Rhyme and Reason E-Book

Mark Forsyth

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Enchanting' Stephen Fry Did you know: - Lord Byron sold more books in a day than Jane Austen did in her lifetime - During the First World War there were more women poets published than soldier poets - A kitchen-maid became one of the most popular poets of the 18th century Some people worry that they don't appreciate poetry; but English poetry wasn't written to be appreciated, it was written to be enjoyed. For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment - for fun, romance, religion and entertainment - and this is a book about those people. Rhyme ### Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, and into the heart of Byromania and the Victorian hearth, to help you understand why poetry has had such an enduring hold on the British psyche. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings, it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.

Leseprobe

Born in London in 1977, Mark Forsyth (aka The Inky Fool) was given a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present and has never looked back. His book The Etymologicon was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller and was followed by The Horologicon and The Elements of Eloquence. He has written A Christmas Cornucopia on the origins of Christmas traditions and A Short History of Drunkenness. He has also penned a specially commissioned introduction for the new edition of the Collins English Dictionary, and written a novel for children called A Riddle for a King. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in London with his dictionaries, and blogs at blog. inkyfool.com.

ALSO BY MARK FORSYTH

A Short History of Drunkenness

A Christmas Cornucopia

The Unknown Unknown

The Elements of Eloquence

The Horologicon

The Etymologicon

AND FOR CHILDREN

A Riddle for a King

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by

Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Mark Forsyth, 2025

The moral right of Mark Forsyth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 528 7

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 529 4

Text design and typesetting by Tetragon, London

Printed in Great Britain

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For Andrea Colvile,

‘But now my oat proceeds’: Discuss digestion in Milton.

The goslings go barefoot.

Trolly-lolly, my dear, trolly-lolly.

CONTENTS

Preface

1  The First English Poem

2  For Engelonde’s Sake

3  The Fifteenth Century, Which Is Mainly Rubbish

4  Down on the Farm

5  The Early Tudors

6  Tottely Different

7  The Iambic Pentameter: An Interlude

8  Elizabethan Drama

9  Jacobean Theatre

10  Metaphysical Poetry

11  The Civil War and Commonwealth

12  The Restoration

13  The Epic

14  An Interlude Concerning the World

15  Heroic Couplets: The Truth in Twenty Syllables

16  Ossian and Others

17  Regency Poetry

18  Byromania

19  The Romantic Myth of the Romantic Movement

20  The Deification of William Wordsworth

21  Dramatic Victorians

22  Anapaests, Dactyls and Other Strange Feet

23  Uttered Nonsense

24  The Nineteenth-Century Ballad

25  Empire and England, England, England

26  War Poetry

27  New Things Under the Sun

28  Poetry Goes to School

29  Old-Fashioned Modernism

30  Moderner Modernism

31  A Valediction Requiring Mourning

Postscript: The Other Fellow

Acknowledgements

Very, Very Select Bibliography

PREFACE

This is a book about poetry and the people who read it. So far as possible, the poets have been left out.

People blather on far too much about poets, and their lives, and their childhoods, and their educations, and their houses, and their portraits, and the details of the private lives, which were, at best, boring, and, at worst, immoral.

The poetry is the important thing, and the people that it was written for – the people who read it and recited it and copied it out and enjoyed it. After all, the poems that are now considered great are merely the ones that people have been enjoying for centuries.

1

The First English Poem

It has been said that poetry comes from pain, but English poetry comes from somewhere far worse. English poetry comes from France.

It arrived in about 1370. The first English poem was called The Book of the Duchess. It wasn’t, to be honest, the best poem in the world. Christopher Columbus wasn’t, to be honest, the best European to visit America. But he was the first. And that makes him interesting.

Technically, of course, Christopher Columbus wasn’t the first European to visit America. The Vikings had paddled over there long before. But we don’t count them because their voyages didn’t lead to anything. They went, came back, and were promptly forgotten about. But Columbus started something. He started a long, unbroken chain of trade and colonisation. So if you want to trace the history of Europeans in America, you trace it back to him, and the Vikings don’t amount to much.

There were poems written in English before The Book of the Duchess. There were Anglo-Saxon poems, which were usually about drizzle and death, and alliterative incomprehensible medieval poems about owls, nightingales and cuckoos. But, like the Vikings in America, they didn’t lead to anything. There is a tradition of English poetry and you can trace it slowly back from the present day to the 1370s and The Book of the Duchess. If you follow that tradition any further back, you end up on the far side of the English Channel.

When The Book of the Duchess appeared, all previous English poetry was forgotten. All the rest starts here. And The Book of the Duchess is, basically, French.

France, back then, was the centre of all that was refined, all that was noble and chivalrous, and all that was fashionable. Every French aristocrat kept a court, and that court was full of courtiers who were courteous and full of courtesy. They had courtly entertainments that were the pinnacle of fashion, and one of these entertainments, the one we’re interested in, was reading out long narrative poems.

