SOURCE: Dean, James. “Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal.” Studies in Philology LXXXVIII, no. 3 (summer 1991): 251-75.

[In the following essay, Dean examines Gower's application of the rhyme royal verse form, particularly its use for specific types of poems.]

Everyone knows that Chaucer was one of the first users, if not the inventor, of rhyme (or rime) royal—also called “Troilus-measure” or the “Troilus-stanza”—a stanzaic verse form of seven decasyllabic lines rhymed ababbcc. Until recently the term “rhyme royal” was thought to be a nineteenth-century coinage to characterize the stanza form of James I's The Kingis Quair (c. 1425), and some have conjectured that the stanza developed from the French form known as chant royal, an intricate prosodic scheme used by Eustache Deschamps and Charles d'Orléans.¹ The problem may be one of terminology, since Deschamps wrote French rhyme royal balades (not normally identified as rhyme royal) as well as chansons royales. As Martin Stevens has suggested, Chaucer might have invented or encountered the form through connection with the London Pui and its concern with the balade.²

Chaucer wrote a number of balades and other lyrics in rhyme royal, including The Complaint unto Pity (first two stanzas only), A Complaint to His Lady, The Complaint of Mars, Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, Truth, Gentilesse, Lak of Stedfastnesse, Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan, The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse, and three poems not ascribed to Chaucer in the manuscripts but thought to be by Chaucer.³ But Chaucer's special genius, his unique contribution to the rhyme royal form, is that he applied the French balade stanza to narrative in Anelida and Arcite, The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and four stories in The Canterbury Tales: The Man of Law's Tale, The Clerk's Tale, The Prioress's Tale, and The Second Nun's Tale.

Despite the efforts of Stevens, it is less well known that Chaucer's friend John Gower, author of Mirour de l'omme, Vox clamantis, and Confessio Amantis, also exploited rhyme royal, and in both French and English. He never achieved Chaucer's high success with the form nor did he exploit it as narrative, but his use of rhyme royal is significant in that it reveals a special debt to Chaucer, a prosodic debt. Moreover, Gower used rhyme royal for specific poetic reasons and in specific situations: for occasional verse (In Praise of Peace) and for philosophical love poetry (Cinkante balades, Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz, Amans's “supplicacioun” from Confessio Amantis). Stevens's point about rhyme royal is that poets used it for royal poetry, identified as such from the fourteenth century. However, Gower exploited the form, as I hope to demonstrate in this essay, because he believed that rhyme royal was appropriate for certain kinds of occasional verse and for amorous lyrics—and, for Gower, love lyrics always meant reflective if not didactic verse. Gower developed both the occasional verse and the love lyrics by imitating Chaucer's poetry; and, as I hope to show, he applied the form, through back formation, to the French of the Cinkante balades and the Traitié.

Because I am claiming that Gower's use of rhyme royal derives largely from Chaucer, I must address one issue immediately: the date of the Cinkante balades. John Fisher in his important study of Gower in his relation to Chaucer has dated the Balades “before 1374.”⁴ This is a very early date, considerably before Chaucer's datable ventures into rhyme royal. In support of his dating Fisher suggests that Gower might have written these lyrics, which advocate married love but in a non-political, neutral tone, for the London Pui.⁵ Fisher finds it significant that the Balades lack specific political reference: “The balades [i.e., Cinkante balades and the Traitié] and the Mirour de l'omme precede his political involvement.”⁶ In making this argument he tries to refute Gower's editor, G. C. Macaulay, who believes that Gower composed most of his Cinkante balades for the court of Henry IV, to whom Gower dedicated the balade sequence.⁷ If Fisher is correct in dating the Balades before 1374, then it is not impossible that Chaucer developed his rhyme royal stanza from Gower's example; but this seems to me unlikely since Chaucer wrote so often in the form, especially beginning with The Parliament of Fowls (“late 1370s or early 1380s”).⁸ The issue depends to a certain extent on when Chaucer wrote his earliest works in rhyme royal—The Complaint unto Pity and The Complaint to His Lady (which are probably very early in Chaucer's poetic career), and Anelida and Arcite and The Legend of Saint Cecilia (later incorporated into The Canterbury Tales as The Second Nun's Tale). In any event the influence seems to have flowed from Chaucer to Gower rather than vice-versa. I favor a date of after 1380 for the Cinkante balades—when Gower would have had time to absorb Chaucer's earlier forays into rhyme royal—but a date post-Troilus (after 1385) seems to me to be even more likely.

That Gower imitated Chaucer in his rhyme royal verses may be observed in English stanzas from In Praise of Peace and from Confessio Amantis, two works that incontrovertibly postdate Troilus and Criseyde. In Praise of Peace, an occasional lyric of 385 lines which is preceded and succeeded by Latin verses, is addressed to the new king, Henry IV, shortly after his accession. Gower reveals that he is tired of strife and eager for Henry to establish peace. But in several places Gower's phrasing resembles Chaucer's, especially that in Chaucer's moral balades Truth, Gentilesse, Lak of Stedfastnesse. For example, in an envoy-like stanza in mid-poem, Gower petitions Henry in lines that might have been modeled on Chaucer's Lak of Stedfastnesse:

Forthi, my worthi prince, in Cristes halve,
As for a part whos feith thou hast to guide,
Ley to this olde sor a newe salve,
And do the werre awei, what so betide:
Purchase pes, and set it be thi side,
And suffre noght thi poeple be devoured,
So schal thi name evere after stonde honoured.

(120-26)

The emphasis Gower places on “this olde sor” and especially the strong caesura after “Purchase pes” reveal a poet who is confident in the form and who carefully studied the poet who wrote, in his envoy,

Shew forth thy swerd of castigacioun,
Dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse,
And wed thy folk agein to stedfastnesse.

(26-28)

Similarly, and in comparable language, Gower asks Henry to help seat the true pope:

Sette ek the rightful Pope uppon his stalle,
Kep charite and draugh pite to honde,
Maintene lawe, and so the pes schal stonde.

(383-85)

In the “supplicacioun” from Confessio Amantis Gower imitates Chaucer's love poetry—doubtless Troilus but perhaps also the “Bill of Complaint” from Pity. In one place in this twelve-stanza lyric-within-narrative Gower sounds like Pandarus (who gently complains to Troilus, “I hoppe alwey byhynde!” [2.1107]) or a hapless Chaucerian narrator:

For evere I wrastle and evere I am behinde,
That I no strengthe in al min herte finde,
Wherof that I mai stonden eny throwe;
So fer mi wit with love is overthrowe.

