John Gower

John Gower (?1330-1408) shooting the world (from a manuscript of his works ca. 1400).Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

John Gower (?1330 - October 1408) was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Life

Overview

Although few details of his life have come down to us, Gower appears to have been a man of wealth and importance, connected with Kent, well known at Court, and in possession of estates. He was the friend of Chaucer, who gives him the title of "the moral Gower," which has clung to him ever since. His 1st principal work was Speculum Meditantis (the Mirror of one meditating) written in French on the subject of married life. It was long believed to have been lost. It was followed by Vox Clamantis (the Voice of one crying) written in Latin, giving an account of the peasants' revolt of 1381, and attacking the misgovernment and social evils which had led to it. His 3rd, and only English poem, was Confessio Amantis (Lover's Confession), a work of 30,000 lines, consisting of tales and meditations on love, written at the request of Richard II. It is the earliest large collection of tales in the English tongue. In his old age Gower became blind. He had, when about 70, retired to the priory of St. Mary Overies (the chapel of which is now the Church of St. Saviour, Southwark), where he spent his last years, and to which he was a liberal benefactor. Gower represented the serious and cultivated man of his time, in which he was reckoned the equal of Chaucer, but as a poet he is heavy and prolix.

Youth

File:John.gower.southwark.london.arp.jpg

The tomb of John Gower in Southwark Cathedral. For more information click on the picture

Gower died at an advanced age in 1408, so that he may be presumed to have been born about 1330. He belonged to a good Kentish family, but the suggestion of Sir Harris Nicolas that the poet is to be identified with a John Gower who was at one time possessed of the manor of Kentwell is open to serious objections.

Career

There is no evidence that he ever lived as a country gentleman, but he was undoubtedly possessed of some wealth, and we know that he was the owner of the manors of Feltwell in Suffolk and Moulton in Norfolk. In a document of 1382 he is called an “ Esquier de Kent, ” and he was certainly not in holy orders.

That he was acquainted with Chaucer we know: 1st because Chaucer in leaving England for Italy in 1378 appointed Gower and another to represent him in his absence; 2ndly because Chaucer addressed his Troilus and Criseide to Gower and Strode (whom he addresses as “ moral Gower ” and “ philosophical Strode ”) for criticism and correction; and 3rdly because of the lines in the 1st edition of Gower's Cortfessio amantis, “ And gret wel Chaucer whan ye mete, ” Src. There is no sufficient ground for the suggestion, based partly on the subsequent omission of these lines and partly on the humorous reference by Chaucer to Gower's Cortfessio Amantis in the introduction to the Man of Law's Tale, that the friendship was broken by a quarrel.

From Gower's Latin poem Vox Clamantis we know that he was deeply and painfully interested in the peasants' rising of 1381; and by the alterations in successive revisions of this work we can trace a gradually increasing sense of disappointment in the youthful king, whom he at first acquits of all responsibility for the state of the kingdom on account of his tender age.

That he became personally known to the king we learn from his own statement in the 1st edition of the Confessio Amantis, where he says that he met the king upon the river, was invited to enter the royal barge, and in the conversation which followed received the suggestion which led him to write his principal English poem.

At the same time we know, especially from the later revisions of the Confessio Amantis, that he was a great admirer of the king's brilliant cousin, Henry of Lancaster, afterwards Henry IV, whom he came eventually to regard as a possible saviour of society from the misgovernment of Richard II. We have a record that in 1393 he received a collar from his favourite political hero, and it is to be observed that the effigy upon Gower's tomb is wearing a collar of SS. with the swan badge which was used by Henry.

The 1st edition of the Confessio Amantis is dated 1390, and this contains, at least in some copies, a 2nd dedication to the then earl of Derby. The later form, in which Henry became the sole object of the dedication, is of the year 1393. Gower's political opinions are still more strongly expressed in the Cronica tripartite.

In 1398 he was married to Agnes Groundolf, and from the special licence granted by the bishop of Winchester for the celebration of this marriage in John Gower's private oratory we gather that he was then living in lodgings assigned to him within the priory of St Mary Overy, and perhaps also that he was too infirm to be married in the parish church. From the inscription on his tomb, as well as from other indications, it appears that he was a considerable benefactor of the priory and contributed largely to the rebuilding of the church.

It is probable that was not his 1st marriage, for there are indications in his early French poem that he had a wife at the time when that was written.

His will is dated 15 August 1408, and his death took place very soon after this. He had been blind for some years before his death.

A magnificent tomb with a recumbent effigy was erected over his grave in the chapel of St John the Baptist within the church of the priory, now St Saviour's, Southwark, and this is still to be seen, though not quite in its original state or place.