Very, very, very long narrative poems.

For example, in the 1380s Gaston III, Count of Foix, wanted something to entertain his court over the long winter evenings. So he commissioned a poet called Jean Froissart to write a long narrative poem that would last all winter. The poem was called Méliador. Every night for ten weeks Froissart would arrive at the castle after supper. There he would find the count and all his knights and squires gathered together and he would sit and read out a new episode of his vast story.

We know about this reading in detail because Froissart himself wrote about it. He was particularly proud that, on this occasion, nobody was allowed to speak during the reading, except the count himself.

Nobody dared to say a word, because he [the Count of Foix] wanted me to be well understood, wherein he took great pleasure; and when it came to any matter of question, then he would speak to me…

Froissart was reading aloud, but that wasn’t because the knights and squires were illiterate. They could all read themselves, but they chose not to. Reading on your own was considered a bit weird at the time. It was approximately like going to the cinema alone today. There’s no law against it, but it’s eccentric. The sort of thing only done by film buffs, the friendless, and combinations of the two. Listening to poetry was a social activity. Half the fun was chatting about it afterwards.

The story of Méliador is all about noble knights and lovely ladies, and it was being listened to by noble knights (and maybe lovely ladies, Froissart doesn’t specify). The poem is about them and their world and their values. The story was a mirror in which they could see themselves reflected and perfected. Afterwards, they would have discussed which knight was more knightly and which damsel more decorous, and what would unfold tomorrow night. And the whole story was written in exquisite rhyming lines of eight syllables.

Méliador is 30,000 lines long and the readings took place over seventy nights. That comes out to a little under half an hour per night. It was the medieval equivalent of working through a box-set.1 But this was a pastime only for the French elite. Listening to narrative poetry was style, it was elegance, it was refined. In short, it was everything that England was not.

The noblemen of England loved France. They loved it so much that they were, at the time, trying to invade it. English armies led by Edward III and his sons, the Black Prince and John of Gaunt, were pillaging (and probably raping) their way from Burgundy to Bordeaux. But really they were just expressing their love of France in the only way they knew.

They were in the middle of the Hundred Years’ War, which was a very bloody but also a remarkably sociable affair, so long as you were an aristocrat. Every English nobleman was bilingual, and had been since the Norman Conquest. Chivalry was in full bloom, and that meant that when, for example, you captured an enemy knight, you didn’t kill him; you took him home and wined him and dined him until somebody paid his ransom. Similarly, treaty negotiations were splendid affairs where the hosts showed off to each other with banquets and jousts and entertainments, and long narrative poems.

But the noblemen of England were put to shame, because we didn’t have any good poems. You can picture John of Gaunt like an English tourist today, eating a fine French meal and saying, ‘We really ought to try to make this at home’, and then wondering whether you’d be able to obtain the ingredients.

———

A woman had to die for English poetry to set forth. Her name was Blanche, and she was John of Gaunt’s wife. The year was 1368. She was twenty-six and he was twenty-eight. They had had seven children together. She died. John was inconsolable. He was publicly inconsolable. Not even his mistress could comfort him (and if you think there’s a contradiction there, you’d never have made it as a medieval duke). He built her a beautiful tomb in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, and every year he held a public commemoration on 12 September, the anniversary of her death.

So we need to picture the scene at one of these commemorations. It’s probably in the splendid Savoy Palace that John of Gaunt had built for himself on the north bank of the Thames a mile to the west of London, in the fields around Westminster. John of Gaunt is there dressed in mourning black. All of his knights and squires are there too, sitting down. There are probably a few ladies as well (including his mistress, about whom he was quite public). And a modest, deferential man comes in, sits down and starts to read a long narrative poem. It begins:

I have gret wonder, be this lighte,

How that I live, for day ne nighte

I may nat sleepè well nigh noght,

I have so many an idle thoght

Purely for defaute of slepe

I have great wonder, by this light,

How that I live, for day nor night

I may not sleep well nigh nought

I have so many an idle thought

Purely for default of sleep.

And that is how English poetry began.

If you were in the audience, there are some things that you’d notice immediately. First, each line is eight syllables long, and it rhymes. This is the French style – you know that because you speak good French and you’ve probably been over there in the last few years, killing some Frenchmen, and fighting alongside others.

Second, the poem turns out to be about a dream that the poet has had. This too is French and terribly fashionable. French poets loved their dreams.

Third, as the poem continues, it turns out to be rather funny. This is odd for the commemoration of a death, but it somehow works. The running joke is that the chap reading the poem out is a bit of an idiot. In his dream he meets a handsome knight dressed all in black (just like John of Gaunt is). The knight is inconsolably sad about something, and the poet asks what the matter is.

