[In the following essay, Norton-Smith disagrees with the critic Alain Renoir that the image of the binding knot simply expresses permanence of union but claims rather that it also suggests, among other things, remembrance and the union of personified ideas.]

Lines 17-28 of Lydgate's Gentlewoman's Lament indicate that a precise classification of metaphors is always difficult. Mr. Renoir in a recent article¹ assumes that all knots discussed by him are ‘binding knots used to express permanence of union’. He suggests that Lydgate's poetic ability is measurable by the appropriateness of, and number of changes which he rings on the fundamental image. But it is possible to argue that these metaphors may have an organisation which does not quite tally with Mr. Renoir's description. The excellent lines (unfortunately the poem tails off after a promising start):

For whane we were ful tendre of yeeris,
Flouring boþe in oure chyldheed,
Wee sette to nothing oure desyres,
Sauf vn-to playe and tooke noon heede,
And gedred flowres in þe meede.
Of youþe þis was oure moost plesaunce,
And Love þoo gaf me for my meede
A knotte in hert of remembraunce
Which þat neuer may beo vnbounde
Hit is so stedfast and so truwe;
For alwey oone I wol beo founde
His womman and chaunge for no nuwe.

are explained by Mr. Renoir as follows:

Here, the image of the ‘Knotte in hert’ serves a double purpose. Not only does it emphasize the relentlessness of the gentlewoman's grief, but it makes us visualize a quasi-physical aspect of it.

The elements in ‘a knotte in hert of remembraunce’ are extremely difficult to identify. Although ll. 25-8 elaborate the image and ultimately identify it with a love-knot, it is not entirely clear that the fundamental image is that of a love-knot. The phrase ‘a knot in the hert’ occurs in Thomas Usk's Testament II.4.136 ff:

But for-as-moche as every herte that hath caught ful love is tyed with queynt knittinges, thou shalt understande that in love and thilke foresayd blisse toforn declared in this[e] provinges shal hote the knot in the hert.

Whatever the meaning of the phrase in the passage, Mr. Schaar's explanation of it² as an equivalent of summum bonum derived from Genius's words in Alan's De Planctu Naturæ (prose VIII): ‘nodus dilectionis præcordialis’ must be rejected. Præcordialis is an adjective and goes with dilectionis. Alan's phrase might be rendered ‘the knot of sincere love’ or even ‘the bond of close love’.

Contextually, Usk's knot seems to draw its illustrative vitality from ‘knittings’ that are ‘tyed’, and the further description (II.4.142) ‘the knotte in the herte muste ben from one to an-other’ suggests that Usk has a love-knot in mind. But Lydgate's knot in heart which Love gave the undesigning child is not at first any such knot. The basic image of ll. 23-4 is that of a knot of remembrance—a knot tied as a reminder.³ The child's reminder may never be undone for the action which Love reminds her eventually to perform is beyond the woman's character and social station. In the next stanza the image is to be developed into a love-knot, but one of a peculiar kind since it is not ‘from one to an-other’ and celebrates no union. It is simply a compact between the woman and her own desire which remains pathetically tied in ‘remembraunce’. The poem ends on this note:

To haue holly my remembraunce
On his persone, so mychil I think.

The unknowing child of ll. 17-24 cannot be presented with a fully developed amatory symbol. It is in the next stanza that the image is ‘matured’ into one appropriate to a young woman. The sequence of tenses in the passage implies such a progression.

Mr. Renoir further suggests that the use of the binding knot in the Temple of Glas ll. 1229-30 is only a simple one and appropriate for a rather colourless conclusion to a rather vague poem. The lines:

Eternalli, be bond of assurance,
The cnott is knytt which mai not be vnbovnd
That al þe goddis of þis alliaunce
…
Shal bere record and euermore be wreke
On which of ȝou his trouþe first doþe breke.

may appear weak if they simply amplify ‘þis alliaunce’ in line 1231. But surely the alliaunce has been disposed of in ll. 1106 ff. where it had been described in detail:

Þen þoȝt I saw, with a golden chayne
Venus anon enbracen and constrein
Her boþ[e] hertes, in oon forto perseuer
Whiles þat þei liue and neuer to desseuer …

