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).
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