Chaucer's Wine Ration
A poem
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:
Arcite, who is named in the second line, is a central character in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.
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’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.
Do I have topay?
This is fun stuff, John. I would love to be in your class!.