The knight launches into a long, beautiful speech about his lost queen, how he played a game of chess with Fortune and cruel Fortune took his queen away.

The poet, who’s a bit thick, thinks that the Black Knight is literally talking about chess, and doesn’t understand why he’s so upset. This process repeats, the knight picks another metaphor, and each time the knight looks more lofty and more tragic, and the poet looks more hapless and dense. Finally, the knight reveals that his wife is dead, and then he rides away to his castle. That’s when it’s revealed that the knight was in fact John of Gaunt all along, which would have come as a big surprise to nobody in the room.

The whole poem took about an hour to read aloud. If you were a member of the original audience, you might well not have known the name of the poet, and you’d certainly not have cared. He was clearly your social inferior, and he clearly knew it (a point that you appreciated). The poem was deferential. It commemorated Blanche of Lancaster, it made John of Gaunt look great, and it made the poet look silly. That was the whole idea.

Of course, if you stopped and thought about it, you would realise that all those beautiful speeches in the poem, which made the Black Knight look so noble, were, of course, written by the poet. If you stopped and thought about it you’d realise that, of course, the poet actually knew what was going on the whole time. After all, he wrote the poem.

It’s a bit like one of those silent film stars. Charlie Chaplin is funny because he keeps falling over, so we laugh at him. It’s only when you think about it that you realise that looking that clumsy takes incredible co-ordination. The same goes for looking stupid within your own poem. It’s the art of looking artless. It was very clever of the poet to make himself look so stupid.

But this is all by the by. As a knight at the reading, sitting there in the Savoy Palace, the main feeling that you would have had was that you were doing the sophisticated French thing. You were in a palace with your fellow knights and squires being read to, just like the French. This was refined. This was Continental. This was the height of fashion.

The poet’s name wouldn’t have mattered to you; he was just a minor civil servant called Geoffrey Chaucer. If you were particularly well informed, you might even have known that John of Gaunt’s mistress was his sister-in-law, which is probably how he got his in in the first place. You almost certainly didn’t know that the whole future of English poetry had just begun, there, in that room, mourning a lost love, and trying to be French.

———

Chaucer had added one thing that the French didn’t have. He added rhythm. This is where English verse begins. If you read those first lines of The Book of the Duchess aloud, you will find yourself stressing some syllables more than others. Those stresses will form a pattern. In this case the pattern goes de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM.

Read this, if you can, aloud; and try to tap your finger to the beat.

I have gret wonder, be this lighte,

How that I live, for day ne nighte

I may nat sleepè well nigh noght,

I have so many an idle thoght

Purely for defaute of slepe

The funny backwards accent on sleepè is there to show that that syllable was pronounced (the word would have sounded like the modern sleeper). It’s there to keep the rhythm regular.

English poetry is all about rhythm. That’s all that stops it being prose. Throughout this book, try to read the poetry aloud, even if it’s under your breath. And try to tap your finger along to the beat. Without that, this book will be worthless.

We’ll come back to the technicalities of verse later. For the moment, Blanche is dead and English poetry is born.

It’s probably worthwhile noting, because I’ve been making fun of him, that John of Gaunt really did love Blanche. He married again, of course. He married the daughter of the Spanish king, and, when she died too, he finally married his mistress, Chaucer’s sister-in-law. But in his will he asked to be buried next to Blanche, his beloved wife.

1 30,000 lines is roughly thirty hours. For comparison, Breaking Bad is sixty hours, Game of Thrones is seventy, and The Sopranos is eighty-six.

2

For Engelonde’s Sake

What John of Gaunt had started caught on. People slightly less rich and powerful than he was, for example the king, wanted their own poems in English.

There was a chap called John Gower who had already written two very long poems, one in Latin, which was the language of learning, and one in French, which was the language of literature. He had written nothing in English, poor fellow, until one day in the 1380s, rowing his boat down the Thames, he bumped into King Richard II, as you do.

(I’ll mark the rhythm again, as Middle English can be a little bewildering.)

In Temse whan it was flowende

As I by boatè cam rowende,

So as Fortunè hir time sette,

My liegè lord par chaunce I mette;

And so bifel, as I cam neigh,

Out of my boat, whan he me seigh,

He bad me come into his barge.

And whan I was with him at large,

Amonges othre thinges seyde

He hath this charge upon me leyde,

And bad me do my businesse

That to his highè worthinesse

Some newè thing I scholdè booke,

That he himself it mightè looke

In Thames when it was flowing

As I by boat came rowing,

So as Fortune her time set,

My liege lord by chance I met;

And it befell, as I came nigh,

Out of my boat when he saw me,

He bade me come into his barge.

And when I was with him at large,

Among other things said

He has this charge upon me laid,

And bade me do my business

That to his high worthiness

Some new thing I should write,

That he himself might see it.

