Keep the Faith: Moral John Gower

Today we take a look at John Gower, who was once considered the "Father of English Poetry," but who is now largely unknown outside English departments.

Transcript

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast: Where Rhyme Gets Its Reason.  I do like that.  I hope everyone is doing splendidly.

You know who I feel bad for?  The nearly famous – well, not famous, I guess.  I don’t really feel bad for anyone who’s famous.  Well, I do feel bad for people on whom fame has been violently  thrust upending their private lives and destroying their peace and quiet.

OK, let me start again.  You know who I feel bad for?  Wait, for whom I feel bad?  Feels unnatural but technically correct – do I go for natural and wait for people to bring me up for being a teacher and ending a sentence with a preposition or do I go full pedantic and have people think me a pompous ass?

Off track here: I feel bad for people who have accomplished great things, but who are only known for their connections to people who have accomplished even greater things.  Like, have you ever heard of bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers or Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas?  Singers like Cilla Black?  They were pretty popular hitmakers back in the 1960s, but most people, if they’ve heard of them at all, only know them because of their relationship to the Beatles.  Their own efforts – pleasant, catchy, hummable, maybe some few of you are singing “Ferry Cross the Mersey” right now – are overwhelmed by the genius and influence of the biggest band in history.  Or even within that band: how great a songwriter was George Harrison? “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Taxman,” “All Things Must Pass” – brilliant, beautiful, clever songs, among the best ever written.  Yet, he happened to be in a band with arguably the greatest songwriters of all time: Lennon and McCartney.  How do you compete with that?  Sometimes he did, no wonder he felt frustrated.

That’s a long way of getting around to the subject of today’s podcast.  John Gower was one of the most popular and prolific poets of the English Middle Ages – everyone read him or heard of him.  He could write great poetry in three languages: French, Latin, and English.  He wrote ballads and allegories and vast collections of tales.  In the centuries immediately following his death in 1408, folks considered him the Father of English Poetry – he was right up there with Chaucer himself.

But today, if anyone knows him at all – and even English literature students frequently do not – they know him because he’s the geezer always lurking in Geoffrey Chaucer’s shadow.

His major work in English is called Confessio Amantis, or The Lover’s Confession, or the Lover’s Shrift (that’s the one I like).  It is the third of his real doorstop books.  The first, called variably Speculum Meditantis or Mirour de l’Omme, tots in at a backbreaking 30,000 lines and sets the tone for his primary literary concerns: religion and morality.  The Mirour offers instruction for the royal court at a time when the French and English peoples could have been fully unified under a single monarch and Gower wished to strike for social reform when the opportunity presented itself.

His second major work is Vox Clamantis – “the voice of one crying out” (an allusion to a passage in the Book of Isaiah which Christians understand as foretelling the coming of John the Baptist) – coming in at a svelte 10,000 lines, an allegory in Latin which includes a dream vision rendering of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and an estates satire in a tone that reminds one of the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures (hence the title – Gower seems to see himself in that moralizing posture, even if we don’t conflate the writer and the speaker [which is almost never a sound analytical move, by the way]).  

If you read book 1 of Vox Clamantis, you get a quite bitter treatment of the peasant class, especially those who participated in the rising.  He condemns the “lowly peasants” who “violently revolted against the freemen and noble of the realm.”  He allegorizes – completely without subtlety – the revolt’s leader Wat Tyler as a jackdaw (a bird associated in the medieval mind with noise, disturbance, and theft – and a pun on Tyler’s first name.  Those birds were sometimes called Wats back then): “this bird spread his wings and claimed to have top rank, although he was unworthy.”  Uppity, lippy peasant.  The Jackdaw demands: “Let all honor come to an end, let justice perish, and let no virtue that once existed endure further in this world.”  Gower calls this “fickle talk,” so there’s no way we can read this ironically.  Gower doesn’t do irony.  He compares the “low sort of wretches” to once placid domestic animals who, deviating from their true nature, have become wild, savage beasts.

