HKB
Dame has asserted that “half so boldly there can no man swear and lie as a woman can”, the poet hastens to interpose, in his own person, these two lines:
“I say not this by wives that be wise, But if it be when they them misadvise.”
And again, in the Prologue to the “Legend of Good Women,” from a description of the daisy —
“She is the clearness and the very light, That in this darke world me guides and leads,”
the poet, in the very next lines, slides into an address to his lady:
“The heart within my sorrowful heart you dreads And loves so sore, that ye be, verily, The mistress of my wit, and nothing I,” &c.
When, therefore, the Clerk of Oxford is made to say that he will tell a tale —
“The which that I Learn’d at Padova of a worthy clerk, As proved by his wordes and his werk. He is now dead, and nailed in his chest, I pray to God to give his soul good rest. Francis Petrarc’, the laureate poete, Highte this clerk, whose rhetoric so sweet Illumin’d all Itaile of poetry. . . . But forth to tellen of this worthy man, That taughte me this tale, as I began.” . . .
we may without violent effort believe that Chaucer speaks in his own person, though dramatically the words are on the Clerk’s lips. And the belief is not impaired by the sorrowful way in which the Clerk lingers on Petrarch’s death — which would be less intelligible if the fictitious narrator had only read the story in the Latin translation, than if we suppose the news of Petrarch’s death at Arqua in July 1374 to have closely followed Chaucer to England, and to have cruelly and irresistibly mingled itself with our poet’s personal recollections of his great Italian contemporary. Nor must we regard as without significance the manner in which the Clerk is made to distinguish between the “body” of Petrarch’s tale, and the fashion in which it was set forth in writing, with a proem that seemed “a thing impertinent”, save that the poet had chosen in that way to “convey his matter” — told, or “taught,” so much more directly and simply by word of mouth. It is impossible to pronounce positively on the subject; the question whether Chaucer saw Petrarch in 1373 must remain a moot-point, so long as we have only our present information; but fancy loves to dwell on the thought of the two poets conversing under the vines at Arqua; and we find in the history and the writings of Chaucer nothing to contradict, a good deal to countenance, the belief that such a meeting occurred.