This story may look a little implausible to us, but most historians believe it’s true. You have to remember that the population of London at the time was only 45,000. Even the king lived in a small town, and when he saw a potential poet he took his chance.

Gower agreed (what else could he do?) and wrote a catastrophically long English poem called Confessio Amantis. It was a collection of love stories that went on, and on and then continued going on for 33,000 lines. Almost nobody, even professors of medieval English, has actually read this poem. But it was very popular at the time.

Back then, long was good. These were entertainments for an evening. Or for many, many evenings (as with Méliador in the last chapter). The king wanted a box-set, and a box-set he got. Confessio Amantis would be a month’s worth of poetry, and it was written to please its audience.

So what did the audience want? What were all those knights and damsels after? Terribly helpfully, Gower wrote down exactly what he thought his audience wanted, and why. It’s a little later in the introduction:

Bot for men sein, and soth it is,

That who that all of wisdom writ

It dulleth oft a mannès wit

To him that shall it aldai rede,

For thilkè cause, if that ye rede,

I woldè go the middle way

And write a bok between the tweie,

Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore,

That of the lass or of the more

Some man may like of that I write.

And for that fewè men endite

In our English, I thenkè make

A bok for Engelonde’s sake.

But for men say, and true it is,

That who that all of wisdom writ

It often dulls a man’s wit

To him that shall it all day read

For that cause, if you want,

I will go the middle way

And write a book between the two,

A bit of fun, a bit of wisdom,

That of the less, or of the more

Some man may like what I write.

And because few men compose

In our English, I think I’ll make

A book for England’s sake.

That last line demonstrates that modern football supporters are not the first people to put an extra syllable in Engelonde, and also that people were feeling rather patriotic and excited about writing in English, and pretending that they lived in a proper country with a proper language of its own. A thought that nobody important had had since the Norman Conquest 300 years before.

English was making a comeback in England under Richard II. It was popping up in public decrees and petitions and announcements and all sorts of other official documents. Poetry was not alone. Indeed, a few decades later, in 1417, Henry V would make English the official language of the English government.

English poetry even started appealing to Englishwomen, if Chaucer is anything to go by. Chaucer had moved on from Dream-Vision poetry, and produced a long poem called Troilus and Criseyde: a tragic love story with funny bits, because Chaucer could never resist adding funny bits.

What interests us is that there’s a scene where a rich, beautiful young widow (Criseyde) is passing her time with her friends by listening to poetry being read aloud. Then her jolly uncle Pandarus comes round and disturbs her.

Whan he was come un-to his niece’s place,

‘Where is my lady?’ to hir folk said he;

And they him told; and he forth in gan pace,

And fond, two other ladies set and she,

Within a pavèd parlour; and they three

Herden a maiden readen hem the geste

Of the Siege of Thebès, while hem leste…

geste=story

Pandarus asks what the poem’s about, hoping it’s something saucy.

‘For God’ès love, what saith it? tell it us.

Is it of love? Oh, some good ye me lere!’

‘Uncle,’ quod she, ‘your maistress is not here!’

lere=teach

maistress= girlfriend

Criseyde then explains, that she, being a fashionable person, is listening to long narrative poetry. And gives her uncle a plot summary.

With that they gonnen laugh, and tho she seyde,

‘This romaunce is of Thebès, that we read;

And we han heard how that king Laius deyde

Thurgh Oedipus his son, and al that deed;

And here we stenten at these lettres read,

How the bishop, as the book can tell,

Amphiorax, fil thurgh the ground to hell.’

gonnen= began

to tho=then

han=have

deyde=died

stenten=stop

And Pandarus, being a man, immediately has to tell her that he’s already read it.

Quod Pandarus, ‘All this know I myselve,

And all the assege of Thebès and the care;

For hereof been there makèd bokès twelve.

But lat be this, and tell me how ye fare.’

He then tries to persuade his niece to dance. She refuses, as it would be inappropriate for a widow like her.

‘A! God forbede!’ quod she. ‘Be ye mad?

Is that a widow’s life, so God you save?

By God, ye maken me right sore a-dread,

Ye ben so wild, it semeth as ye rave!

It setè me well bet, ay, in a cave

To bide, and read on holy saintès lives;

Lat maidens gon to dance, and youngè wives.’

It would suit me better

Importantly, Criseyde says that she could read to herself on her own in a cave. All upper-class women were literate. She chose to listen to poetry as a social activity with her friends.

———

There’s something else very important about those lines that will affect the rest of English poetry. Chaucer has done something huge, something tremendous, something that would echo down to the echoing ages.

He has added an extra de-DUM to every line.

Lat maydens gon to daunce, and youngè wyves.

De-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum

That’s going to be the rhythm of most of the English poetry ever written, and Chaucer invented it. If you want the technical name, it’s called an iambic pentameter. But that’s only because iamb means de-dum, and pentameter means five in a row.