(8.2238-44)

These brief excerpts from In Praise of Peace and Confessio Amantis demonstrate, I hope, not only Gower's skill with rhyme royal but also Chaucer's influence on Gower's prosody, hence on his poetics. In the remainder of this essay I wish to examine in greater detail Gower's use of rhyme royal in the Cinkante balades, the Traitié, In Praise of Peace, and Confessio Amantis.

I

Whenever Gower wrote his Cinkante balades, they manifest influence not only from Chaucer's rhyme royal but also from French balade forms. It should be emphasized that only about half of the 51 Cinkante balades are in seven-line stanzas. Twenty-seven of these balades, including the second dedicatory lyric and the two concluding balades (numbers “50” and “51”), are in another French balade form Anglicized and popularized by Chaucer: the so-called Monk's Tale stanza (ababbcbc; in Gower ababbcbC).⁹ It is possible that Gower adapted his French rhyme royal stanzas from French balades. But it is more plausible to suppose that he adapted Chaucer's English rhyme royal—or perhaps French verse written by Chaucer but now lost¹⁰—to his own Anglo-French balades. I say this because the evidence from The Romaunt of the Rose, The Book of the Duchess, Troilus, and The Canterbury Tales, among other works, suggests that Chaucer took the lead in importing continental forms, French and Italian, into Ricardian England.

An important issue in considering Gower's use of rhyme royal in the Cinkante balades is whether those balades accurately can be termed rhyme royal. Fisher does not identify them as such, and Macaulay argues that Gower's verses—which he claims rhyme ab ab bcc¹¹—derive naturally, with a few Anglicizing touches, from corresponding French balades. Macaulay ascribes the difference in metre or “rhythm” to Gower's “attempt to combine the English accentual with the French syllabic measure” (p. lxxiv). This theory is possible, yet it seems far easier to believe that Gower was imitating Chaucer's (English) balade forms, rhyme royal and The Monk's Tale stanza; that he rhymed his seven-line stanza ababbcc (not ab ab bcc); and that French turns of phrase sometimes pulled him away from the accentual patterns of rhyme royal. Moreover, decasyllabic and endecasyllabic lines were not as common in French balades as Macaulay implies. Froissart, Othes de Grandson, and Charles d'Orléans sometimes wrote in ten-syllable verses, and Deschamps often, but octosyllabics were the verses of choice in fourteenth-century French balladry.¹² Gower's Mirour de l'omme is consistently in octosyllabics, but his balades, whether French or English and whether in seven or eight-line stanzas, are consistently in decasyllabics, as are Chaucer's balades.

The subject of the Cinkante balades is refined love, a topic Chaucer treated often and well, although Gower probably drew on his own knowledge of French courtly verse for his balade cycle. The phrasing and treatment of erotic themes are for the most part conventional in the French manner. The narrator speaks, for example, of “le tresgrant desir” (4.15), “ma debonaire” (4a.6), “mon tresdouls coer” (4a.18), “vo grant noblesce” (6.9), “fin amour” (7.1; 47.2), “ma tresbelle honouree” (7.5), “ma sovereine joie” (9.44), and so forth.¹³ He complains to the lady: “Pour vo bealté jeo languis en destresce” (6.24). [For your beauty I languish in distress.] He petitions her with the words: “O tresgentile dame, simple et coie, / Des graces et des vertus replenis, / Lessetz venir merci, jeo vous supploie …” (9.33-35). [O most noble lady, natural and reserved, filled with graces and virtues, let your mercy come, I beg of you. …] Elsewhere he proclaims, just as conventionally, that the lady “est tout mon confort matin et soir” (5.15). In some poems the narrator has recourse to standard paradoxes, as in “Balade 9,” in which he says: “Jeo ris en plour et en sante languis” (9.26). [I laugh while crying and in health feel sick.] He invokes the seasonal metaphor to describe his alternating hope and despair (balades “2,” “7,” “10,” “13,” “15,” “36,” “37”). Two balades are Saint Valentine poems (“34,” “35”). Gower is quite convincing in his role as courtly French lover in this balade cycle (for it is a cycle)¹⁴—convincing, that is, within the artifice of the convention. In his extant poetry Chaucer never invested so sincerely in the French persona. His narrator always manifests a non-conventional self-irony that the persona of Cinkante balades lacks.

If Gower is convincing as the complaining French lyricist steeped in fin amour, he is less persuasive as the philosopher of eros, at least in the Balades. Gower is not content simply to reproduce the erotic ambience of, say, a Machaut dit or a balade sequence of Deschamps, although he does this; he is concerned as well to provide a moral-philosophical framework that glosses (and supposedly distances) the love lyrics. A marginal gloss at the end of “Balade 5”—a gloss typical of Gower's practice in his other writings—directs us to the institution of marriage: “Les balades d'amont jesqes enci sont fait especialement pour ceaux q'attendont lours amours par droite mariage” (p. 342). [The balades from here on are made especially for those who serve their loves in true marriage.]¹⁵ An even more important gloss, to “Balade 6” (“La fame et la treshalte renomee”), claims a universal significance for the reflections on love:

Les balades d'ici jesqes au fin du livere sont universeles a tout le monde, selonc les propretés et les condicions des Amantz, qui sont diversement travailez en la fortune d'amour.

(p. 343)

[The balades from here to the end of the book are universal, for the whole world, according to the qualities and conditions of lovers, who are variously troubled by the fortunes of love.]

These two glosses reveal Gower's attitude toward his balade cycle: he regards the vicissitudes of love as a metaphor for the human condition. To this extent the treatment of love in Cinkante balades anticipates that in Confessio Amantis, where the narrator learns that he is too old to love through a sequence of exemplary stories and through Cupid and Venus's intercession, the whole explicitly moralized and framed by the universal “Prologue” and by the conclusion. Like the Cinkante balades the Confessio includes significant and almost assuredly authorial glosses. My point is not that the Cinkante balades demonstrate how Gower is a moral poet or how he always writes the same poem but rather that he views love poetry as an opportunity for reflecting on what it means to be human. This universalizing, philosophical tendency of Gower perhaps explains why Chaucer characterizes him as “moral Gower”—not a term of opprobrium—and why he dedicated Troilus and Criseyde to the author of Cinkante balades, Mirour de l'omme, and Vox clamantis. (Confessio Amantis postdates Troilus.)

Gower's skill in the French rhyme royal stanza may be seen in two examples from the Cinkante balades. In the first example, from stanza one of “Balade 45,” Gower compares his lady's restorative powers with the healing properties of crystal:

Ma dame, jeo vous doi bien comparer
Au cristall, qe les autres eslumine;
Car celle piere qui la poet toucher
De sa vertu reçoit sa medicine,
Si en devient plus preciouse et fine:
Ensi pour vo bounté considerer
Toutz les amantz se porront amender.