Writing

Q2. Chaucer’s Contemporary Poets who contributed English Literature Microsoft word file included

The effigy on Gower's tomb rests its head upon a pile of three folio volumes entitled Speculum Meditantis, Vox Clamantis and Confessio amantis. These are his 3 principal works.

Speculum Meditantis

The first of these was long supposed to have perished, but a copy of it was discovered in the year 1895 under the title Mirour de l'omme. It is a French poem of about 30,000 lines in 12 line stanzas, and under the form of an allegory of the human soul describes the 7 deadly sins and their opposing virtues, and then the various estates of man and the vices incident to each, concluding with a narrative of the life of the Virgin Mary, and with praise of her as the means of reconciliation between God and man. The work is extremely tedious for the most part, but shows considerable command over the language and a great facility in metrical expression.

Vox Clamantis

Gower's next work was the Vox clam antis in Latin elegiac verse, in which the author takes occasion from the peasants insurrection of 1381 to deal again with the faults of the various classes of society. In the earlier portion the insurrection itself is described in a rather vivid manner, though under the form of an allegory: the remainder contains much the same material as we have already seen in that part of the French poem where the classes of society are described. Gower's Latin verse is very fair, as judged by the medieval standard, but in this book he has borrowed very freely from Ovid, Alexander Neckam, Peter de Riga and others.

Confessio Amantis

Gower's chief claim to reputation as a poet, however, rests uponhis English work, the Confessio Amantis, in which he displays in his native language a real gift as a story-teller. He is himself the lover of his poem, in spite of his advancing years, and he makes his confession to Genius, the priest of Venus, under the usual headings supplied by the 7 deadly sins. These with their several branches are successively described, and the nature of them illustrated by tales, which are directed to the illustration both of the general nature of the sin, and of the particular form which it may take in af lover. Finally he receives at once his absolution, and his dismissal from the service of Venus, for which his age renders him unfit.

The idea is ingenious, and there is often much quaintness of fancy in the application of moral ideas to the relations of the lover and his mistress. The tales are drawn from very various sources and are often extremely well told. The metre is the short couplet, and it is extremely smooth and regular. The great fault of the Confessio amantis is the extent of its digressions, especially in the 5th and 7th books.

Miscellaneous

Gower also wrote in 1397 a short series of French ballades on the virtue of the married state (Traitié pour es sampler les amantz niariés), and after the accession of Henry IV. he produced the Cronica tripartite, a partisan account in Latin leonine hexameters of the events of the last 12 years of the reign of Richard II. About the same time he addressed an English poem in 7-line stanzas to Henry IV. (In Praise of Peace), and dedicated to the king a series of French ballades (Cinkante Balades), which deal with the conventional topics of love, but are often graceful and even poetical in expression. Several occasional Latin pieces also belong to the later years of his life.

On the whole Gower must be admitted to have had considerable literary powers; and though not a man of genius, and by no means to be compared with Chaucer, yet he did good service in helping to establish the standard literary language, which at the end of the 14th century took the place of the Middle English dialects. The Confessio arnantis was long regarded as a classic of the language, and Gower and Chaucer were often mentioned side by side as the fathers of English poetry.

Critical introduction

by Thomas Arnold

The poetry of Gower has been variously estimated. It was a practice with the poets of the sixteenth century to link his name in a venerated trio with those of Chaucer and Lydgate, just as in the seventeenth century the names of Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher were often joined together as the great dramatic lights of the preceding age. In each case the effect of closer study has been to lead men to think that they have been joining gold with iron and clay. Shakspere, read attentively, rises high above the standard reached by Jonson and Fletcher; and in a yet greater degree has the genius of Chaucer, accurately studied and rightly felt, impressed the present age with the sense of his unrivalled eminence among his contemporaries.

Gower, a man of birth and fortune, must have lived in the cultivated society of his day. Of that society, French poetry, in its various forms of Fabliau, Rondel, Romance, Epigram, Chanson, &c., was one of the chief delights and distractions. With much imitative power, with the faculty of sustained attention, with a high appreciation for his own thoughts, and remarkable linguistic facility, Gower, when he betook himself to poetry, was sure to become a copious and prolific writer. But, possessing no originality, he was equally sure to remain pent within the imprisoning bounds of fashion and conventionality, to follow, not take the lead, to interpret, not modify opinion.

He seems to have been without the sense of humour; we doubt if a single jest of his own making can be found throughout his writings. From this cause, although he may justly be called a moralist and a didactic writer, (Chaucer and Lydgate both speak of him as the ‘moral’ Gower), the higher intellectual rank of a satirist must be denied him. The moralist declaims, the satirist paints; we are convinced of the deformity of vice in the one case, but we see it in the other. The faculties of the first dispose him to subjective estimates of men and things, those of the second to objective estimates. The one describes the offenders, the other makes them exhibit themselves. The moralist inveighs against the selfish cowardice of a degraded proletariat; the satirist puts a few simple words in their mouths, and we know them and their kind for evermore.