Chaucer was an extraordinarily busy fellow. Not only did he hold down his day job as a civil servant, and invent English poetry, and write the first English tragedy (with funny bits); but he then decided to do Everything Else.

Everything Else, in this case, was the Canterbury Tales, which contained everything.

It’s quite hard to explain the Canterbury Tales, except by comparison. Imagine a modern film in which people from all walks of life have got locked in a room and decide to pass their time by watching movies. First there’s a soldier who picks an action movie with lots of stunts and explosions and car-chases, and it’s a really good action movie. Then a yummy-mummy introduces herself and picks a rom-com, and it’s a great rom-com. Then a health and safety inspector chooses his favourite public information film, then a pretentious student picks his favourite black-and-white French arthouse movie, then a charity worker picks a documentary about the starving in somewhere, then a policeman picks his favourite crime drama, then a pervert picks a porno, and so on and so forth.

By the end of that, you would have a whole portrait of modern society. And it wouldn’t just be a portrait of the people. It would be a portrait of how they looked at the world, because every genre of film has a different attitude to the world, it looks at society in a different way. And, once you’ve put them all together, you’ll be looking at society from every possible angle.

That’s basically what Chaucer did in the Canterbury Tales. The story is that Chaucer joins a bunch of pilgrims riding from London to Canterbury. They decide to pass the time by telling stories to each other. It starts with a knight telling a serious story of swords and chivalry, and then a drunk miller tells a story of farce and fornication. A merchant tells a story about finance. A nun tells a story about evil Jews. A corrupt priest recites the sermon that he uses to con Christians out of their money. And when it gets round to Chaucer’s own story, it’s such rubbish that all the other pilgrims tell him to shut up.

‘This may well be rhyme doggerel,’ quod he.

‘Why so?’ quod I, ‘why wiltow lette me

More of my talè than another man,

Syn that it is the bestè rhyme I can?’

‘By god,’ quod he, ‘for plainly, at a word,

Thy drasty rhyming is nat worth a turd!

Thou dost nought ellès but despendest time.

Sire, at a word, thou shalt no lenger rhyme.

Lat see where thou canst tellen aught in geeste,

Or telle in prose somewhat, at the leaste,

In which there be some mirth or some doctrine’

wiltow lette= will you stop

ellès=else

A lot of enthusiastic English teachers like to go on about how the Canterbury Tales are bawdy; and they are, in places. And some people like to go on about how they’re feminist; and they are, in places. Because, in places, the Canterbury Tales are everything: noble, vulgar, pious, dirty, thoughtful, foolish and strange.

The same poet who could write about turds could write this:

This world nys but a thurghfare full of woe,

And we been pilgrims, passing to and fro.

is only a thoroughfare

Chaucer could do everything, or rather Chaucer was inventing how to do everything in English. Though he was joined by other poets, he still did it better. It is, of course, hard to explain that without quoting a whole tale, and they’re rather long. But here are two little passages, both about somebody turning pale. The first is by John Lydgate.

The thought oppressed with inward sighès sore,

The painful live, the body languishing,

The woeful ghost, the heart rent and tore,

The petouse cheer pale in complaining,

The deadly face like ashes in shining,

The salt tears that fro mine eyèn fall,

Parcel declare ground of my painès all

live=life

petouse=pitious

And here is Chaucer describing roughly the same thing. In his case, it’s a woman called Custance who’s turning pale. Before you read it, you should remember that public executions were still very much a thing in London back then. Indeed, it was a bit of a boom-time for the execution business. People would be led through the streets to the gallows.

Have ye nat seen some time a palè face,

Among a press, of him that hath be lad

Toward his death, whereas him gat no grace,

And swich a colour in his face hath had,

Men mightè knowe his face, that was bistad,

Amongès all the faces in that rout:

So stant Custance, and looketh hir about.

press=crowd

swich=such

stant=stood

The audience, the listeners, would be thinking of people they knew.

Except that the listeners were getting a little further away. Chaucer had moved out of London by the time he started writing the Canterbury Tales. He still needed an audience, and that’s why he invented the pilgrims. He couldn’t imagine a poem without a group of listeners, even if they were imaginary.

In 1394, a strange manuscript crops up in a legal record. It was a copy of Troilus and Criseyde valued at 20 shillings, and it didn’t belong to Chaucer. That means that other people were starting to read his poems. Probably not in private, but aloud to their own households. You didn’t need to be the king any more, or to be John of Gaunt, or to know the poet personally. You could have your own copy.

Well, you could if you could afford 20 shillings, which was three months’ salary for a farm labourer. But a woman called Alice Goodgroome got hold of it, and she was the first owner, that we know of, of a book of English poetry.

That’s all we know about her.