[My lady, I should compare you with the crystal, which illuminates others; since by touching this stone the poet, through the stone's special power, receives its medicine, so from it he becomes more precious and refined: thus by reflecting on your goodness, all lovers can improve themselves.]

Here Gower mingles English prosodic techniques with a French sensibility. He maintains the integrity of each line—each contains its own thought—yet three lines are enjambed (1, 3, and 6). The enjambement in this stanza is not as striking as some of Chaucer's run-on lines from Troilus, as in the following passage of Criseyde's reported speech from book 2:

She thanked hym of al that he wel mente
Towardes hire, but holden hym in honde
She nolde nought, ne make hireselven bonde
In love. …

(1221-24)

Gower's lines are more constrained but no less skillfully wrought than these, in which the rhyme royal form seems to dissolve in the onward rush of narrative. Gower's lines may be compared with Chaucer's witty balade in the French tradition, Against Women Unconstant, whose third stanza reads:

Ye might be shryned for your brotelnesse
Bet than Dalyda, Creseyde or Candace,
For ever in chaunging stant your sikernesse;
That tache may no wight fro your herte arace.
If ye lese oon, ye can wel tweyn purchace;
Al light for somer (ye woot wel what I mene),
In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene.

(15-21)

Chaucer's verses are strongly iambic, as are some of Gower's French verses, especially 6 and 7. Gower's lines are regularly decasyllabic or endecasyllabic, although not always iambic. Line 4 of the quoted example—“De sa vertu reçoit sa medicine”—which may be endecasyllabic along with its rhyming lines (2 and 5), may be read as iambic, with naturally heavy stress falling on the first sa, the second syllables of vertu and reçoit, and the first and third syllables of medicine. But in line 5 the scansion is less certainly iambic, with naturally heavy stress falling on Si, en, the second syllable of devient, plus, the first and third syllables of preciouse, and the first syllable of fine. Still, some heavy stresses are more emphatic than others, and the case could be made that the line is iambic (and endecasyllabic), with lighter stress on en and plus—hence that line 5 is pentameter with a trochaic substitution in the first foot. Finally, in Gower's stanza there is a strong sense of a couplet. The reflecting (considerer) leads to the lovers' improvement (amender). And these lines, after the interesting prosody of lines 1-3 and 5, are regular and iambic, with a trochaic substitution in the first foot of line 7, although the word Toutz should not receive heavy emphasis since the point of the line is that all lovers can improve themselves and not that all lovers, as opposed to some lovers, can improve. Line 7 gathers momentum and force until the final syllable, where the significance of the couplet is exposed and the content of the stanza is summarized: just as the crystal heals, so the lady's bounté amends. The word amender, with its significations of restoration and improvement, is a bon mot, a mot juste.

My second example from Cinkante balades comes from “Balade 49.” Here the narrator engages in witty paranomasia with concepts of good and evil in regard to love. Stanza one, which anticipates Sidney's sonnet 5 to Stella, reads:

As bons est bon et a les mals malvois
Amour, qui des natures est regent;
Mais l'omme qui de reson ad le pois,
Cil par reson doit amer bonement:
Car qui deinz soi sanz mal penser comprent
De bon amour la verité pleinere,
Lors est amour d'onour la droite miere.

[Love, who is governor of natures, is goodness to those who are benevolent and ill-will to those who are evil. But the man who is guided by reason must, through reason, love well: because he who knows he harbors no evil thought is filled with the truth of good love; therefore, love is the true mother of honor.]

The French is not easy to translate, since Gower compresses the thought considerably and leaves much of the signification to wordplay. The balade opens in the high style, with a reverse construction, and with a run-on line. The effect is a little studied and more formal than many of Gower's balades concerning love. This is because Gower has a thesis on love and reason in the lyric: namely, that love has a reasonable component and is therefore the “true mother” of honor. If the balade is stilted, it is because Gower wants to imitate the structures of rational thought. Love governs natures or temperaments and makes the good better and the bad worse. That man who is governed by reason is compelled to love especially well; and the man who is filled with good thoughts expresses love's truth. Ergo, love is not only reasonable but also honorable. Here, despite the pauses for end-stopped lines and connectives (“Mais,” “Car,” “Lors”), there is a reasoned, onward movement to the refrain line and no strong couplet. Some of the lines, especially 1 and 5, are both decasyllabic and iambic.

The Cinkante balades lack some of the qualities we most value in Ricardian literature: the ironic narrator; the trenchant anatomy of society and of estates; the development of character; the exploration of religious sensibility; symbolism. No one is going to argue that the Balades merit an exalted place in the fourteenth-century canon. But this cycle deserves more attention than it has received in the past—as a cycle, as rhyme royal in French, as thoughtful, sometimes witty imitations of French and Chaucerian verse. Finally, I agree with the sentiments of Thomas Warton, who says of the Cinkante balades generally, in a turn of phrase no longer fashionable:

… they have much real and intrinsic merit. They are tender, pathetic and poetical, and place our old poet Gower in a more advantageous point of view than that in which he has hitherto been usually seen.¹⁶

II

The Traitié selonc les auctours pour essampler les amantz marietz is a cycle of eighteen balades, all in French rhyme royal, probably written in 1397 for Gower's marriage and addressed “a tout le monde en general.” In this cycle Gower extols married love, denounces adultery showing its disastrous consequences through historical examples (“selonc les auctours”), and sets the history of married love in a theological context, especially through marginal Latin glosses. Here Gower is more successful in establishing his philosophical context than in the Cinkante balades, yet the balades themselves are less interesting as poetry than the Cinkante balades. Some of the balades in the Traitié (“Balades 6-15”) are rehashes of stories narrated more successfully in Confessio Amantis. In the Traitié they have the quality of allusions. Still, Gower demonstrates his abilities in French rhyme royal again here, as in the Balades, and in a poetic medium—philosophical or theological poetry—never attempted by Chaucer, who reserved rhyme royal for pathetic saints' lives, love tragedy, love balades, and occasional lyrics.

The Traitié begins with a balade of origins. This concerns the original harmony of body and soul, when God created man in his image:

Le creatour de toute creature,
Qui l'alme d'omme ad fait a son ymage,
Par quoi le corps de reson et nature
Soit attempré per jouste governage,
Il done al alme assetz plus d'avantage;
Car il l'ad fait discrete et resonable,
Dont sur le corps raison ert conestable.

