Time Past and Time Present in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Gower's Confessio Amantis

Abstract

The fourteenth century possessed a strong sense of past, a feeling for history and its bearing on (401). What is unique to Chaucer and Gower is that although both expressed sentiment that had grown old, and while they both tended to cast passing of time in moral terms, they also relied ultimately on personal sensibility to define relationship between present and (403). Particularly conclusion to Clerk's Tale and end of CA provide moments where Chaucer and Gower turn away from moralistic, clerical time and toward time as experience rooted in psyche, what might be termed 'humanistic time' (403). For Chaucer, defining virtue of Golden Age was constancy, precisely virtue that Griselda embodies. It is contemporary lack of constancy that Clerk decries, and so his final lament compares women of his time to debased coinage. Dean points out that it was ironically gold that caused downfall of Saturnian Golden Age. Griselda thus for Clerk an ideal, to be invoked in poetry, whose virtue rebukes present age of 'brassy' arrogance (406). Gower's CA introduces world grown theme in its Prologue. Nebuchadnezzar's statue embodies in shape of man as microcosm the decline of virtue, specifically love or charity, in macrocosm (407). While tone here is disengaged and moralistic (407), Gower also suggests, both in Prologue and in Book 5's discussion of avarice, that perfection of Golden Age is located in man's psyche, in his innate sense of moderation or mesure. The way back to harmony of past is through memory and poetry, a process symbolized by poet Arion and put into practice through stories of CA. Gower makes Amans an emblem of division in love; like senescent world, Amans is old and feeble. Amans's final encounter with Venus, a moment that is both amusing and poignant (411), allows reader to experience time and its passing in a very personal fashion. In end, for Chaucer and Gower it is not only that quest for a clarification of leads to a recherche du temps perdu, but also that the search for lost time leads to important insights about self (413). [CvD]