‘Curramus praecipites, et

Dum jacet in ripa, calcemus Caesaris hostem.’

Several MSS. of the Confessio Amantis, Gower’s principal poem, contain a passage in Latin prose in which he describes the three books which he had written, all with a didactic motive, ‘doctrinae causa.’ The first of these, Speculum Meditantis, was in French verse. It was probably written between 1360 and 1370, at a period when the ladies at Edward III’s court and their admirers would hardly have condescended to read a poem couched in their native English, a tongue not then believed to be suited to themes of love, mysticism, and chivalry. It was a strictly moral poem, treating of virtues and vices, and the methods of penitence and amendment; but it has absolutely vanished; and since from the account we have of the contents it is impossible not to believe that it was exceedingly dull, we may be reconciled to the loss. Gower’s next considerable effort, the Vox Clamantis, a Latin elegiac poem in seven books, was suggested by the rising of the commons under Wat Tyler and others in 1381. Why he chose to write it in Latin it is impossible to say, unless we suppose that he wished to hide from the objects of them, under the veil of a learned language, the sharp censures on the classes of knights, burghers, and cultivators, which the poem contains. In a passage which is grotesque if not dramatic, the poet thus describes the ringleaders of the insurrection:—

  ‘Watte vocat, cui Thomme venit, neque Symme retardat,
  Recteque Gibbe simul Hicke venire jubent:
Colle furit, quem Geffe juvat, nocumenta parantes,
  Cum quibus ad damnum Wille coire vovet.
Grigge rapit, dum Dawe strepit, comes est quibus Hobbe,
  Lorkin et in medio non minor esse putat.’

The murder of Archbishop Sudbury by the rebels is described, but with little of that local or circumstantial colouring which we should desire. All that they succeeded in doing, says Gower, was to send him to heaven,

‘Vivere fecerunt, quem mortificare putarunt;

Quem tollunt mundo, non potuere Deo.’

For several years before the rising of the commons the fame of Chaucer’s English poetry must have been growing. Mere fashion could not hold out against the commanding power of that poetry; and Gower, when next he attempted a considerable work, found that he might as well write it in English. The Confessio Amantis was begun, he tells us, at the command of Richard II, who meeting him one day on the Thames, while the tide was flowing, called him into his barge, and bade him in the course of their talk to ‘boke some newe thing.’ Thus incited, Gower planned a work

‘Whiche may be wisdom to the wise,

And play to hem that list to play.’

The long prologue is taken up with an account of the then state of the world, in which he repeats much of the censure on the various orders of men that he had introduced into the Vox Clamantis. He deplores the decline of virtue and good customs, and the general tendency of things to grow worse. Love itself is diseased, and no longer the pure passion that it once was. Starting from this point, he devotes the greater part of the voluminous poem which follows to an examination of the various ways in which men offend against the god of love. The seventh or penultimate book only is an exception to this remark, being a sketch of the philosophy of Aristotle. The lover is represented as a penitent, who, being half dead from a wound inflicted by Cupid, and resorting to Venus his mother, is recommended by the goddess to apply to Genius her priest, and confess to him all the sins that he has committed in the article of love. With the seven deadly sins, pride, anger, envy, &c., for his groundplan, the penitent confesses under the head of each his misdeeds as a lover, and the confessor consoles and directs him by relating the experiences of former lovers in pari materia.

This strange medley of things human and divine, of which notable examples exist in the works of Chaucer and Boccaccio, does not mean the consecration of the world of passion by introducing religion into it, but the profanation of religion by degrading its rites and emblems to the service of earthly desire. But in this commingling of the morality of Christianity and the morality of Ovid, the two elements agree no better than fire and water; and the sense of this, forcing itself upon the consciences of the nobler spirits that thus offended, led to those ‘Retractations’ and palinodes which modern critics have regarded with so much wonder and disdain. Thus it was with Chaucer; thus with Boccaccio: to Gower perhaps, who wrote under the spell of fashion and in the groove of imitation, the precise character of the absurd confusion of ideas which reigns in his book was never sufficiently apparent to induce him to regret it.

The quarrels of poets are not relevant to the purpose of this book; otherwise we might be tempted to enter on the much-debated question of the relations between Chaucer and Gower, and the meaning of certain inserted or suppressed passages in their writings. We will only observe that since the discovery (in Trivet’s Chronicle) of the common source of the story of Constance, told by Chaucer in the Man of Lawe’s tale and by Gower in the second book of the Confessio Amantis, the chief reason for doubting the existence of a bitter feeling between the two poets has been removed. If Chaucer had, as Tyrwhitt and Warton thought, borrowed from Gower the story of Constance, it was hard to believe that he would speak roughly of him in the prologue to the very tale which attested the literary obligation. But no such obligation existed, and therefore the words may be taken in their natural bearing.