3

The Fifteenth Century, Which Is Mainly Rubbish

Almost no poetry worth reading was written in the fifteenth century, so we’ll trundle past it as quickly as we can. The fourteenth century had Chaucer; the fifteenth century had Chaucerians. A Chaucerian is a poet who wants to be Chaucer, but isn’t.

It’s astonishing, and rather lovely, how quickly Geoffrey Chaucer was placed on a pedestal after his death in 1400. I’d say that he was soon considered one of the greats, but that would be wrong, because there weren’t any other greats. As far as English literature was concerned, there was only one wonderful poet.

Here’s John Lydgate in the 1430s, writing in the iambic pentameters that Chaucer had invented: five te-tums in a row.

My maistir Chaucer, with his fresh comedies,

Is dead, alas, chief poet off Breteyne,

That whilom made full pitious tragedies;

The fall of princes he did also complain,

As he that was of making sovereign,

Whom al this land sholde of right prefer,

Sith of oure language he was the lodester […]

Wherefore lat us give him laud and glory

And put his name with poets in memory.

Breteyne=Britain

sith=since

lodester=lode-star

lat=let

It’s all very pious and reverential. And yet, the poem that that’s taken from, The Fall of Princes, illustrates the problem. It tries to be like Chaucer, but it’s stiff and rigid and dull. Very dull. It has none of Chaucer’s charm, none of his humour. It’s about various famous rulers and their various famous falls from power. And it goes on forever. Well, to be precise it goes on for 36,365 lines. By most reckonings it’s the second longest poem ever written in English.1 Reading it feels like forever, I imagine. I’ve never read the whole thing myself, and nor, I suspect, has anybody else.

And Chaucer wasn’t just popular in England. He was popular in strange foreign countries like Scotland. A Scots poet called Robert Henryson wrote of how:

To cut the winter nicht and mak it schort

I tuik ane quair – and left all uther sport

Writtin be worthie Chaucer glorious

Of fair Creisseid and worthie Troylus.

tuke ane quair=took a book

And yet, the poem that that’s taken from is also part of the problem. Robert Henryson was writing a sequel to Troilus and Criseyde, called The Testament of Cresseid. It follows her on her further adventures. But whereas Chaucer’s heroine was lively and laughing and human, Henryson’s Cresseid is a sinful harlot who gets her comeuppance. All that The Testament of Cresseid shows is that reworking classic literature with a female main character is a tradition that goes all the way back to the beginnings of English literature, as does the tradition of their not being very good.

Thomas Hoccleve put it best in his Lament for Chaucer. He complains that Death has come too soon:

She might han tarried hir vengeance a while

Till that some man had egal to thee be;

Nay, lat be that! she knew well that this isle

May never man forth bringe like to thee,

han=have

egal=equal

At the time, he was, unfortunately, right.

There was one man who had a stab at it and did all right, but he wasn’t brought forth by this isle.

Charles D’Orleans was a French nobleman, born in 1394. He was highly educated, and even as a teenager he was a fine poet. People grew up quickly back then. Charles married in 1406 at the age of eleven. By 1409 he was a father, and a few days later (medieval medicine being what it was) he was a widower. Two months after that he turned fifteen. But you can’t hold a good fifteen-year-old down, and by the following August he’d cheered up and remarried.

The Hundred Years’ War was still going strong, and, aged twenty, Charles joined all the other noblemen in France to crush the puny English at Agincourt: 15,000 Frenchmen against 7,000 Englishmen. After the inevitable English victory, Charles was found trapped under a heap of corpses. He was taken out, captive, and back to England.

Being a prisoner of war in medieval times was rather nice, if you were an aristocrat. You weren’t locked up in a dark dungeon or anything like that. Quite the opposite. A prisoner was the guest of his captors. Charles stayed at various castles and stately homes. He was assigned servants. He was wined and dined. He was taken out hunting. He could order his favourite books or wines to be sent over from France. And he did just that. 432,000 bottles of wine.

If that figure seems quite high, it’s because Charles was prisoner for a long time. Most noblemen were simply ransomed back to the French. A price would be named, your family raised the money, and home you went. The problem was that Henry V of England was claiming the French throne; and Charles D’Orleans was also a potential claimant.

So, Henry V gave orders that Charles should never be ransomed back to France. In the end he was. But it took twenty-five years of negotiation. Which means that Charles was only averaging 17,280 bottles of wine a year (47 a day), which is still enough to have a good time, and also to entertain your guests.

Twenty-five years is a long time, even when tipsy. So Charles settled down to what he was good at: writing beautiful French poetry. But then he started to learn English. He would need to as the servants probably wouldn’t have known any French. Even his various aristocratic hosts would probably have been more comfortable in their home language.

Charles started translating his own poems into English. And then – horror of horrors – he started writing original poems in English. And they weren’t at all bad. In fact, they were rather good. In fact, they were probably the best English-language poems of the fifteenth century.

