The life so short, the craft so long to learn,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dreadful joy that slips away so quickly –
All this mean I by Love ….
These are the first lines (modernized) of one of the first Valentine’s Day poems ever written. Chaucer penned them sometime in the late 1370’s or early 1380’s: ninety-eight stanzas in a seven-line form that he may also have invented, a form he devoted to cultic practice:
For this was on Saint Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make ….*
*Foul: fowl, rhymes with fool; chese: choose; make: mate
“There” is a parliament of fowls on a hill of flowers presided over by “the noble Goddess of Nature.”
Chaucer has two wry observations to make about love’s relationship to learning. One is that it should be a thing at all. The first line, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn,” is a bog standard aphorism. People have been saying it since the days of Hippocrates’ “Do no harm.” It refers to mastering anything. You’ve got to work hard, you’ll have some ups and downs, stick with it.
The fourth line doesn’t surprise anyone much, but it’s off just enough for the reader to be struck by the simple truth of the admission. The tone of the delivery remains shrouded: it could be wonder, bitterness, petulance, detached frankness. There’s something off, though. Love isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be simple, presumably starting with love at first sight. To think of it as a craft doesn’t bode well. One could end up like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, he who gives “little delicate compliments” to ladies with “as unstudied an air as possible.” Early in the English tradition, Chaucer signals the social and literary fertility of an implicit tension between study and love.
Literariness is the object of Chaucer’s second wry remark. He makes himself the butt of a joke about love and bookishness, or the difference between knowing and knowing-about:
For even though I know not Love in deed
Nor know how he pays folk their hire
Still, it happens that I full oft in books read
Of his miracles and his cruel ire.
You can almost see Chaucer working himself up, taking himself too seriously, talking himself into his competencies. All the while he suggests the chasm that separates theory from practice, head knowledge from the experience of love.
He knows he’s doing this, naturally: presenting a persona, speaking the ineffable. We haven’t arrived at the unadorned author. We know that. Our danger is to overlook the great authorial presence in this poem (in Chaucer’s works generally) and the gentle jokey seriousness. This apparently is what Chaucer is like: jokey, readerly, reflexive, and utterly committed to the bond of charity sexual, political, ontological.
The poet is going to report on a parliament of fowls he comes across in a dream. First, though, he describes steamier and seedier encounters in the same dream (with more than passing references to Priapus and Venus). We learn to trust his decorum (this isn’t the Miller’s Tale) before we read his journalism. In this phase of his dream, Chaucer writes about seeing the God of Love Cupid and then, among his servants, Craft personified:
Then was I aware …
… of the Craft that can and has the might
To cause by force a creature to do folly –
Disfigured was she, I will not lie.
One senses a difference between this Craft (“the Craft that …”) and the craft pursued in the poem’s opening line.
Forgive me: it’s hard to talk about these things properly. First the easy bit: it’s not like Chaucer anticipates having a problem with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Nor is it as though he is upset about the power of sexual attraction and temptation. “To cause by force a creature to do folly” isn’t about young people fumbling on the couch and getting carried away or, as Thomas Merton put it, getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
Craft is disfigured because she’s part of a world of artifice, sterility, priapic lust, and wasted love service (Chaucer includes a list of bad lovers – think GOT meets Jeffrey Epstein), a world Chaucer passes through before he comes to Nature and her parliament. This Craft has to do with deleterious ways of loving and writing.
The reason this is difficult to talk about is that the secularizing of literature has made it hard for the person (me, maybe you) wanting to talk about Chaucer on sex in ways that are other than permissive, hugely non-judgemental, and generally nudge-nudge-wink-wink not to sound like or to be perceived as though they’re members of the Moral Majority and have a problem with art-artifice-constructedness-creativity to boot.
There are all sorts of riotous fun and games in the parliament presided over by Nature, who is “full of grace.” Generally, she lets the birds get on with their ordering, their inclinations (“as them Nature would incline”), and their hilarious specious debates. Furthermore, prominent space is given to courtly performativity: Chaucer in no way sets up a nature vs culture or fact vs fiction or givenness vs constructivism world of binaries, nor need (ought) the Christian reader interpreting him in and for our time do so.
Chaucer saw in sexual dalliance and craft a threat to what he calls “common profit,” as did classical writers on the virtues generally. (We talk obsessively about narcissism, but we didn’t invent the myth that gave us the term.) Chaucer saw in classical and Christian ethics as they passed over into cultural discourse in his day an ominous dimension of enculturated sexual practice. I think medievalists like C.S. Lewis, who had an abiding awareness of the occult, and Charles Williams, who wrote compellingly about spiritual warfare in sexual terms, recognized in their studies a strand of culture that was malevolently “disfigurat,” and the loss (or suppression) of this awareness in modern medievalism.
Sexual dalliance is love without thought. Or an idea without love. It is to be caught in a spell. It can befall the aesthete, the rationalist, the hunter, the sentimentalist.
To stand before the Goddess of Nature,
to take hire dom and yeve hire audyence
to accept her judgement and give her heed
is the beginning, not the end, of difficulty. You’re driven by desire, must listen, must talk, try to make it work with some kind of coherence, look around and see everyone else more or less making a hash of it too (not least many of the Christians), all of us sent off again in springtime with her blessing.
But, Lord, the blisse and joye that they make!