That Gower was timid and a timeserver is a conclusion which it is difficult to resist, when we consider the changes made in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis. In its original shape, as we have seen, it states that the poem was undertaken and made ‘for kynge Richardes sake,’ and prays ‘that his corone longe stonde.’ But in several MSS. all this is, not very skilfully, omitted or changed. In these the poem is dedicated to ‘Henry of Lancaster,’ and is said to have been composed in the sixteenth year of King Richard, i.e., in 1393. Henry, afterwards Henry IV, could not have been called Henry of Lancaster till after his father’s death in February 1399. Soon after that date Richard II went over to Ireland; his unpopularity in England was great; the plot for supplanting him by Henry was set on foot, and with every month that passed the movement grew in strength. It was probably in the course of the summer of 1399 that Gower, perceiving how things were going, transformed his prologue so as to make it acceptable to the pretender whose success he anticipated. In the copies with the altered prologue he also omitted the lines of eulogy on Chaucer at the end, which the poem had originally contained. What could have prompted the omission but a feeling of estrangement? And for this estrangement the severity of the language just quoted from Chaucer supplies a probable motive.

The last considerable work of our author was the Cronica Tripartita, a Latin poem in three books, giving a regular history of political incidents in England from 1387 to 1399. As might be expected, the writer bears hardly throughout the poem on the unfortunate Richard. He seems to know nothing of the common story as to the manner of his death. The deposed king died, he says, in prison, from grief, and because he refused to take food.

Of Gower’s shorter French poems, his Cinkante Balades, which exist in MS. in the library of the Duke of Sutherland, Warton has printed four. They are in stanzas of seven and eight lines, with refrains, and are written not without elegance.

Critical reputation

Gower's poetry has had a mixed critical reception. In the 15th century, he was generally regarded alongside Chaucer as the father of English poetry. Over the years, however, his reputation declined, largely on account of a perceived sidacticism and dullness.

During the 20th century he has received more recognition, notably by C.S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love (1936). However, he has not obtained the same following or critical acceptance as other major poets of the period.

A complete edition of Gower's works in 4 volumes, edited by G.C. Macaulay, was published in 1899-1902, the 1st volume containing the French works, the 2nd and 3rd the English, and the 4th the Latin, with a biography.

Recognition

In Shakespeare

• Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play by Shakespeare, is based on Gower's work and features Gower as the Chorus.
• Henry IV, Part 2 includes Gower as a messenger.
• In Henry V, Gower is the ideal English soldier.

Publications

• Mirour de l'Omme, or Speculum Hominis, or Speculum Meditantis (French, c.1376–1379)
• Vox Clamantis (Latin, c.1377–1381)
• Confessio Amantis, or Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins. (English, c.1386–1393)
• Traité (French, 1397)
• Cinkante Balades (French, 1399-1400)
• Cronica Tripertita (Latin, c.1400)
• In praise of peace (English, c.1400)

Concerning the Philosopher's Stone - John Gower poem reading Jordan Harling Reads

"The Lover's Confession"

See also

• Middle English poets
• List of British poets

References

•  Macaulay, George Campbell (1911). "Gower, John". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 298-299. . Wikisource, Web, January 19, 2018.
• Urban, M. (ed.) (2009) John Gower, Manuscripts, Readers, Contexts, Turnhout: Brepols ISBN 978-2-503-52470-2
• Watt, Diane (2003) Amoral Gower. University of Minnesota Press
• Yeager, R.F. (ed.) (2007) On John Gower: Essays at the millennium. (Studies in Medieval Culture, XLVI) Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Pp. x, 241

External links

Poems

• Gower, John (1330?-1408) at Representative Poetry Online
• Gower in The English Poets: An anthology: Extracts from Cinkante Balades,
  • Extracts from Confessio Amantis: Prologue, Alexander and the Robber, The Story of Constance
• John Gower at PoemHunter (9 poems)

Books

• Works by John Gower at Project Gutenberg
• Complete works Internet Archive
• Excerpt from Confessio Amantis - Harvard Chaucer Pages
• John Gower at Amazon.com
• Volume 1 of the Confessio Amantis (containing the Prologue, Book 1, and Book 8); Volumes 2 (Books 2-4) and 3 (Books 5-7) can be accessed at the Complete Catalogue of TEAMS texts

About

• John Gower in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• John Gower in the Catholic Encyclopedia
• Gower, John in the Dictionary of National Biography
• "Move over, Chaucer, these days poet John Gower is all the rage" at University of Rochester
• John Gower (c.1330-1408) at Luminarium

Etc.

• The International John Gower Society
• The Gower Project

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.. Original article is at: Gower, John