It was not until I encountered Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales during my sophomore year of college that I began to learn how to read. Two factors, one accidental and one intentional, made this possible: first, the inconvenience of Chaucer’s Middle English forced me to read more slowly and more carefully than I had previously done; second, Chaucer’s stories themselves combine high seriousness with bawdy, lewd, slapstick humor. Imagine being a twenty-year old college student trying to make sense of that combination. I was totally confused, and totally paying attention.
Chaucer’s characters seemed to care about everything I cared about: sex, power, victory, honor, chivalry, love, to wed or not to wed. Importantly, they were really into bars, wine, and ale. Here was the full cast of concerns for a young man, mashed up and as full of contradiction in the book as they were in my own soul at the time. To my delight, I found that this confused mess is actually the source of beauty, redemption, and even love. Chaucer really loves his characters: he writes Alison, the adulterous young wife with a "lecherous eye," with as much beauty and depth as he writes the chivalrous, honorable Knight. Love is also a major theme throughout the Tales. For all of their confusions and sins, each character tries to assert his understanding of love for his fellow pilgrims. Because of this, Chaucer sees in each character value and potential.
Bernard O’Donoghue, Irish poet and long-time professor at Oxford University, aims to bring Chaucer’s marvelous poetry to a "modern readership" in his new volume, Reading Chaucer’s Poems. O’Donoghue sees his work as a starting point and stepping stone, which, as he well knows from a long teaching career, is often the mark of a good teacher. "I hope that these samples will tempt the reader to proceed further into the pages of the Riverside Edition: the nine hundred lines of The Franklin’s Tale are too long for inclusion here, but the tale’s haunting magic and writerly elegance would be a good text to go on to."
This collection is comprehensive, including selections from Chaucer’s shorter works, as well as from the big-ticket items Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. Despite, or perhaps because of, his aim to reach a modern readership, O’Donoghue has retained Chaucer’s native Middle English rather than opting for a translation.
Given its considerable strengths, it is regrettable that this popularizing volume begins with a potted biography of Chaucer. Moreover, the introduction contains, amidst a long conversation about Chaucer scholarship, this underwhelming statement: "[i]t has proved difficult for professional criticism to agree about exactly where [Chaucer’s] strengths lie…." Similarly deflating is a long statement on Chaucer’s use of poetic devices.
Given that O’Donoghue wants to find an appeal to a "modern readership," he might have started with the excitement one gets while simply reading Chaucer’s stories. I can’t help but think that a twenty-year old young man who would love Chaucer’s unique blend of bawdiness and seriousness will pick up the volume, see yet another short biography of the author at the beginning of the introduction, and immediately place it on the shelf again.
The spirit that pushes someone to pick up a book of poems about love, honor, chivalry, and pilgrimage is different from the spirit that analyzes poetic devices. There can be no doubt that the technical analysis of poetic devices is a fruitful enterprise. On the other hand, including these analyses in the introduction puts the cart before the horse: readers haven’t yet had a chance to enter the gloriously messy world of Chaucer’s stories when they are hit with cold, clean inquiries into technique.
Once I got down to Chaucer’s poetry itself, I enjoyed O’Donoghue’s volume. Despite the volume’s deficiencies in exciting me to read the poems, the volume does succeed in offering a pleasantly diverse selection of Chaucer’s work. This underscores the lesson that stories are critical for keeping a modern reader’s attention. Great stories still have the ability to tell us something about our deepest human concerns, provided we don’t strangle them with analysis, but rather let them breathe by listening carefully.