Chaucer's Sir John Introduces The Rooster Chanticleer & Pertelote

In the US a number of candidates -- Huckabee, Fiorina and Carson --  in the conservative party announced this week that they too were seeking the nomination for President. The US elections will be in another eighteen months. In  light of the elections in the UK with exit polls favoring the conservatives and no confirmed tallies of ballots released yet, it still seemed appropriate to return to the rooster in the dale. So as I have a chance to offer some diversion, I'll continue with Nevill Coghill's excellent Geoffrey Chaucer in the Nun's Priest's Tale. There was an older woman...

"She had a yard that was enclosed about
By a stockade and a dry ditch without,
In which she kept a cock called Chanticleer.
In all the land for crowing he'd no peer;
His voice was jollier than an organ blowing
In church on Sundays, he was great at crowing.
Far, far more regular than any clock
Or abbey bell the crowing of this cock.
The equinoctial wheel and its position
At each ascent he knew by intuition;
At every hour -- fifteen degrees of movement --
He crowed so well there could be no improvement.
His comb was redder than fine coral, tall
And battlemented like a castle wall,
His bill was black and shone as bright as jet,
Like azure were his legs and they were set
On azure toes with nails of lily white,
Like burnished gold his feathers, flaming bright."

That's some chicken that knows the precise movements of planetary geometry, and by instinct.

"This gentlecock was master in some measure
Of seven hens, all there to do his pleasure.
They were his sisters and his paramours,
Coloured like him in all particulars;
She with the loveliest dyes upon her throat
Was known as gracious Lady Pertelote.
Courteous she was, discreet and debonair,
Companionable too, and took such care
In her deportment, since she was seven days old
She held the heart of Chanticleer controlled,
Locked up securely in her every limb;
O what a happiness his love to him!"

Out of a number of hens, one with the loveliest dyes on her throat and the best deportment, and at such a young age, she had the high-minded qualities that in a bird, set this rooster straight. And too, they could sing, Coghill says, 'probably a popular song': my lief is faren in londe. Or, 'My life/love is in a foreign land'. For Chaucer's Priest is quick to tell us, that, 'as I understand' it was in this far off day that birds and animals could speak and sing. We have moved first from history to suspended disbelief.

The rooster groans and lurches on his perch, His 'dearest heart... aghast' asks 'why do you groan and start?' He's had a dream. There was a beast, a hound with a skinny snout, and red.

"It was enough to make one die of fright."...
"For shame,' she said, 'you timorous poltroon!
Alas, what cowardice! By God above,
You've forefeited my heart and lost my love.
I cannot love a coward, come what may.
All women long - and O that it might be! -
For husbands tough, dependable and free,
Secret, discreet, no niggard, not a fool
That boasts and then will find his courage cool
At every trifling thing. By God above,
How dare you say for shame, and to your love,
That there was anything at all you feared?
Have you no manly heart to match your beard?
And can a dream reduce you to such terror?
Dreams are a vanity, God knows, pure error.
Dreams are engendered in the too-replete
From vapours in the belly, which compete
With others, too abundant, swollen tight."

A hen that knows what a woman wants. Toughness, dependability, discretion. But not the boastful who turn in fright from dreams that come from over-full bellies.

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Nevill Coghill was an Oxford English Lit Professor of the twentieth century - and who reached a wider audience than many - with his 1951 translation of Chaucer quoted and excerpted  here and published by Penguin. He works it happily into a mid-century idiom that makes sense and captures the rolling rhythms of Chaucer easily. It was a bestseller for decades.