Part 105 (1/2)

You made, and think that all is but a fair, This world that pa.s.seth soon, as flowers fair!

And love Him, the which that, right for love, Upon a cross, our soules for to bey,* *buy, redeem First starf,* and rose, and sits in heav'n above; *died For he will false* no wight, dare I say, *deceive, fail That will his heart all wholly on him lay; And since he best to love is, and most meek, What needeth feigned loves for to seek?

Lo! here of paynims* cursed olde rites! *pagans Lo! here what all their G.o.ddes may avail!

Lo! here this wretched worlde's appet.i.tes! *end and reward Lo! here the *fine and guerdon for travail,* of labour*

Of Jove, Apollo, Mars, and such rascaille* *rabble <93> Lo! here the form of olde clerkes' speech, In poetry, if ye their bookes seech!* *seek, search

L'Envoy of Chaucer.

O moral Gower! <94> this book I direct.

To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, <95> To vouchesafe, where need is, to correct, Of your benignities and zeales good.

And to that soothfast Christ that *starf on rood* *died on the cross*

With all my heart, of mercy ever I pray, And to the Lord right thus I speak and say:

”Thou One, and Two, and Three, *etern on live,* *eternally living*

That reignest ay in Three, and Two, and One, Uncirc.u.mscrib'd, and all may'st circ.u.mscrive,* *comprehend From visible and invisible fone* *foes Defend us in thy mercy ev'ry one; So make us, Jesus, *for thy mercy dign,* *worthy of thy mercy*

For love of Maid and Mother thine benign!”

Explicit Liber Troili et Cresseidis. <96>

Notes to Troilus and Cressida

1. The double sorrow: First his suffering before his love was successful; and then his grief after his lady had been separated from him, and had proved unfaithful.

2. Tisiphone: one of the Eumenides, or Furies, who avenged on men in the next world the crimes committed on earth. Chaucer makes this grim invocation most fitly, since the Trojans were under the curse of the Eumenides, for their part in the offence of Paris in carrying off Helen, the wife of his host Menelaus, and thus impiously sinning against the laws of hospitality.

3. See Chaucer's description of himself in ”The House Of Fame,” and note 11 to that poem.

4. The Palladium, or image of Pallas (daughter of Triton and foster-sister of Athena), was said to have fallen from heaven at Troy, where Ilus was just beginning to found the city; and Ilus erected a sanctuary, in which it was preserved with great honour and care, since on its safety was supposed to depend the safety of the city. In later times a Palladium was any statue of the G.o.ddess Athena kept for the safeguard of the city that possessed it.

5. ”Oh, very G.o.d!”: oh true divinity! -- addressing Cressida.

6. Ascaunce: as if to say -- as much as to say. The word represents ”Quasi dicesse” in Boccaccio. See note 5 to the Sompnour's Tale.

7. Eft: another reading is ”oft.”

8. Arten: constrain -- Latin, ”arceo.”

9. The song is a translation of Petrarch's 88th Sonnet, which opens thus: ”S'amor non e, che dunque e quel ch'i'sento.”

10. If maugre me: If (I burn) in spite of myself. The usual reading is, ”If harm agree me” = if my hurt contents me: but evidently the ant.i.thesis is lost which Petrarch intended when, after ”s'a mia voglia ardo,” he wrote ”s'a mal mio grado” = if against my will; and Urry's Glossary points out the probability that in transcription the words ”If that maugre me” may have gradually changed into ”If harm agre me.”

11. The Third of May seems either to have possessed peculiar favour or significance with Chaucer personally, or to have had a special importance in connection with those May observances of which the poet so often speaks. It is on the third night of May that Palamon, in The Knight's Tale, breaks out of prison, and at early morn encounters in the forest Arcita, who has gone forth to pluck a garland in honour of May; it is on the third night of May that the poet hears the debate of ”The Cuckoo and the Nightingale”; and again in the present pa.s.sage the favoured date recurs.

12. Went: turning; from Anglo-Saxon, ”wendan;” German, ”wenden.” The turning and tossing of uneasy lovers in bed is, with Chaucer, a favourite symptom of their pa.s.sion. See the fifth ”statute,” in The Court of Love.