In Book 5, he takes farmers and ploughmen to task for their laziness and greed.  He says, “They are the men who seek food for us by the sweat of their heavy toil, as God himself has decreed . . . .God imposed servile work upon them so that the peasantry might subdue its proud feelings and liberty.”  He takes us right back to the Garden of Eden and the punishment for the Fall.  Now peasants demand higher pay, better conditions, and relief from taxation.  Gower calls such demands “perfidy”: deceitfulness, untrustworthiness.

So Gower’s lifelong project, if you want to call it that, is a critique of the estates system: not its potential injustice but the fact that the estates in practice don’t fulfill their duties in theory.  Like in Piers Plowman from a couple of episodes ago, Gower’s critique rests upon a theory of justice that’s kind of a hybrid of Plato’s harmony theory from The Republic and divine command theory.  Briefly, harmony theory argues that justice is every person knowing their place in the society and doing what is required of that place.  Equity and equality have no place in this scheme.  Why?  Because divine command theory states that God determines what is right and wrong and since God placed you at a particular rung on the social ladder, you are morally obligated to fulfill the duties that come there.  

So, too, in the Confessio Amantis, that 33,000 line hernia-maker of a poem.  Written in a Middle English with certain East Anglian and Kentish features, it indeed differs somewhat from Chaucer’s London dialect, though it seems clear that the latter’s use of the vernacular encouraged Gower to do so as well, that and, Gower himself says, there aren’t many English writers nowadays: “fewe men endite in oure englyssh.  In fact, in Book 8 of the poem, Gower tips the hat to his friend with a speech by the goddess Venus:

And gret wel Chaucer, when ye mete,
As mi disciple and mi poete:
For in the floures of his youthe
In sondri wise, as he wel couthe,
Of ditees and of songes glade,
The whiche he for mi sake made,
The lond fulfild is overal:
Whereof to him in special
Above alle othre I am most holde

And greet well Chaucer when you meetAs my disciple and my poet,For in the flower of his youthIn sundry ways, as well he knew,Of glad ditties and songsWhich he made for my sake,The land is overfilled,And so him especiallyAbove all others, I hold.

