Let Your Backbone Slide
Well, the time is fast approaching for the duedate of my first essay of the semester. I consider this one to be the most indecisive and sketchy of my works so far. I've been scrambling these last few days to get my act together and write something worthwhile. Alas! It's been a plague of migraines, digressions, and writer's block. Even though I haven't written one word for this essay I am already jittery.
The question is: Consider the nature and function of the dream vision as a poetic device in The Book of the Duchess. I don't know why I am not getting this. My brain refuses to cooperate. It's lazy. Anyways, I took Vivian's advice and picked the two most important episodes in the poem that I could use to describe the 'nature' and 'function'. Those two scenes are: the Forest episode and the Chess game. Now I need to examine four or five passages in each episode for noteworthy word play, especially since Vivian and I noticed that Chaucer is as fond of puns as seems Shakespeare. In fact, this is perhaps hairbrained but puns seem to be the thing that tie together even two disparate episodes with two different characters like those I selected. Take for instance this key quotation from the Chess episode of the black knight's tale:
But God wolde I had oones or twyes
Ykoude and knowe the jeupardyes
That kowde the Greke Pictagoras!
I shulde have played the bet at ches
And kept my fers the bet thereby. (665-9)
I am amazed I deciphered this passage, especially because the editor admits he cannot fathom why Pythagoras is tied to chess. My amateurish modern translation is this: But God, had I mastered the first and second, and known (solved) the problem (unknown) like Pythagoras! I would've fared better at chess and kept my queen as a result. The obvious reference is 'fers' , a queen chess piece, also a symbol for White (Blanche of Lancaster), his beloved courtly lady being taken away from him in death The rest of the passage is rather simple: the black knight is referring to the Pythagorean theorum. This idea of the hypotenus, I think, ties back in with an earlier part of the text where the black knight says "May nought make my sorwes slyde" (567) [my emphasis] (trans. Nothing can make my sorrow go away). It becomes this complex mathematical metaphor now. Imagine a right angle triangle. If he can solve the base and the height, he reaches a 'slope' which is equated with "going away" or "allaying". Beyond this deciphering, I can't figure out any conclusion. Before this passage he refers to how Fortune checkmated him with a 'poune errante' (mating pawn)--the most shameful and crushing defeat in chess imaginable, I gather.
Obviously the 'chess' game figures as an allegory for the black knight's life, or battle with Fortune and his subsequent defeat. But there has to be more to the Pythagoras reference. It's the segue from Pythagoras to chess, such a complex metaphor or symbol that I can't figure out at the moment.
The question is: Consider the nature and function of the dream vision as a poetic device in The Book of the Duchess. I don't know why I am not getting this. My brain refuses to cooperate. It's lazy. Anyways, I took Vivian's advice and picked the two most important episodes in the poem that I could use to describe the 'nature' and 'function'. Those two scenes are: the Forest episode and the Chess game. Now I need to examine four or five passages in each episode for noteworthy word play, especially since Vivian and I noticed that Chaucer is as fond of puns as seems Shakespeare. In fact, this is perhaps hairbrained but puns seem to be the thing that tie together even two disparate episodes with two different characters like those I selected. Take for instance this key quotation from the Chess episode of the black knight's tale:
But God wolde I had oones or twyes
Ykoude and knowe the jeupardyes
That kowde the Greke Pictagoras!
I shulde have played the bet at ches
And kept my fers the bet thereby. (665-9)
I am amazed I deciphered this passage, especially because the editor admits he cannot fathom why Pythagoras is tied to chess. My amateurish modern translation is this: But God, had I mastered the first and second, and known (solved) the problem (unknown) like Pythagoras! I would've fared better at chess and kept my queen as a result. The obvious reference is 'fers' , a queen chess piece, also a symbol for White (Blanche of Lancaster), his beloved courtly lady being taken away from him in death The rest of the passage is rather simple: the black knight is referring to the Pythagorean theorum. This idea of the hypotenus, I think, ties back in with an earlier part of the text where the black knight says "May nought make my sorwes slyde" (567) [my emphasis] (trans. Nothing can make my sorrow go away). It becomes this complex mathematical metaphor now. Imagine a right angle triangle. If he can solve the base and the height, he reaches a 'slope' which is equated with "going away" or "allaying". Beyond this deciphering, I can't figure out any conclusion. Before this passage he refers to how Fortune checkmated him with a 'poune errante' (mating pawn)--the most shameful and crushing defeat in chess imaginable, I gather.
Obviously the 'chess' game figures as an allegory for the black knight's life, or battle with Fortune and his subsequent defeat. But there has to be more to the Pythagoras reference. It's the segue from Pythagoras to chess, such a complex metaphor or symbol that I can't figure out at the moment.
posted by Davyth | 8:22 PM
2 Comments:
You've stumbled upon something which is well-known to allegorists: that the extended-metaphors that allegories and dream-visions are very often built on a complex system of puns and punnings (the general term given to verbal play). The landmark text in this regard in Maureen Quilligan's THE LANGUAGE OF ALLEGORY, which, though it spends more time on Spenser than on Chaucer, is very useful indeed, especially in its outlining of the fundamentals of this stuff. Give it a look, if you have time. Cheers.
Thanks Jeremy.
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