[The Creator of all living beings—who made the soul of man in His image, by which the body of reason and nature was tempered through right governance—gave the soul the greater sway. Because He made the soul discerning and rational, reason was ruler over the body.]

The marginal Latin gloss repeats some of the information included in the French verses but also adds material:

Qualiter creator omnium rerum deus hominem duplicis nature, ex anima racionali et humana carne, in principio nobilem creauit; et qualiter anima ex sue creacionis priuilegio super corpus dominium possidebit.¹⁷

[How God the Creator of all things in the beginning created man noble, with a two-fold nature, from a rational soul and human flesh; and how the soul from the privilege of its creation held dominion over the body.]

The Latin gloss emphasizes the double nature of mankind, and does so in theological phrasing, whereas the French stanza, though mentioning the body, focuses on the soul's dominance and the importance of reason in God's original scheme of creation. The body receives attention in the second stanza, but there it is “frele char” (line 12); and because God rules over the soul with love, no offense or “foldelit”—these associated with the body—can enslave the soul. The third stanza first broaches the subject of marriage—the soul contains reason and “measure,” while the body “Avera la bone espouse en mariage” (line 18)—but the gloss says nothing about marriage even though marriage is the balade cycle's chief topic. To a certain extent the differences between text and gloss arise from the differences between verse and prose, French and Latin. But an important element is the distinction between a balade text whose subject is love and marriage, on the one hand, and the commentary, on the other. This is the kind of distinction pointed up by text and explanation in Dante's Vita nuova.

Chaucer, as I say, never wrote rhyme royal stanzas in this subject—at least his extant verse reveals nothing of this theological, didactic cast. Perhaps the closest Chaucer came to the opening stanzas of the Traitié were the description of souls in The Parliament of Fowls (lines 57-91) or the invocation to Venus in the Proem of Troilus book 3. Considered from another viewpoint, a prosodic viewpoint, the Traitié resembles Chaucer's verse experiments, Anelida and Arcite and The Complaint of Mars. Those two works, like the Traitié, attempt to combine narrative form with lyric; and both are considered to be less than satisfactory as narrative or lyric. (Anelida and Arcite is of course incomplete.) The narrative, story sections of Anelida and Mars are in rhyme royal, but the meditations on the story—the strophe and antistrophe of Anelida, the actual “compleynt” section of Mars—are in other balade schemes. Gower never varies his stanzas in the Traitié: he always writes three rhyme royal stanzas, that is to say, balades without envoys. Yet the tension between narrative and lyric, and the unfortunate consequences for the works as narrative or lyric, are similar in Chaucer's works and in the Traitié. The balladry is subordinate to the narrative story or thesis concerning married love; the Traitié, as its title implies, is more of a treatise than a poem.

This is not to say that the Traitié is a failure in what it attempts, in its unique genre. The concept behind the Traitié is bold and experimental. Gower's concept resembles the central idea behind macaronic lyrics, which combine one form of discourse (the vernacular, with its special connotations) with another (usually Latin, with its often theological overtones). The treatise framework and Latin glosses emphasize the doctrinal points about virginity, marriage, and adultery; the rhyme-royal verses stress the human, emotional situations within the theological framework.

A good example occurs in “Balade 5,” on the marriage sacrament, whose refrain is “Sa foi mentir n'est pas a l'omme honeste.” The Latin gloss speaks of the sacredness of marriage, how its bonds must not be dissolved. The poem's second stanza even locates wedlock in the context of the Incarnation:

De l'espousailes la profession
Valt plus d'assetz qe jeo ne puiss descrire:
Soubtz cell habit prist incarnacion
De la virgine cil q'est nostre Sire:
Par quoi, des toutes partz qui bien remire,
En l'ordre de si tresseintisme geste
Sa foi mentir n'est pas a l'omme honeste.

[The professing of wedlock is more valuable a thing than I can describe. Under this mantle our Lord took flesh from the Virgin Mary. From this, whoever examines the entire situation, in the order of so holy an act, it is not right that a man's faith should lie.]

The French is formal and impressive, the lines partly enjambed, with the intent of contrasting the high worth of the holy family, under whose auspices Christ was born, and the adulterer, who breaks faith with his sacred marriage vows, his “profession” of wedlock. The high style contributes to the sense of outrage in the climactic refrain line: “Sa foi mentir. …”

The rhyme-royal form heightens and underscores the thought through three principal structural units (indicated by Macaulay's colons). First, Gower articulates the high worth of marriage; then, he links that worth with Christ, source of value, rhyming “profession” with “incarnacion.” Finally, he sets up his final line by adducing the holy act, “si tresseintisme geste,” and undercuts the thought with the adulterer, the “spousebreech” in English. The rhyme word in the couplet, “honeste,” is normally positive, of course, but here the point is that it is not “honeste”—respectable, honorable, worthy, proper, appropriate—for a man to give the lie to his marriage vows.

Gower's skilled use of this form may be compared with Chaucer's prosody in, say, The Parliament of Fowls, 141-47, where the stanza construction is similar:

These vers of gold and blak iwriten were,
Of whiche I gan astoned to beholde.
For which that oon encresede ay my fere
And with that other gan myn herte bolde;
That oon me hette, that other dide me colde;
No wit hadde I, for errour, for to chese
To entre or flen, or me to save or lese.

Here too, as in Gower's French stanza, there are strong stops after lines two and four, although Chaucer provides a stronger sense of a couplet (as often in his rhyme-royal stanzas) through the end-stopped fifth line, which forces a pause before “No wit hadde I.” Gower's concluding formula begins in line five, with “Par quoi,” which connects the Incarnation with the couplet material. The strength of Chaucer's stanza is its imitation, through prosody, of the narrator's psychological confusion: he does not know whether to enter the garden or to flee. The strength of Gower's stanza is the contrast of ideas—more external than psychological—between high doctrinal idealism and human failing.

III

In Praise of Peace, addressed to the new king Henry IV (hence 1399-1400), is an occasional poem of 385 rhyme-royal verses with a seven-line Latin poem at the beginning and a fifty-six line Latin epistolary poem at the conclusion.¹⁸ The English poem is laudatory and somewhat hortatory, pitched in such a way as to offer a poetic confirmation of Henry's legitimacy to govern England. We hear much about God's justice, “pourveiance,” and the “lawe of riht” in relation to Henry's succession—as if God had been preparing England for this moment when Henry should step in and rescue the land from its woes. Macaulay commends the extended lyric as “not without some merit,” “dignified,” and “craftsmanlike” in execution (Vol. 3, p. 551). In fact its strengths are those of the Chaucerian moral balades like Truth or Lak of Stedfastnesse: dignified appeals to authority, decorous citing of proverbial wisdom, and especially linking of morality with political theory.