Umm . . . by the way: all the modern English translations of the Confessio in this podcast are of my own devising.  I couldn’t find many online and I didn’t want to leave a lot of you behind by only using the original language.  But, as I’ve said before, I’m not a trained translator, so these are pretty ad hoc. If there are any mistakes, they are mine and if anyone out there notices them – or has a better version – please let me know.  Corrections on the back of a $20 bill.
Gower’s shout-out is likely a returned favor for Chaucer’s addressing his Troilus and Chrysede to Gower, asking him to offer any corrections or revisions to the text, though I believe that address was removed from later editions.
Anyway, the Confessio does have many things in common with Chaucer’s masterwork, The Canterbury Tales.  It is a frame narrative – that is, a story within a story – in which an aging and quite lonely lover, cleverly named Amans, while wandering the spring forests (and presumably listening to those flatulent bucks), invokes the Roman goddess of love, Venus, begging her to justify his loneliness.  He has sinned against love and must make a full confession to Venus’ chaplain, Genius.  With this frame, we get what scholars call “the external matter” a prologue and an epilogue which serve to establish the moralizing, estates satire of the Confessio.  In between, like the Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, we get a bunch of tales, adapted from Ovid and the Bible among numerous other sources.  Depending on how you count, there are about 100 tales included in this collection.  Several of the stories Gower includes can also be found in the Canterbury Tales, such as the “Tale of Florent” (a version of which the Wife of Bath tells) and the “Tale of Constance” (the Man of Law’s turn in Chaucer).  The tales here chiefly concerned with warnings and condemnations of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.  Mainly lust, though – it sells better.
And sell it did – well, metaphorically at least.  Research indicates that the Confessio rounds out the top popular texts of the English Middle Ages, the others being those we’ve read before: Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and Gawain and the Green Knight.
Gower departs from his more illustrious friend and rival in that he does not adopt the French iambic pentameter verse that Chaucer would popularize and help establish as the standard meter of English poetry by the 15th century.  Instead, Gower preferred what he called a “plain style”: rhyming octosyllabic couplets (that rather sound like trochaic tetrameter) that were earlier hallmarks of English accentual-syllabic verse.
Wait – did that all sound like Greek to you?  Well, that’s because it was, partially.  I realize now that I've not really explained how the new poetic lines worked after English literature largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line. 
Here it is in summary:
Accentual-syllabic verse measures line length by the number of poetic feet a line contains.  Poetic feet are simply combinations of two or more syllables with a specific accent pattern: that is, which syllables in the foot are stressed and which unstressed.  Different lengths and stress patterns denote different feet.
Now, the Greeks had a bunch of them, but English adopted a comparative handful: the iamb, the trochee, the spondee, the dactyl, the anapest, and the pyrrhic.  Of these, by far the most important and most common is the iamb.  It’s a two syllable foot in which the first is unstressed and the second is stressed: ba-BUMP.  So, a word like “until” is an iamb and “forego.”  A trochee is also a two syllable foot with the opposite stress pattern: stressed unstressed.  So my name – Matthew – is a trochee.
Groovy (also a trochee, by the by).  Now, poets select a particular number of feet to govern their line lengths.  Using Greek prefixes, if you have one foot per line it's called “monometer”, two is dimeter, three trimeter, four tetrameter, five pentameter, and so on.
So when I say that Chaucer used an “iambic pentameter” line, I mean that each of his lines is made up of five iambs, with stresses on syllables 2,4,6,8, and 10.  If Gower is using a trochaic tetrameter line, I mean each of his lines is made up of 4 trochees with stresses on syllables 1,3,5, and 7.
A caveat here: when we identify a poem’s line type, we’re speaking in general terms.  A poem is not invariably iambic or trochaic anything – that would be boring.  The stress pattern would get so predictable that the poem would begin to sound like a metronome (which, incidentally, is what some critics have accused Gower of sounding like).  No, a good poet will strategically mix up the accents occasionally, like a jazz drummer syncopating the rhythm, to surprise us or to emphasize a key point or passage.  Iambs are sometimes called the “rising foot” because the stress on the even syllable kind of lifts the line up, has a more positive tone, if I can use that word.  Trochees, on the other foot, are sometimes called the “falling foot” because the odd syllables drive the line down.  You often find trochaic lines used in religious or devotional poetry because the sound of the line suggests deference or bowing or humbling.
Um, I hope that was useful.  Seem to have strayed off-course a bit here but I did want to patch up that hole before we carry on with the podcast.  Line styles will become particularly important when we get to the Renaissance writers, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, who used stress rhythms to tremendous effect.
