Oh pShaw, as the wan don said--bet you keep it under your pillow!
Cacklin',
C
on 12/5/01 3:32 AM, Alison Croggon at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> 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
>
> Home page
> http://users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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