In Praise of Peace is an extended meditation on the lawful grounds for rulership. Its political theory seems to derive from the Lancastrian political myth; for Henry labored to portray his kingship as divinely inspired, as underwritten by his ancestry, and as approved by the people (see lines 8-14). So while Gower affirms the necessity of war, his actual point is rather that peace is better than war. He draws an implicit contrast between the old regime (Richard), which he compares with pagan tyrannies, and Henry's regime, which he characterizes as grounded in Christian principles of right kingship. Alexander conquered the world through might, he observes, but his realm did not endure because “Al was vengance and infortune of sinne” (49). But now, he testifies, “the feith of Crist is come a place / Among the princes in this erthe hiere” (50-51), so princes should conduct themselves like Christians:

Good is teschue werre, and natheles
A kyng may make werre uppon his right,
For of bataile the final ende is pees.
Thus stant the lawe, that a worthi knyght
Uppon his trouthe may go to the fight;
Bot if so were that he myghte chese,
Betre is the pees, of which may no man lese.

(64-70)

Even as Gower praises Henry, he advises him to act justly, with the implication that he might not do so. He uses his praise, that is, to suggest what he thinks ought to be done, which is a time-honored function of forensic and epideictic rhetoric. At the same time he places his panegyric and advice in a context of moral philosophy, as was his customary practice in other writings.

In a finely-crafted stanza, stanza 15, Gower invokes the ubi sunt? motif to characterize kingships based solely on worldly glory and victory in warfare:

For vein honour or for the worldes good
Thei that whilom the stronge werres made,
Wher be thei now? Bethenk wel in thi mod.
The day is goon, the nyght is derk and fade,
Her crualte, which mad hem thanne glade,
Thei sorwen now, and yit have noght the more;
The blod is schad, which no man mai restore.

(99-105)

There is a monitory quality to this stanza—a lyric-within-lyric sense that owes much to thirteenth and fourteenth-century moral poetry such as the lyrics in the Vernon MS. Monitory lyrics alert readers to the uncertain moment of death and impending Judgment; and they feature expressions of regret such as “hadde I wiste” and “al to late, al to late / wanne þe bere ys ate gate.”¹⁹ A number of lyrics—such as “Whon Men beoþ muriest at heor Mele” from the Vernon MS, which has as its refrain “And sum tyme þenk on ȝuster-day”; or “Al it is fantam þat we mid fare”—urge us to remember or look to our end.²⁰ In Gower's stanza, the rapid swings of dark and light, sorrow and elation, all bracketed by the moral context, are carried especially by the rhyme words: “stronge werres made” into “derk and fade” and then “glade”; but “glade” drops to “Thei sorwen now” and “noght the more,” which rhymes with “no man mai restore.”

In another moral stanza, constructed on different principles but every bit as skillfully crafted as the ubi sunt? stanza, Gower invokes the nine worthies—classical, Hebrew, and “modern”—to expose the fruitlessness of war:

See Alisandre, Ector and Julius,
See Machabeu, David and Josue,
See Charlemeine, Godefroi, Arthus,
Fulfild of werre and of mortalite.
Here fame abit, bot al is vanite;
For deth, which hath the werres under fote,
Hath made an ende of which ther is no bote.

(281-87)

The anaphora of the first three lines prepares for the admonition of line 5, which acknowledges their fame but does not honor the results of their wars. The verses of praise build to the caesura in line 5, when the sentiment turns against the great heroes: “bot al is vanite.” The couplet simply but effectively underscores the moral, wisdom point.

Toward the close of In Praise of Peace (lines 330-71) Gower turns to the issue of pity, a corollary of peace. Pity, according to Gower, will keep away war and cruelty and will promote charity and peace (330-36). Finally, he petitions Henry directly on behalf of pity, and names himself as Henry's servant:

And to thin erthli pris, so as y can,
Which everi man is holde to commende,
I, Gower, which am al thi liege man,
This lettre unto thin excellence y sende,
As y which evere unto my lives ende
Wol praie for the stat of thi persone
In worschipe of thi sceptre and of thi throne.

(372-78)

These verses, Gower's penultimate stanza, are in Gower's high style and might be compared with the penultimate stanza of Chaucer's Troilus, which mentions Gower and “Strode” (perhaps Radulphus Strode) as well as Christ:

O moral Gower, this book I directe
To the and to the, philosophical Strode,
To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte,
Of youre benignites and zeles goode.
And to that sothfast Crist, that starf on rode,
With al myn herte of mercy evere I preye,
And to the Lord right thus I speke and seye. …

(5. 1856-62)

Gower's stanzas are somewhat more predictable than Chaucer's, but Gower's verses are as confident and “craftsmanlike” as Chaucer's.

In Praise of Peace is a well-developed occasional poem that exploits topics Gower has written on in other works. These topics include division in the land, the decline of religion, the necessity of strong, just leadership, and the world's mutability. Gower was expert in these topics, having developed them at some length in his three great longer poems,²¹ but in this lyric he treats them in rhyme-royal, Chaucerian verses which impart to the topics a dignity and high seriousness, even a kind of elegance, that they might have lacked in octosyllabics.

IV

Gower's most arresting use of rhyme royal occurs in Amans's twelve-stanza “supplicacioun” or letter of complaint to Venus at the close of Confessio Amantis (8. 2217-2300), beginning “The wofull peine of loves maladie.” This is a remarkable lyric within narrative that appears at an emotional high point, after Amans has heard Genius's exemplary stories but before he hears Venus's verdict on his unfortunate plight as senex amans, the aged lover. The “supplicacioun” offers a traditional lover's complaint, in conventional language deriving from French dits and similar to Chaucer's complaints. But it appears in Gower's otherwise octosyllabic and somewhat old-fashioned narrative poem—old-fashioned because Chaucer had been leading the way in rhyme royal for about fifteen years before Gower's third recension of the Confessio.²² The fully-established octosyllabics—more than 32,000 verses before the letter of complaint—only intensifies the break between the four-stress couplets and the rhyme-royal stanzas. In this respect the “supplicacioun” differs from the formal songs and letters in Chaucer's Troilus—bracketed in the manuscripts as Canticus Troili (3. 1744-71), Canticus Troili (5. 638-44), Litera Troili (5. 1317-1421), and Litera Criseydis (5. 1590-1631), lyric set-pieces which decorously harmonize with and naturally flow from the rest of the narrative.