But back to Mr. Gower.  Wasn’t he the druggist in “It’s a Wonderful Life”?  The one who boxed George’s sore ear?  I think so. 
Right, as should be clear from the foregoing, it's going to be impossible to encapsulate Gower’s massive Confessio in a single podcast episode (particularly if the host seems to have the attention span of a caffeinated ferret – sorry about that today.  Mind seems to be running everywhere). 
So I want to consider a few tales that seem to hit on a single consistent subject:  that subject is faithfulness, or its opposite faithlessness.  In the prologue, Gower asserts that faithfulness is indeed the book’s raison d’etre.  I did find this little passage translated somewhere on line:
In English 'tis my wish to makeA book for our King Richard's sake.To him belongs my fealtyWith all my heart's strong constancy,As loyal man in everything…
If we take Gower at his word, Richard II charged the composition of this book and he, for the glory of his liege lord, composed it.  He uses the “fealty” here to describe his duty.  Of course, fealty in the Middle Ages is the formal obligation of vassal to lord, following a ceremony of homage in which the vassal prostrates himself before the lord imploring his protection.  And so with words like “constancy” and “loyal.” So the notion of faithfulness was integral to the stability, efficacy, and perpetuation of the entire social order.  In a largely illiterate world, one’s word, one’s pledge, must be given as sacred and inviolable.  Faith, in this sense (though certainly this is embedded in the conventional religious sense of the word) becomes a shorthand for the entire system of moral obligation in the medieval mind. 
And if you think back, this has been the conflict mechanism in many of the plots we’ve discussed in previous episodes.  Beowulf is the embodiment of loyal faithfulness – true to his father’s oath, to Hrothgar’s plight, and to the Geats right until the end.  Grendel is his moral foil – the embodiment of treachery and faithlessness.  In the Anglo-Norman era Arthur legends, Vortigern and Mordred break faith.  Gawain hides the green sash from Bercilak to cheat the Green Knight, the Pardoner sells false relics, and so on and so on.
And so, it seems to me, Gower’s project of moral reform rests upon a faith in faithfulness.  In the prologue, he announces his concerns that, in this age, people have too many diverse values and opinions:
for now upon this tydeMen se the world on every sydeIn sondry wyse so diversed
and now at this timeMen see the world, on every side,in many diverse ways
And so we immediately understand the rather conservative and orthodox anxiety of “Moral Gower” (as Chaucer named him).  Like anyone of such a bent of mind, Gower wishes for consistency and reliability because (quite rightly, I suppose) those guarantee stability and order.  To ensure the reliability that ensures order, one must promote faithfulness, fealty. One of the tales, “Ceix and Alcyone” tells of the love between Ceix, King of Trachis and Alcyone, daughter of wind god Aeolus: Ceix, says Gower, “Had Alcyone as his wife, which as his own heart’s life, he loved.”  Sigh. They loved each other so much that they would playfully call each other Zeus and Hera.  So says Gower’s source (and the gods don’t like uppity humans taking their names in vain, as we well know).  Ceix also had brother whose grave misfortune it was to be turned into a goshawk.  Gower doesn’t really say why – I suppose we must simply accept that one of the great mysteries of life is that one’s loved ones may occasionally and without warning become raptors (or jackdaws – See Tyler, Wat above).  Maybe he had the temerity to refer to himself as Acanthis.  Ceix wants to know if there's anything he can do to save his brother, so he decides to sail to an oracle for the answer.  Alcyone begs him not to go, fearing the stormy sea and the gods’ anger.
But when the months were goneWhich he set for his homecomingAnd still she heard no tidingThere was no lack of fear,So she asked the goddess to forbear
Ceix does not return and Alcyone, in her great anxiety, prays to Juno “know how he fared.”  Juno sends the messenger Iris to let her know, in a dream, that Ceix has drowned.  The god Morpheus creates an apparition of the dead Ceix to tell the dreadful story.  But the jealous gods repent when they see the lovely Alcyone so distraught and
beheld, for the truth of love which in this lady stoodThey have upon the salt flood,Her drowned lord and her alsoFrom death to life turned soThat they have been shaped into birds.
So because of their faithfulness – to each other and to the ornithoid brother – they are granted new lives as birds (cruel irony?) swimming among the waves.  The phrase “truth of love” gives us the reason that the gods beshrewed their earlier jealousy.  The moral is clear: stay true and you will be rewarded.  Incidentally, it’s from this myth we get our idiom “halcyon days” – meaning a period of blissful calm.
As a contrast, Gower’s version of the “Golden Fleece” story shows the fruits of faithlessness.  Medea, Jason’s wife, uses her magic to assist in his quest for the Fleece and restores youth to her father-in-law, and is, in general a very devoted but self-assured, wife.  That doesn’t prevent Jason from coming home with a bit of sidepiece one night.  His infidelity emphasizes for Gower the corruption inevitable in this earthly world, and of course, we all know that this leads to the death of her children at her own hands.
