Candice - Now where would I find The Franklin's Tale? I'm all agog
and nowhere near a good library - but gentilesse sounds pretty much
the arena I want to play in -
Best
A
>Alison wrote:
>
>> What is a better word for a
>> sense of mutual respect and mutual responsibility, which also implies
>> difference? For something which means the enrichment of social
>> relationships, in its focussing on individual validities? I do mean
>> something quite specific and real, which I know is possible from my
>> own personal relationships, but I don't quite know how to describe it.
>
>Interjecting a response to both here, I'd say read _The Franklin's Tale_,
>where the word is _gentilesse_--a nobility of spirit or sensibility in which
>_trouthe_ and _freodom_ combine to yield the notion of integrity. When their
>personal integrity is made the basis of Arveragus and Dorigen's
>relationship, it breeds the same in their relations with others: debts are
>forgiven precisely because they've been honored, debtors freed by virtue of
>the binding words--their troth--to which they remain true. When Aurelius
>rises to the gentilesse of Arveragus and Dorigen, he too becomes a freeman
>("franklin"). Resolved to be truthful to the _Maister_ (magician and
>philosopher) whom he'd wooed with a fine meal and then promised to pay an
>exorbitant sum for a seductive illusion, he is released from his own debt in
>turn with a gesture redolent of Christopher's Prynne-at-the-table: You paid
>for my food, says the old master of _moones mansions in minde_--"It is
>ynough."
>
>Here is what poets do and what poets learn how to do from their
>predecessors, as Chaucer learned this instructive tale from Boccaccio and
>Prynne has gone to school on the both of them, among others. What remains to
>be done now, as always, is for the rest of the world to learn from
>poets--but the world we live in seems neither inclined to be so educated nor
>to have produced many poets with the wherewithal for the job, including the
>requisite gentilesse.
>
>Candice
>
>
>Christopher wrote:
>
>>> So what should poets do? What _can_ they do? The questions you
>>>began with. I
>>> too don't believe that poetry can (or should) be justified by its
>>> _usefulness_. It's certainly not very 'useful' in any direct or
>>>obvious way.
>>> But as writers and as readers we _can_ 'work and eat at the same table', as
>>> Prynne puts it. We can remain alive to the consequences of what is on that
>>> table. We can 'look to [our] limits and employ them' (also Prynne).
--
Alison Croggon
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