And what’s more, they were clearly influenced by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Two chapters ago Chaucer was an inferior in two ways: he was a social inferior because he was a commoner writing to entertain aristocrats; and he was a national inferior because he was an Englishman trying to write in the French style.

France was a better country, French was a better language, a duke was better than a Chaucer.

But Geoffrey had had a son, called Thomas Chaucer; and Thomas Chaucer was a very successful political operator. He managed, through a lot of chicanery and favours, to amass a huge fortune. Thomas Chaucer was so rich that he was able to marry his daughter to a duke.

In 1430, aged twenty-five, Alice Chaucer married William de la Pole, and became the Duchess of Suffolk. It seems to have been a very happy marriage, and in 1433 they had a new guest in their house: Charles D’Orleans. He stayed there for the next three years.

Two generations. That’s it. Just two generations ago Geoffrey Chaucer had been the diffident civil servant trying to write in the French style. Two generations later his granddaughter had an heir to the French throne prisoner in her house. And what was the Duke of Orleans doing there? He was learning to write English poetry in the style of his hostess’s grandfather.

It was also while Charles was a guest there that he received news from France that his second wife had died. He had loved her. They had only had five years together before his capture, so he hadn’t seen her since she was sixteen,2 but he was still distraught. Also, his daughter by his first marriage had died a few years earlier.

So the following poem was probably written at Alice Chaucer’s house. There is no French version. This is an English original.

Alone am I and will to be alone

Alone, withouten pleasure or gladness

Alone in care, to sigh and groan

Alone, to wail the death of my maystres

Alone, which sorrow will me never cesse

Alone, I curse the life I do endure.

Alone this faintith me my great distress,

Alone I live, an ofcast creature.

Alone am I, most woefullest bigoon,

Alone, forlost in painful wilderness,

Alone withouten whom to make my moan,

Alone, my wretched case for to redress,

Alone thus wander I in heaviness,

Alone, so woe worth mine aventure!

Alone to rage, this thinketh me sweetness,

Alone I live an ofcast creature.

[…]

Alone of woe I have take such excess,

Alone that physick nys there me to cure.

Alone I live, that willith it were less;

Alone I live, an ofcast creature.

will=want

maystres=mistress=wife

cesse=cease

ofcast=outcast

cre-a-ture=three syllables

bigoon=surrounded (like woebegone)

forlost=lost

aventure=luck

physick=medicine

nys=isn’t

=wishes it (my life)

were shorter

Not all his poems are that gloomy. He recovered after a while and started writing new love poems to an unnamed, but presumably English, lady.

In 1440 Charles D’Orleans was released, and returned to France. The chronicles say that by that time he spoke better English than French. He married again3 and had three daughters and a son, Louis, who, finally, became King of France. He also had the Duke of Suffolk over to stay, as they were still friends.

Nobody likes to mention Charles D’Orleans. The French don’t like to admit that they lost the Battle of Agincourt, because it still hurts. On the other hand, the English don’t like to admit that the best English-language poet of the fifteenth century was a Frenchman, because it still hurts.

———

For three chapters now we have been dealing with courts and kings and princes. It is time to take a brief break. To leave the pomp and palaces and to peer, disapprovingly, at the revolting peasants.

1 The runaway longest is King Alfred by John Fitchett, published in 1841. It is 131,000 lines, and unfinished.

2 Your maths is correct.

3 Since you were wondering, the answer is fourteen.

4

Down on the Farm

All humans compose poetry, but only some humans possess pen and paper. History requires stationery, and stationery was in short supply among the peasants of Olde Engelonde. That’s why we’ve spent the last three chapters hanging around the courts and castles of the king. They had the paper, so they had the poetry.

But we should briefly, very briefly, stroll out to the fields and see what was being said and sung by the peasants.

Some smidgens did get written down. But often we haven’t the haziest idea of who wrote them or why. For example, there’s a manuscript book about land tenures. It was written some time between about 1450 and 1500. It’s about rents and tenants-in-common and other legal stuff. But there’s a blank page where somebody scribbled down (it really is a scribble) a poem about a peasant girl having an affair with her parish priest.

Hey nonny, I will love our Ser John and I love any

O Lord, so sweet Ser John doth kiss

At every time when he wolde play

Of himself so pleasant he is

I have no power to say him nay

Sir John loves me and I love him

The more I love him the more I may

He says ‘Sweetheart, come kiss me trim.’

I have no power to say him nay.

Sir John to me is proffering

For his pleasure right well to pay

And in my box he puts his offering

I have no power to say him nay.

Sir John is taken in my mouse-trap

Fayne would I have hem both night and day

He gropeth so nicely about my lap.

I have no power to say him nay.

Sir John giveth me reluys rings,

With praty pleasure for to assay.

Furs of the finest with other things.