There is also the somewhat more charming story of “Adrian and Bardus.”  This one has analogues from south  and central Asia: India and Tibet.  Also known as the “Ungrateful Man and the Grateful Animals,” the story goes that a Roman lord one day falls into a pit.  He cries out for help, pledging half his wealth to anyone who draws him up.  A poor woodcutter named Bardus hears him and throws down a rope.  But on the first attempt to draw him up, Bardus instead pulls up an ape!  Trying again, Bardus pulls up a serpent!  Finally, Adrian surfaces but refuses to honor his promise to the woodcutter and stalks off: He said not once ‘Grant Merci” but headed straight for the city and let this poor Bardus be.”  What a jerk.  Poor Bardus indeed.
But, it turns out, the ape helps Bardus with the wood every day and the serpent brings a precious stone.  And whenever Bardus sells the stone, the serpent brings another.  A wise judge chastises faithless Adrian, orders him to honor his pledge.  All works out in the end.
So does it in the “Tale of Apollonius” (which Shakespeare and George Wilkins turned into the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre in 1609 – poor Gower: other people always nick his best bits.  Well, Shakespeare gave him a speaking role, anyway).  Appollonius’ life is plagued with trials and tribulations, all stemming from the disintegration of King Antiochus’ family (who has been tupping his own daughter).  Appolnius discovers this in the solving of a riddle and warns the King: “"It touches all that is private / Between thine own child and thee."  He is banished but ends up saving the city of Tarsus from famine by sailing to it with a ship full of grain. Later he gets shipwrecked, marries a princess, and endures calamity upon adventure.  In one of these vignettes, his wife appears to die giving birth to their daughter on board ship.  Distraught, Appollonius cries out:
Ha, wife,My pleasure, my joy, my desire,My wealth and my restorer,Why shall I live, and thou shalt die?Ha, thou fortune, I thee defy,Now hast thou done to me thy worst!Ha, heart, why will thou not burstThat forth with her I might pass?My pains were well the less.
The sailors are superstitious about having a corpse on board, and Appollonius agrees to let them build an elaborate coffin filled with his jewels and riches so that
    he would for her winUpon some coast a sepulture,In case by chance she be foundHe laid great sums Of gold And of jewels a sum untoldTogether with a note saying thus:"I, king of Tyre, Appollinus,Wish all manner of men to knowThat hear and see this device,That helpless without adviceHere lieth a king's daughter dead:And who that happens her to find,For charity think in his mind,And see that she have a fine graveWith this treasure, which you shall have.
See? He kept his faith with her and with whomever would perform the requisite burial rituals for her.  Of course, she’s not dead.  She washes ashore and is healed by a great physician and his servants.  They open the coffin and, Gower says, they “honestly” took her out.  Interesting adverb there – honestly.  Could you remove a body from a coffin dishonestly?  Perhaps if you were a graverobber or were willing to . . . uh . . . violate her modesty.  But Gower’s word choice here indicates an entire moral rectitude.  And since the wife believes herself the only survivor of a shipwreck, she becomes a devotee at the Temple of Diana, the goddess of virginity and childbirth (rather broad brief, that).
Eventually, after losing his daughter for years to sex traffickers, they are reunited.  He finds his wife the “abbess” of the temple, he avenges himself on his family’s betrayers.  Honor restored, family restored, stability restored.
Just the way moral Gower likes it.  It’s easy, I suppose, to see John Gower as a self-righteous grumpy old man, yelling at kids to get off his lawn and to get a job, wondering why girls dress that way now, and why the youth today just have no respect.  Yes, it’s easy, because he is that guy.  I reckon Gower has fallen out of favor over the centuries because his moral vision is just too inflexible – it doesn’t bend.  Chaucer had a moral vision for his society, Langland, too.  The Gawain Poet warned against a shallow performance of nobility.  But all did so with a recognition of, indeed, almost a compassion for, the human frailty they critiqued.  Gower lacks irony, he lacks wit.  There’s no knowing twinkle in his eye.  I think, to modern readers, he seems stern at best and insufferable at worst.
But maybe we ought to cut him a little slack.  We do not share his theory of justice.  For him, peasants demanding equality was breaking faith with the divinely ordered justice of the universe.  It wasn’t a proto-democratic awakening of human rights to be celebrated, like we might see the Velvet Revolution or the Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter or the recent protests in Iran.  For Gower, it was anarchy, and order is the surest guarantee of human happiness. But we shouldn’t rush to see Gower as simply an apologist for an oppressive feudalism and totalitarian church.  To do so assumes that he knows that our modern definition of justice is the right one and he is cynically preferring another so that he can keep hobnobbing with folks like Richard II, John of Gaunt, and Henry IV.  That’s anachronistic and a bit arrogant.  We don’t have to agree with him, we don’t have to want to live in the just medieval world he envisions, and we don’t have to like his poetry, but we should be gracious enough to accept that he is genuinely concerned for the social and spiritual flourishing of humanity.
Thanks for joining me today.  This podcast is only possible because of you, so thank you for all the support you offer.  Couldn't do it without you.  Stay safe and, until next time: keep the faith!