Each week I receive a certain amount of email concerning my blog posts. The messages are mainly encouraging, but I am sometimes surprised by the source mentioned, as it is not always my blog’s web page. Several in recent weeks refer to encountering an essay on “Senior Correspondent”, a site that appears to anthologize on-line journalistic gerontology for the pleasure and instruction of our fellow-seniors. I know of this site at least by name. Twice I rashly promised to write something for them and twice I ignominiously forgot to do so—at which point the editors sensibly decided that a purloined essay was probably just as good as a commissioned one, and maybe even better, in that it was actual rather than unconvincingly potential.
From
the pirating of my essays I take absolutely no offense—far from it. The truth is the Lord’s, as Augustine
says, and as for the Internet, it’s as free as the air we breathe or the water
from a mountain spring. That I am
a senior is valuably documented by my reduced-fare MetroCard. That I am a correspondent is perhaps
slightly less certain, but still plausible. That I am communicating with other seniors is the subject of
this essay.
Just
yesterday I taught the fifth of six seminars in a Chaucer course I am teaching
at the Evergreen Forum, one of several “adult schools” in our town. The phenomenon of “continuing
education,” an important one nationally, is related to a number of demographic
trends. People are living longer
and healthier lives. The number of
college-educated retirees is quite large in absolute terms, and steadily
increasing. Many retired people,
anticipating perhaps decades of mentally active life, have made such
opportunities as tend to be found especially in the environs of college towns
an important factor in their choice of retirement location.
Seniors
are delightfully tolerant and forgiving as students—which is perhaps a way of
saying they have pretty low expectations.
They also tend to be smart and cultured and to have heard of such historical events as World War II. And the curriculum on offer from the Evergreen Forum is pretty relaxed
too. Among my competitors are
courses with such titles as “Devils, Demons and the Supernatural in
Opera,” “What to Eat? Do Not Worry,” and “Curiouser and
Curiouser: 150 Years of Alice”—all of which I’d like to take myself. Still, the idea of teaching an introductory
Chaucer course on the Middle English text of the “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales seemed a bit eccentric
to me even as I was proposing it. The
question is not really whether you can spend six weeks on 850 lines of poetry,
but whether such an activity can in any sense constitute an “introduction” to Chaucer.
The
answer, I have been delighted to discover, is in the affirmative. I have a full load of thirty students,
and at least half of them already had read some Chaucer. As recently as half a century ago
Chaucer featured in high school English courses, and several of my students
still hold in their memories, after all those years, some or even most of the
first immortal sentence, florid and nearly endless (128 words), with which the
poem begins: Whan that Aprill with his
shoures sote…New students of Chaucer often think, mistakenly, that the
hardest part is the language, but it takes no more than half an hour to correct
that misapprehension, and to bring them to an understanding that a “modern version”
of Chaucer’s text is not merely not the same thing as Chaucer, but something
inevitably feebler and less interesting.
One
can have a great experience for the first time only once, and it is really
rather thrilling to see a septuagenarian first reading, and then really
“getting” some of the great lines in the Prologue for the first time. Take, for example, Chaucer on gold. What Milton would later call “the precious bane”
appears seven times in the Prologue and crucially controls the descriptions of
six of the pilgrims. The spiritual
failures of the Prioress and the Monk, two professional ascetics with high
station but without vocation, are signaled by the inappropriate gold ornaments
that are a part of their accoutrements.
From the Prioress’s string of beads, rather in the manner of a modern
girl’s “charm” bracelet is appended “a brooch of gold full sheene [bright]”, while the Monk fastens the chin-strap
of his cowl in a somewhat extra-ecclesial fashion. “He had of gold
ywroght a ful curious pyn.” To the
Clerk of Oxenford (the original glad learner and glad teacher, incidentally) he
offers the following couplet:
But
al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet
hadde he but litel gold in cofre—
an idea dependent upon a “groaner” of a quibble then
available on the word philosopher,
meaning both an aspirant to wisdom and a money-grubbing alchemist! The concluding couplet of the
description of the medical doctor—the medical profession (Little Pharma,
perhaps?) was often taxed with the charge of cupidity in the fourteenth
century—is less kindly:
For
gold in phisik is a cordial,
Therefore
he loved gold in special.
Here we see both the medicinal and the linguistic roots of
my old grandmother’s “elderberry cordial”. Do you think the Doctor’s love of gold was really based in its value as a heart medicine? Finally, there is the Good Parson’s
characteristically simple statement of an aspiration met by far too few of his
colleagues in this poem—that of clerical holiness. In the middle of the seventeenth century Milton would
famously say of the corrupt English clergy that “The hungry sheep look up, and
are not fed.” Chaucer had
anticipated him with his version of a biblical aphorism:…if gold ruste, what shal iren do? Then he tells it like it is.
For
if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,
No
wonder is a lewed man to ruste;
And
shame it is, if a preest take keep,
A
shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.
The Clerk of Aberystwyth: the late Roger Roberts took his degree at the age of 82
