The long and short of it is that rhythm makes things interesting. Without a beat we’re dead. My attempt to read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English begins with knowing something about the iambic pentameter. Soon a delightful rhythm surfaces. If I can’t get five stresses in a line I’m saying it wrong.
What goes down must come up seems like a simple enough concept. But having a sense of rhythm is not inherent in all of us. Like swimming, skipping, or striking a ball, it is a coordination that needs to be taught. Where to speed up, where to pause. Imagine learning to recite Chaucer at a young age!
Whan that Clara with her eager tong
Speaks every syllable, (nicht one is wrong)
Rejoiceth Jack, who sayeth, “Hip Hooray,
She speaketh perfectly, from Zed to A”
Than angels twang thir harpes and they sing
(Sebastian Bach leads all the caroling!),
“To Canterbury this lady hath been sent!
With Chaucer she is perfectly aqueynt.”
MORE ON CHAUCER:
O master dear, and father reverent,
My master Chaucer, flower of eloquence,
Mirror of fructuous entendement,
O universal father in science,
Alas that thou thine excellent prudence
In thy bed mortal mightest not bequeathe….
*
Fader Chaucer fayn wolde han me taught,
But I was dul and learned lite or naught.
These lines by Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426)
[Hoccleve’s praise of “Father Chaucer,” written shortly after Chaucer’s death, is, admittedly, a bit over the top, and I’m not sure that “excellent prudence” is the quality of Chaucer’s that I would pick to praise—but the sense the Chaucer opened something up is very strong here. “Science” = knowledge. (Latin, “scientia,” knowledge.] “Fructuous entendement” = fruitful understanding. “Entendement” is an instance of the French influence on Middle English. “Entendement” is the French word for “understanding.” “Mirror of fructuous entendement” seems somehow to fit James Joyce, whose Bloomsday is Saturday. And Chaucer as “Fader” goes with Sunday—Father’s Day. It is kind of a wonderful thing to be a “mirror of fructuous entendement,” no?]
CHAUCER
An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
[Longfellow’s poem is a sonnet of the Italian variety. Unlike Shakespeare’s sonnets, it doesn’t end in a heroic couplet—the form Chaucer invented. But I like that he calls Chaucer “the poet of the dawn.”]