The “supplicacioun” contains a deft intermingling of formal complaint (including mythological subjects and learned allusions), courtly terms, rhetoric, and self-mockery (as noted earlier). The tone is plangent if not lugubrious; and Gower combines a high style with occasional informal diction. In the first stanza Amans, like the narrator of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess,²³ formally complains of a love-sickness for which there is no medical cure:

The wofull peine of loves maladie,
Ayein the which mai no phisique availe,
Min herte hath so bewhaped with sotie,
That wher so that I reste or I travaile,
I finde it evere redy to assaile
Mi resoun, which that can him noght defende:
Thus seche I help, whereof I mihte amende.

(2217-23)

The initial formality (“Ayein the which”) is somewhat undercut by the colloquial expression “bewhaped with sotie,” which literally means something like “stunned into foolishness” or “befuddled with folly” (Peck).²⁴ The whole stanza is a dilatation of “peine” in love, which has disoriented Amans to the extent that his reason is threatened. Only the last line, which is not part of a true couplet, diverges from the dilatated topic, for the final line launches a different thought: Amans will seek redress of his erotic grievance. This seeking redress is, of course, the efficient cause of the letter of complaint to Cupid and Venus, which in turn prepares the way for the excruciatingly comic dénouement of the narrative, when Amans learns that he is too old to serve as lover.

Gower's rhyme-royal verses are, I submit, exceptionally well crafted to their purpose: exposing Amans's pain and his urgent plea for mercy. Like so many of Chaucer's complaints, they argue something personal rather than something doctrinal (as in the Traitié). Stanza three of the “supplicacioun,” for example, displays a Chaucerian adeptness for portraying feelings and considerable skill in the Troilus-measure:

The resoun of my wit it overpasseth,
Of that Nature techeth me the weie
To love, and yit no certein sche compasseth
Hou I schal spede, and thus betwen the tweie
I stonde, and not if I schal live or deie.
For thogh reson ayein my will debate,
I mai noght fle, that I ne love algate.

(2231-37)

This stanza compares favorably with the stanza of similar content from The Parliament of Fowls (quoted above). Like Chaucer's narrator, Amans feels caught between two human conditions: loving successfully or failing in love, living or dying. Three lines are enjambed, with awkward (yet deliberate) pauses in mid-line after “love,” “spede,” and “stonde,” all of which convey a sense of informal musing—love seeking understanding. The effect is quite different from what Gower manages in the Traitié and even in the Cinkante balades, which contains fine verses, skillfully executed in the French mode, but not the colloquial facility of Amans's complaint against Nature. Gower also builds his stanza toward the couplet, which counterposes—in a way anticipating Sidney's verses to Stella—reason, which would urge flight, and will, which forces him to love. Gower precedes his couplet with a strong end-stopped line, although this is not his usual practice in the “supplicacioun,” where the last three lines often comprise a unit.

In the fourth stanza, cited earlier as the Pandarus-like stanza, Gower/Amans first introduces mythological material, and this material accomplishes at least two things. First, it places Amans's plight in a mythological context: what happens to Amans has happened and will happen to others. Second, it provides a special (high) tone against which Amans's all too human condition can be juxtaposed:

Upon miself is thilke tale come,
Hou whilom Pan, which is the god of kinde,
With love wrastlede and was overcome:
For evere I wrastle and evere I am behinde,
That I no strengthe in al min herte finde,
Wherof that I mai stonden eny throwe;
So fer mi wit with love is overthrowe.

(2238-44)

Love conquered even Pan, the nature god, writes Amans, invoking the wrestling metaphor, which is the stanza's governing trope and which leads directly to the witty rhyme of the couplet. Amans claims that his heart has no strength to stand for “eny throwe” (any space of time) on his (figurative) feet: in this way his mental capacities (“wit”) are continually “overthrown” by love. Pan, though a god, was one of the less reputable gods, and wrestling a lower-class sport;²⁵ hence, Amans is doubly undercut.

In another Chaucerian stanza, Amans speaks of the world's mutability in broad philosophical (Boethian) and mythological terms:

I se the world stonde evere upon eschange,
Nou wyndes loude, and nou the weder softe;
I mai sen ek the grete mone change,
And thing which nou is lowe is eft alofte;
The dredfull werres into pes fulofte
Thei torne; and evere is Danger in o place,
Which wol noght change his will to do me grace.

(2259-65)

The structural principles of this stanza I take to be typical of Gower's rhyme-royal verses: lines 1-2 form a unit; lines 3-4 form another unit syntactically related to the first (“I se”; “I mai sen ek”); and lines 5-7 form a unit with no strong concluding couplet. This stanza construction might be compared with the opening stanza of Troilus book 2, which also features a 2, 2, and 3 structure, no well-defined couplet, and variable weather:

Owt of thise blake wawes for to saylle,
O wynd, o wynd, the weder gynneth clere;
For in this see the boot hath swych travaylle,
Of my connyng, that unneth I it steere.
This see clepe I the tempestous matere
Of disespeir that Troilus was inne;
But now of hope the kalendes bygynne.(26)

This is Chaucer's high style, complete with an O altitudo and the epic boat metaphor. Gower's style seldom rises to this height, for he prefers, as he says in a different context, “the middel weie” between high and informal styles. Still, the first four lines of Gower's stanza 7 from the “supplicacioun” display the subtleties of rhyme royal, a skill learned from Chaucer and from his own experiments in French baladry.

The middle stanzas of the “supplicacioun” invoke classical mythology as do many of the “examples” in the Traitié; but the allusions in Amans's letter function more integrally than do the Traitié's stories of adultery. The story of Pan helps to explain Amans's personality. Earlier, he had pointed out that he does not drink from the Jovial barrel of good fortune but rather from the “bitter cuppe” (2256). Finally, he turns to Ovid, “the grete clerc,” and his tales of love, Cupid, and Venus. These are not figures cited to bolster an abstract doctrinal argument (such as that in the Traitié concerning marriage and adultery) but characters who will play a prominent—indeed, climactic—role in the narrative. The letter of complaint is addressed to Cupid and Venus, and Cupid eventually will extract the “dart” of love from his breast. So these are no mere allusions to mythic or historic personalities but key players in the unfolding drama of Amans's self-awareness.

Gower's expertise and maturity with the form may be observed also in stanza 10, in which Amans addresses the main point of his “supplicacioun”:

Forthi to you, Cupide and Venus bothe,
With al myn hertes obeissance I preie,
If ye were ate ferste time wrothe,
Whan I began to love, as I you seie,
Nou stynt, and do thilke infortune aweie,
So that Danger, which stant of retenue
With my ladi, his place mai remue.