I have no power to say him nay.

ser=reverend

and=if

trim=well

reluys=shiny

All we know about that poem is that it sounds as if it were composed by a peasant girl. It maybe sounds as though it were meant to be sung, perhaps in a group. And it got written down by somebody, for God-alone-knows-what reason, in a book about land tenures.

These peasant poems tend to be a bit simple, and a bit bawdy (although it’s always possible that it’s because they’re simple and bawdy that we think they’re by peasants). The classic example, ‘I have a gentle cock’, ends up exactly how you think it would: ‘And every night he percheth him / In mine lady’s chamber’.

And sometimes they’re strange riddles. And sometimes they’re strange bawdy riddles. But for the purposes of this book, they’re not very useful. We don’t know who wrote them, who read them, or more properly who recited them. We don’t know where they were recited or why they were enjoyed. We can use our imagination, nothing more.

So let’s imagine that there’s a group of women working. Maybe they’re threshing corn or something rural like that. One of them leads with a song, and the others all join in with the words ‘Trolly lolly’. Trolly lolly was a sort of meaningless phrase that pops up in these poems in the way that ‘doo-beedoo’ pops up in pop songs of the 1950s.

The poem is real. She’s singing about her boyfriend:

His bonnet is of fine scarlet,

Trolly lolly

With hair as black as jet

Trolly lolly

His doublet is of fine satine

Trolly lolly

His shirt well made and trim

Trolly lolly

His coytt it is so trim and rownde

Trolly lolly

His kisse is worth a hundred pownde

Trolly lolly

His hoysse is of London black

Trolly lolly

In him there is no lack

Trolly lolly

His face it is so like a man

Trolly lolly

Who can but love him than?

It’s not Chaucer. It’s not Charles D’Orleans. But it is a bit of fun. And really we’re only here to acknowledge – briefly and reluctantly – the existence of the lower classes.

So let’s leave the peasants in their fields, and return to the courteous courtiers of the court and their courtship. The Tudors are about to arrive, and so is the sonnet.

5

The Early Tudors

Back at court, everybody was writing poetry. There was a mania for it. A Tudor nobleman or noblewoman was expected to be able to knock out a poem in five minutes flat, or indeed just improvise one. There’s a story about Henry VIII aboard the royal barge. He was heading down the Thames towards Greenwich, where he had his mistress installed in a tower in the park. He was accompanied by a courtier called Sir Andrew Flamock. As they approached, Henry turned to Flamock and said, ‘Let us rhyme.’

‘As well as I can,’ Flamock replied, ‘if it please your grace.’

Henry pointed to the tower and said:

Within this tower

There lieth a flower

That hath my heart

And Flamock was just meant to rhyme back. Right there and then. No preparation. Because that’s what a Tudor nobleman was meant to be able to do. It should be understood that Flamock’s rhyme didn’t have to be fantastic. It was just meant to… rhyme, and to fit the occasion. This is the vital point of this chapter. These days, we tend to think of poetry as something utterly wonderful that the poet has sweated and studied over for ages. Poetry is Poetry. It is, in the modern world, supposed to be the expression of terrible truths and great genius. Poetry is supposed to be sublime. But in the court of Henry VIII, it was just something you did.

It was not, after all, going to be printed and sold to the general public. The idea of a general public didn’t really exist. Poetry was still something courtiers did with their friends, or their lovers, or their king. All Flamock had to do was to rhyme back, preferably in a way that would please the monarch.

But he rather messed that up. Flamock replied:

Within this hour

She pissed full sour

And let a fart.

Henry was annoyed and Flamock’s career as courtier was ruined. Henry VIII being annoyed will be another theme of this chapter.

Henry VIII is usually remembered today for breaking away from the Church of Rome and for having a lackadaisical attitude towards his wives’ necks. His poetry is forgotten. It’s really not that bad. Take this one, which he wrote as a young man. It’s a tender account of how Henry would always remain faithful in love.

Green groweth the holly,

So doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly.

As the holly groweth green

And never changeth hue,

So I am, ever hath been,

Unto my lady true.

As the holly groweth green

With ivy all alone

When flowers cannot be seen

And greenwood leaves be gone,

Now unto my lady

Promise to her I make,

From all other only

To her I me betake.

Adieu, mine own lady,

Adieu, my special

Who hath my heart truly

Be sure, and ever shall.

special was pronounced spec – ee – al

We can’t know whether Henry wrote that to one particular woman. He might have. Amusingly, it might have been Catherine of Aragon. But he was certainly proud of it. He set it to music and performed it for the court, with two backing singers.

At court, everybody was writing, reciting and improvising poetry, all the time. Love poems, hate poems, poems for particular occasions, poems comical, poems tragical and poems about writing poems. The court ladies spent all their time on these ‘vain toys and poetical fancies’. One lady-in-waiting got in trouble for scribbling ‘idle poesies’ in her prayer book. There was poetry everywhere.

But none of it was published.