Dr. Schick in his notes to this passage did not consider the colour of the chain—but colour is important for it is stressed by Lydgate in line 1225 in the parallel image of the two hearts shut in one lock by Venus's ‘key of gold so wel depured’.⁵ Venus's golden chain is certainly meant to be distinguished from the ordinary chain of positive law (marriage) which binds the lady to her husband (ll. 335, 338). What Lydgate has in mind is Chaucer's ‘feyre cheyne of love’ which, as a symbol of universal matrimony, binds together the Elements and man and woman in wedlock. The colour possibly has been taken from Jean's adaptation of Boethius (4.m.6.) in the Roman ll. 16785 ff.:

Si gart, tant m'a Deus enouree
La bele chæine doree
Qui les quatre elementȝ enlace.

The knot of ll. 1129-30 is fashioned in the golden chain of Venus—a chain at one time or other connected with marriage, the bond of the elements, union of personified ideas, and Universal Mind.⁶ Venus in this poem acts towards the lovers rationally. She is a Venus wholly in accord with Alan's or Chaucer's Nature: that Venus of Reson and Sensuallytee who is described by Nature as sometimes working in harmony with Nature's laws. What Venus offers the lovers in the Temple of Glas is a resolution which must not contradict the matrimonial bond. The lovers must respect the prior legal claim of earthly marriage since their own celestial, golden law of love is its prototype.

Thus, it may be seen that this knot is not a simple, colourless binding-knot for we must take into account the other complimentary descriptions of Venus's alliaunce. What is important in Venus's binding of the lovers cannot be contained in any single image—its final emphasis is the result of a building up of several images. When Gray in his Remarks on the Poems of Lydgate spoke of an age which made its poetic effects by a long accumulation of detail he was referring to the art of narrative. He might well have included the art of metaphor.

Notes

1. ‘The Binding Knot: Three Uses of One Image in Lydgate's Poetry’, Neophilologus XXXI pp 202 ff.

2. English Studies 37, pp. 260-1.

3. The earliest clear reference to such knots recorded by the OED seems to be circa 1449.

4. Cf. Knight's Tale A2130 and Boethius, De Cons. 2.m.8, 4.m.6.

5. Cf. Romaunt 2087 ff (Roman 1999 ff).

6. The history of the golden chain has been traced somewhat inconclusively by Emil Wolff, Die Goldene Kette, Hamburg, 1947. The origin and exact philosophical emphasis attached to the phrase by the Middle Ages still await a coherent treatment. The phrase denotive of love in indissoluble union occurs in the De Planctu Naturæ (prose IX) in the final words of Generosity's panegyric on Nature ‘… prout intime cognationis expressa parilitas expetit, me tibi aurea dilectionis cathena connectit’. The phrase would then appear to have been transferred from this specialised context to that of the chain of the elements by Jean de Meung in the passage quoted above. The two metres of Boethius more than suggest the identification and Jean possibly needed no further impulse. A philosophical concept may have lent the identification other kinds of validity, but in philosophy the two chains (one of the Elements, the other of gold) are separate—for one is material, the other immaterial. In Macrobius's Commentum the ‘chain of the elements’ is discussed in book I. 6 and plainly has no extra-physical extension. The ‘golden chain’ is discussed in I.18 where it is derived from Homer and plainly symbolises the Unity of Divine Mind: ‘one splendor lighting up everything’. Plato, although he treats the chain of the elements seriously and at length in Timæus 32c nowhere gives the golden chain the same treatment. He refers to it satirically in the Theætetus 153c where a dig at the Sophists seems to have been intended. The popular commentary of Chalcidius to the Timæus provides no help on passage 32c. The commentaries of William de Conches and William de Thierry are unavailable to this writer. Proclus's Commentary to the Timæus does identify the chain of the elements with Zeus's golden chain. This golden chain is three-fold, consisting of material elements, cause of bodies, and one reason proceeding through all things. It is derived not from Homer but from the Orphic fragment 161. …

   How Proclus's commentary might have reached the ordinary scholar in the Middle Ages remains mysterious. The 14th century commentary on the Timæus, Anon. Oxon., Corpus Christi MS. 243, although including a discussion on the chain of the elements (fol. 153r) shows no special influence of Proclus at this point.