(2280-86)

The natural stresses in this stanza fall on the important words: “Cupide” and “Venus” in line 1, “hertes obeissance” in line 2, “wrothe” in line 3, “Nou stynt” in line 5, “Danger” and “stant” in line 6, and “ladi” and “remue” in line 7. Of these, the spondaic quality of “Nou stynt” is especially noteworthy and is reminiscent—again, to my ear—of Pandarus's urgent advice to Criseyde that she “Go love”:

Thenk ek how elde wasteth every houre
In ech of yow a partie of beautee;
And therefore er that age the devoure,
Go love; for old, ther wol no wight of thee.

(2. 393-96)

This counsel underscores Pandarus's carpe-diem philosophy, articulated earlier, of “Cache it anon, lest aventure slake!” (2. 291). And like Gower's “Nou stynt,” “Go love” occurs at a climactic moment, after Pandarus has carefully spurred curiosity and shortly after he has revealed Troilus's love for her, at line 319.

The “supplicacioun” represents Gower's most “Chaucerian” moment, so to speak. The language is natural within the artifice of the rhyme-royal stanzas, which Gower's contemporaries might have found constraining or problematic.²⁷ The whole enterprise is witty, especially in hindsight; for shortly after the “supplicacioun” Amans, with his elaborate pose as unrequited lover, is exposed, to his own mortification, as too old to be a courtly lover.²⁸ Gower exploits the rhyme-royal form to good advantage: it helps elevate the “supplicacioun” to a unique status, since it differs formally—and markedly—from the rest of the narrative. It also helps Gower strike the proper tone, a tone of high courtly idealism, which could only be effected through proficiency in the form. For the “supplicacioun” to succeed, as it does, Gower/Amans must be convincing as the courtly lover, writing the conventional lover's complaint. The evidence suggests, I believe, that Gower achieved this proficiency in rhyme royal through study of the master craftsman in the form: Chaucer.

V

Gower is so adept in rhyme royal that I want to speak of his “art of imitation.” We have heard about Chaucer's “good ear,” referring to his ability to imitate, or parody, the poetry of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries;²⁹ but Gower has his own fine ear, with a sensitivity to the strengths and subtleties of poetic nuance. I hope I will not be misunderstood as saying that Gower's use of rhyme royal constitutes slavish imitation of Chaucer or that Gower's best moments in the form derive from similar passages in Chaucer. My point is rather that Gower recognized the potential of rhyme royal for his own poetry, and he adapted it for his own purposes. So far as we know, Chaucer never wrote French balades in rhyme royal (or in a language other than English); nor did he write an extended occasional lyric in the form; nor did he include rhyme royal within his octosyllabic narratives. These are Gower's contributions, Gower's prosodic ideas, and they have their own interests and strengths.

Gower's use of rhyme royal does not display the wide-ranging facility of Chaucer's verses. There are several good reasons for this. First, Chaucer simply exploited the form, which he may have invented (at least for English poetry), more often than Gower: he had more practice in it. Second, he applied rhyme royal to narrative works as well as to balades, and narrative can include different possibilities within it. Third, he used rhyme-royal dialogue—an important example of the possibilities within narrative—which is something Gower never attempted. True, Gower addresses the “supplicacioun” to Cupid and Venus, so there is something like a “voice” speaking rhyme-royal verse; but this is not the kind of dialogue one finds, for example, in Troilus, where Pandarus and Criseyde speak in something close to sticomythia:

“Nay, therof spak I nought, ha, ha!” quod she;
“As helpe me God, ye shenden every deel!”
“O, mercy, dere nece,” anon quod he,
“What so I spak, I mente naught but wel,
By Mars, the god that helmed is of steel!
Now beth naught wroth, my blood, my nece dere.”
“Now wel,” quod she, “foryeven be it here!”

(2. 589-95)

Nor does Gower attempt to break beyond the confines of the rhyme-royal stanza, as does Chaucer, for example, in the following (rare) instance (again, from Troilus 2):

Criseyde aros, no lenger she ne stente,
But streght into hire closet wente anon,
And set hire doun as stylle as any ston,
And every word gan up and down to wynde
That he had seyd, as it com hire to mynde,
And wex somdel astoned in hire thought
Right for the newe cas. …

(598-604)

But Gower attempted other things, in lyric forms—French courtly and didactic balades, extended English occasional and political verse, and complaint within octosyllabic narrative—that Chaucer did not try, perhaps because he would have found such forms uninteresting or merely experimental. Chaucer's artistic taste has survived and has been endorsed by later generations in ways that Gower's has not, at least not in the present critical climate, which values (for the most part) mirth over morality and native over foreign poetry. Gower developed an art of prosodic imitation, from French poetry and from Chaucer (himself much influenced by French poetics), by which he adapted what he admired in others' verses to his own concerns—the universal condition of love (Cinkante balades), the contrast between the high profession of marriage and the evils of adultery (Traitié), the importance of peace to statecraft (In Praise of Peace), and the virtues of courtly idealism (the “supplicacioun” or letter of complaint from Confessio Amantis). Within his art of imitation Gower contributes something substantial and important to Ricardian poetics; and we should acknowledge this contribution and give Gower his due as a skillful poetic craftsman.

Notes

1. See Tauno F. Mustanoja, “Chaucer's Prosody,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 82, and his references to Edwin Guest and Theodore Maynard. See also Paull F. Baum, Chaucer's Verse (Durham: Duke University Press, 1961), 48, who suggests that Chaucer might have invented rhyme royal by dropping the fourth b-rhyme from The Monk's Tale stanza (ababbcbc); and Derek Brewer, An Introduction to Chaucer (London: Longman, 1984), 77, who thinks Boccaccio was responsible for the “splendid metre.” Most recently, James I. Wimsatt has traced English balade forms to France and especially to Machaut. See “Chaucer and His French Contemporaries,” in The Chaucer Newsletter 11 (1989): 1-2.

2. “The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature,” PMLA 94 (1979): 62-76. “There is reason to believe,” says Stevens, “that Chaucer, too, though he was younger [than Gower], would have been familiar with the practice of the puy and the crowning of the chauncon reale. Quite possibly, it was here that he was first exposed to the rhyme royal format” (p. 64). Stevens believes that the adjective “royal” in phrases for rhyme royal (as in balades ryale) derives from the practice of directing balades to royalty. See also Donald R. Howard, “Rhyme Royal and the London Puy,” in Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), 266-68.

3. References to Chaucer's works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). The three rhyme-royal poems not ascribed to Chaucer are Against Women Unconstant, Complaynt d'Amours, and A Balade of Complaint.

