Chaucer's Wine Ration

A poem

A portrait of Chaucer from a manuscript of his younger contemporary, Thomas Hoccleve

Chaucer’s Wine Ration

Chaucer stands at the very center of my personal canon. I teach him more than I do any other writer. (I actually teach two courses dedicated entirely to Chaucer—an undergraduate course and a graduate seminar.) I even have a dog named Chaucer.  However, I find him difficult to approach in my scholarly writing, though I have published one article on his work and presented several conference papers. Part of this difficulty stems from the vast critical and scholarly literature that has accumulated around Chaucer over the last six centuries, which I have spent much of the last three decades reading: it can be hard coming up with an original scholarly argument about him. But I think even more to the point is Chaucer’s resistance to completion, to definitive readings, to being pinned down. He is reflexively ambiguous and ambivalent. He is finifugal.

I find, therefore, that my most engaged, personal responses to Chaucer sometimes come in the form of poetry rather than scholarship. So my post today is my second poem of the week. (You can find Sunday’s poem here, also on a medieval theme.)

Two notes:

1. Arcite, who is named in the second line, is a central character in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.

2. Chaucer was a career civil servant, and apparently a good one—to the extent that he was granted a really nice flat above Aldgate, as well as a generous daily wine ration.

On to the poem . . .

Chaucer the dog

Chaucer’s Wine Ration

Readers take note:

Arcite is dead,

But has he been spotted in Ireland,

Or wherever they’re filming? No

​spoilers

Please. That would prime the pump, but

​not so fast!

Wait!

I’ve read this story before,

(The Two Noble Kinsmen? No, that came

later. Boccaccio?) so it

​must

Be trash, chewed up, spit out,

Rebooted, repurposed, upcycled,

​what more could we

Do with it?

I wonder if Chaucer asked that

​question

As his tallow candle sputtered and he

Sipped from his large daily ration of wine,

Guaranteed by Richard the second

​king

Of his name. Could this be

​disposable?

The poem I mean, not the wine. But

​perhaps what matters

Is the wine—not because I

​don’t like the

Poem, but because royal favor

​must be

Savored while it lasts. You never

​know when

Your gig as wool comptroller may

​simply

Suck the sense from your sound

​pentameter.