Gower and the Crying Voice

Abstract

Scholars have often characterized John Gower as a moralizing and even severe poet, one for whom obedience to normative law is the sole ethical standard. I suggest that this is only half of the picture. On the one hand, Gower certainly relies on prescriptive forms, such as the exemplum, distinctio, and the microcosm, to make the ethical lessons of his poetry legible to the reader. But on the other, he also draws the reader’s attention to moments in his poetry when a strict obedience to normative forms of ethics leads his characters into moral error. Gower does this by staging for his reader moments in which these characters cry out to various figures of power, begging those figures to suspend ethical norms in the name of mercy and pity. I argue that, in his three long poems—the Mirour de l’omme, the Vox Clamantis, and especially the Confessio Amantis—this “crying voice” casts light upon Gowers views of ethics and poetics alike, by stressing at once the flexibility of Gowers moral views and his commitment to listening, if only in conceit, for the voices that are latent in the matter he reworks.