4. John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (New York: New York University Press, 1964), x.

5. John Gower, 81-83. See also Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1977), 196, citing Fisher; and Stevens, “The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature,” 63-64.

6. John Gower, 67.

7. See The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899-1901), 1: lxxiii. All citations from Gower's writings are from this edition.

8. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 994. Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 297 says “c. 1382.”

9. Gower's possible indebtedness to Chaucer for this form is a subject for another essay. The eight-line stanza was common in French balades.

10. For conjectures about Chaucer's French verse, perhaps written in his youth, see The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 631, and Arthur K. Moore, “Chaucer's Lost Songs,” JEGP 48 (1949): 196-208. See also James I. Wimsatt's general discussion of Chaucer's relation to French poetry and the French language: “Chaucer and French Poetry,” in Geoffrey Chaucer: Writers and Their Background, ed. Derek Brewer (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 110.

11. The Complete Works, 1: lxxiii. It is noteworthy that Ten Brink made a similar argument for the construction of Chaucer's rhyme royal stanza, although the argument has been vigorously, and I believe correctly, refuted. See Mustanoja, “Chaucer's Prosody,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Rowland, 82-83.

12. Deschamps may have used decasyllabics for variety. He wrote more than 1000 balades, and he varied the stanza length (from seven to fifteen verses), the syllables, the rhymes, and the envoys. See the description of his balades in Oeuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud, 11 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1903), 10: 115-21. For Froissart's use of decasyllabic balades, see, for example, L'espinette amoureuse, in Oeuvres de Froissart, ed. A. Scheler, 3 vols. (Brussels: Devaux, 1870 1872), 1: 129-30 and 191-92. For Charles d'Orleans, see John Fox, The Lyric Poetry of Charles d'Orléans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 106: “More than two-thirds of the ballades are written in octosyllabic verse. … The first twelve ballades suggest that a balance was originally sought between the two measures, since six are written in octosyllabics, six in decasyllabics, but after that the shorter measure prevailed. Charles's growing attachment to the more congenial octosyllabic line is revealed elsewhere” (p. 106).

13. For purposes of thematic analysis I do not distinguish between the eight-line and seven-line stanza. The seven-line stanzas include the first dedicatory balade and balades 3, 4, 4a, 6-8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 35-38, 44-49, and the final envoy. In the manuscript two balades were numbered 4 (hence 4 and 4a).

14. Fisher calls the Balades “a balade sequence” and compares it, with some justice, to sonnet sequences of the Renaissance (p. 75). For a plot summary of the Cinkante balades, see Macaulay, 1: lxxv-lxxviii (“Matter and Style”).

15. Macaulay in his “Glossary and Index of Proper Names” glosses the verb attendont “wait for, expect, be destined to” (p. 482), but I think the sense of the passage demands “serve,” as in Chaucer's Troilus: “For I, that God of Loves servantz serve …” (1.15) or as in Mirour de l'omme (attendance): “Ly autre sept [sins], que d'attendance / Au deble sont par tout soubgit” (271-73).

16. As quoted by Macaulay, 1: lxxi-ii. Macaulay found this statement in Warton's History of English Poetry (1774).

17. There is a misprint in Macaulay's edition (p. 379), which reads: “… anima ex sue crear / cionis priuilegio supe- / corpus dominium possidebit.” The “r” and the hyphen were transposed in printing.

18. In Praise of Peace and the Latin verses at the end, in elegiacs, are separate works though linked by a colophon. The colophon says “Explicit carmen de pacis commendacione” and, of the Latin verses, “Et nunc sequitur epistola …” (p. 492). Macaulay prints the Trentham MS version of In Praise of Peace, with variants from Thynne's 1532 edition of Chaucer, which has manuscript status.

19. For “al to late,” see the poem titled Proprietates Mortis in English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 130.

20. Both poems in Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown and rev. G. V. Smithers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), 143-48 and 56 respectively.

21. See Fisher, John Gower, chap. 4.

22. Gower's first recension, dedicated to Richard II and Chaucer, dates from 1390, although he began work on it some four years before this, about when Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde. See Fisher, John Gower, 116-27; Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (New York: Holt, 1968), xxxii; Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 190, 297.

23. See Book of the Duchess lines 1-40, esp. 35-40. Chaucer's narrator characterizes himself as “a mased thyng” (12), which is the equivalent of Gower's “bewhaped with sotie.”

24. “Bewhaped” is an unusual word used only in the past participle. It seems to be parallel with awappen (past participle awaped) and perhaps related to wappen, to strike, hit and wappe, blow. The form bewhaped occurs also in early romances. See MED s.v. awhaped and bewhapen.

25. Pan, Chaucer's “god of kynde,” half man, half goat, was not an Olympian and was best known for his pursuit of women and nymphs; his fortuitous discovery of Panpipes from reeds; and his loss to Apollo, the great Olympian god of lyric poetry, in a musical contest. Chaucer's Miller was a champion wrestler (CT I.548) as was Sir Thopas (VII. 740); and Gamelyn, hero of The Tale of Gamelyn (mid-fourteenth century) was a physical man and a wrestler.

26. See also Troilus 2. 778-84 and 946-52 for similar constructions. Stanzas 5, 7, and 12 of Gower's “supplicacioun” might be said to have a 2, 2, and 3 construction; stanza 11 has a full stop after line 4; and stanzas 2 and 3 have a full stop after line 5. We might safely conclude from this variety that Gower did not revert to a single model for his rhyme-royal stanzas but rather let the content determine the stanzas' shapes.

27. See, for example, Hoccleve's attempts at rhyme royal in The Regement of Princes, and Furnivall's somewhat desperate attempts to make the verses scan in some recognizable pattern: Hoccleve's Works, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS, E. S. 72 (London: Kegan Paul, 1897), stanzas 289 (p. 73), 706 (p. 178), 711 (p. 179), and passim. See also the effects at moral rhyme-royal baladry of “In ffull grett hevenesse myn herte ys pwyght” and “See much, sey lytill, and lerne to suffre in tyme,” both in Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 266-68 and 279-80 respectively. These are only samples; others occur in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 72-73 (rhymes “chiere” with “champioun” in stanza 1), 87 (an especially egregious example), 103, 130-32, etc. Some of the above-cited lyrics may not have been intended as rhyme royal, despite the rhyme schemes. The fate of rhyme royal in the fifteenth century deserves further study.

28. For an especially fine treatment of this “dry and rueful comedy,” see Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry, 211.

29. Dorothy Everett, “Chaucer's ‘Good Ear,’” Review of English Studies 23 (1947): 201-8 and Mustanoja, “Chaucer's Prosody,” 70.