'd have thought I'd abandoned the idea of being an academic completely, that there was no lingering regret or nostalgia there. But I recently had an extremely unpleasant exchange on a scholarly listserve (I know! How quaint! But scholars are like that.) It's for Chaucer scholars. I'd lurked there for years -- possibly decades? But I almost never posted.

But someone had questioned whether students should be made to learn Old English in order to complete an English major. I then questioned whether Beowulf belonged in the syllabus of an English survey class. The responses were withering, and rather cruel: the assumption that we were simply too lazy to learn Old English, and too stupid to appreciate Old English poetry, reeked from every response. That was not the depressing part, although it was irritating: the depressing part was that absolutely no one would actually produce an argument. "I include Beowulf because it's written in English," someone declared. As if that weren't precisely the question that had been raised: is Old English close enough kin to be regarded as the same language as Modern English? And, the related question, is its masterwork Beowulf properly regarded as part of the tradition of English literature?

It has not always been so regarded. In the 19th Century, which is when people other than a few antiquarian cranks began reading it, it was generally considered a different, though of course genetically related, language. It was called "Anglo-Saxon." Renaming it "Old English" was largely a political move by astute academics, not a linguistic one. The West-Saxon dialect in which Beowulf is written is actually more uncle than father to Chaucer's Middle English. There's lots of ways to slice the pie. The old saying that "a 'language' is a dialect with an army" has a lot of truth to it: if Portuguese was spoken in a just a few villages it would be probably be regarded as a difficult dialect of Spanish, not its own language; if Catalonia had ever managed ever to win its independence, Catalonian would certainly be regarded as a language, not a Spanish dialect. There are no dependable objective ways of deciding these borderline cases. The motive for renaming Anglo-Saxon Old English was, at least partly, justifying its inclusion in the study of English literature.

The question's not all that important, and I don't really care how it's decided: Beowulf can look after itself, these days. And I understand that modern scholars who hoped to make a living out of selling their skills in Old English would not look kindly on someone proposing to drop it from the English syllabus. But the point is that I would expect this group of people to at least be able to have a conversation about it, a conversation that appreciated the complexities of classifying languages and dialects, and which bore in mind that everything you keep in a syllabus comes at the expense of dropping something else out. Whether Beowulf is worth reading in the original -- well, to me, and to most people who have ever read it, that's a stupid question. Of course it is. But the intelligent question is, is it more worthwhile than reading, say, Dryden and Pope? Or Swinburne and Sir Walter Scott? Those are the sort of trade-offs we're talking about. (A further depressing thing was the realization that no one was interested in this probably because almost none of them ever had given a damn, or ever would give a damn, about Dryden or Sir Walter Scott.)

Of course, the main thing that distressed me was not being taken seriously. It wounded my amour-propre. If I'd finished my damned dissertation at Yale, if I'd stuck it out through the recession of the 80's and gotten an academic job, people would have responded to me completely differently. But still, there would have been no real conversation. Because scholars, of all people, are the least likely to actually talk about these things. The discussion of such things is the currency of their economy: they can't afford to do it for free. I remembered, in the course of this interchange, the oppressive atmosphere of the years when I was writing, or rather not writing, my dissertation: every stray thought I had, I seized and hoarded. It might be an article someday! It might prove that I'm a serious scholar! There was something horrible, and deforming, about treating my own thoughts as property. I hated it.

But. But. The first couple years at Yale were so wonderful. Because we weren't scholars yet, we grad students, and we did talk about books. We had wonderful conversations. It was the world I wanted to live in. Coming from Springfield, Oregon -- it was amazing, incredible. Like coming out of a dark hole and being in the sunlight for the first time. I was so grateful for the friends there, for the talk. It made me so happy.

And then it all crumbled and went away, as people got their degrees and went off to teach in Georgia or upstate New York or L.A., and for twenty long years, I had nothing of the sort. It's this blog community, all of you, who have given it back to me. I'm terribly grateful to you all. Thank you. All of you. For being willing to talk, and to listen. Most of you haven't read Beowulf in Old English. That's all right. Because you'd want to if you had the time. And even if you didn't want to -- if you did it anyway, you'd want to talk about it. It would engage your heart and your mind and you'd say what you damn well thought about it.

I unsubscribed from the Chaucer list this morning. I subscribed thinking I would find conversations of the sort I love, many years ago. I almost never did. I don't need to look for them there any more, though.

Two stanzas of Hoccleve's Lament for Chaucer, rendered into Modern English

I loved these lines, so full of love his mentor, il miglior fabbro, and so colloquial and to the point (rare virtues, in 15th Century verse!) So I tried my hand at -- what do you call it? -- translation? modernization? Hoccleve's English stands about midway between Chaucer and Shakespeare, but it's still old enough, I think, to be difficult for a reader who's never learned Middle English

Death has little more consideration
For the sober man than for the plastered;
No more for a man of kind deliberation,
Than for a consummate and vicious bastard;
In a pile, every man is mastered
By her, the rich and grinding poor the same;
The shrewd and discerning like the stupid and lame.

She might have delayed her vengeance for a while,
Until some man into your equal grew --
Forget that! She knew well enough this isle
Could never produce another man like you;
Like all of us, she had a job to do,
God gave her orders, I hope, for the best;
Oh master, master, God give your soul good rest!

---

Here are Hoccleve's stanzas. The verse form is rhyme royal, which Chaucer used for the best long love poem in English, Troilus and Criseide, as well as for some of the Canterbury Tales.

Deth hath but smal consideracion
Unto the vertuous, I have espyed,
No more, as scheweth the probacion,
Than to a vycyous mayster losel tried.
Among an heep, every man ys maystried
Wyth here, as wel the poore as ys the ryche;
Leered and lewde eek standen al iliche.

Sche myghtte han taried hir vengeance a while
Til that sum man had egal to the be.
Nay, let be that! She knew wel that thys yle
May nevere man forth brenge lyk to the,
And hyre office nedes do moot sche;
God bad hire soo, I truste as for thi beste
O maister, maister, God thy soule reste!