A collection of individual essays, most of them reprinted here, this volume showcases Marie Borroff 's approach to reading poems: as a poet reading other poets, considering carefully the issues of prosody, rhyme, and diction that must occupy every poet during composition. Three of these essays are new; the others span the years 1982 through 1998. All are gems of close reading, attentive to the language chosen, yet informed as well by scholarship in the broader culture of the late Middle Ages.
Three sections--Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Philological-- give shape to the collection and let her lead with her strong suit, two new essays on the Canterbury Tales. In "Dimensions of Judgment in the Canterbury Tales: Friar, Summoner, Pardoner, Wife of Bath," Borroff argues for a Wycliffite allusion in the "Summoner's Tale" that aligns Chaucer with an anti-fraternal polemic. In particular, Friar John's speeches in the tale "exhibit the showy rhetoric attributed by Saint Paul to the false apostles of his day, and, by their opponents [e.g., Wyclif], in later times, to the friars" (33). Friar John's claim of apostolic sanctity, along with that of the pilgrim Friar Hubert before him, should bring to mind the condemnation of such hypocrisy by William of Saint Amour, Richard FitzRalph, and John Wyclif, a hypocrisy dramatized by Jean de Meun in the figure of Fals-Semblant. Chaucer's covert theological judgment should not, Borroff maintains, occlude the very real comic pleasure readers derive from these characters. Rather, judgment and comedy go hand in hand, an effect described by Borroff, aptly, as "a kind of penumbra of grim satisfaction surrounding our amusement" (44). The Wife of Bath, devoid of hypocrisy and seen to condemn herself in her own monologue, emerges in Borroff's reading as far more sympathetic than the friars. While one might argue with Borroff's claim that the Wife in her prologue stands apart from the threat of eternal damnation that hangs over Friar John and his ilk, because she does not pretend to serve God as they do, one can not ignore the pull of the Wife's engaging performance, and Borroff's treatment certainly does the Wife justice.
In the second new essay, "Silent Retribution in Chaucer: The Merchant's Tale, the Reeve's Tale, and the Pardoner's Tale," Borroff plies similar waters, finding a critique of materialistic paternalism in the figures of January and the Reeve's parson, both of whom receive their just hereditary desserts, whether they know it or not. In the Pardoner's reference to Christ's pardon at the close of his tale, Borroff finds an implicit critique of the church practice of giving pardons . Mention of the pardon that only Christ can give, at a point not necessary to the dramatic moment, suggests to Borroff the voice of Chaucer, again, reflecting Wycliffite sympathies. Borroff is quick to point out that Chaucer could not have wanted to declare these sympathies unequivocally, and she articulates with the sensitivity of one who has read Chaucer's words many, many times his means of disguise, his verbal shield, his use of "fictional surrogates" (68). Borroff ends this chapter with the rallying cry of the exegetical critics D. W. Robertson, Jr., Bernard Huppe, Robert E. Kaske, and others: "taketh the fruyt and lat the chaf be stille" (VII [B2] 3443), but with a crucial difference. The "fruyt" for Borroff's Chaucer is not Roman Catholic orthodoxy, but a Wycliffite vision of clerical reform.
Somewhat less satisfactory is a short piece on the "Prioresse's Tale" which, coming after these two opening essays, seems to ignore the larger questions Borroff has just addressed. Why, one wonders, would a reform-minded poet give the worldly Prioresse this particular tale, with its attendant vision of otherworldly bliss? The essay does not undermine the preceding ones; it simply does not measure up to their scope and breadth. And while she has added addenda to some of her reprinted essays here, this is not one of them.
But with the fourth essay, "Chaucer's English Rhymes," Borroff's skill at parsing the poetic line emerges strongly, as the star of this collection. Comparing the French Roman de la Rose, Chaucer's English translation of it (The Romaunt of the Rose), and the Book of the Duchess, Borroff examines Chaucer's use of end-rhymes to demonstrate that each language restricts rhyming practice in certain ways. In French, whole words that rhyme are rare, and so the ready availability of suffixes that rhyme make up the great majority of rhymes in the Roman. In English, such suffixes are themselves relatively rare, and so poets must rely more heavily on rhyming words with lexical significance, and on recurrent rhyming pairs of words. Borroff claims that such practice in English versification can be thought of as "systems, formulaic in nature and, like all sets of formulas, serving the poet as a technical resource" (86). Chaucer's ability to turn these formulas into poetry that mimics speech patterns distinguish his work from the doggerel verse of lesser poets in Middle English.
As will be clear from this description, using such analyses, Borroff does not shy away from evaluating a poet's artistry. Some poems are simply better than others, and Borroff asserts this both explicitly and implicitly by arguing the point at the technical level of rhyme, meter, and poetic diction. One wonders whether the reluctance of some critics to value Sir Gawain and the Green Knight more highly than other Middle English romances, such as "Sir Degrevant," for example, has something to do with a general neglect of the techniques of artistry, of how a poem operates. Borroff argues from the ground up, as it were, starting with the poetic line rather than arguing from cultural or historical generalizations on down to a specific poem. Where her attention to the poetic line may not immediately be evident, as with the fifth essay, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Passing of Judgment," one finds it cropping up as the argument's essential building block, never far from her thesis, whatever the topic.
This preference for philological investigation contrasts with contemporary critical emphases on philosophy, sociology, the history of science, labor relations, gender, etc. Indeed, some of Borroff's harshest criticism is for critics whom she feels put politics before poetry: "To reprove the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for ignoring actual and imminent threats to'the common knightly culture in the changed circumstances of the fourteenth century,' in retreating to the time of King Arthur [in his poem], is not only to judge [the Gawain-poet] as a member of society rather than as a poet, but to project into his world political views held by the illuminati of a later millennium" (113, quoting David Aers). As Borroff demonstrates, her focus on"the poet's use of the resources of his language to give form to his experience as a private person, and not primarily as a member of late medieval society" (xii) can also reveal the poet's engagement in the hot issues of his day, as with Chaucer and the Wycliffites. Still, more often than not, Borroff's conclusions can sound old-fashioned. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in her estimation, details the process of individual "maturation" without regard to gender, social status, or particular historical moment (109-110). The poem describes a descent from high ideals to the human realm of contingent action, demystifying and domesticating the strange Green Knight and the worrisome Morgan the Goddess along the way. Borroff's argument here, typically, depends on close readings of "certain descriptive and verbal repetitions" (100), as she brings her intense poetic gaze to bear on the inner workings of this virtuoso performance. And so, if her conclusions seem out-dated, asserting that the poem traces a general human experience like growing up, why should we throw out the baby with the bath water? Why not exercise our own critical acumen and assert that some "old-fashioned" criticism is good criticism? Lest we forget what New Critical close reading can accomplish, or lest we forget how to perform such analyses ourselves, let us preserve the best of such readings, let us continue to learn from them, and let us value the contributions of scholars who have been reading and re-reading these works for decades.Two essays devoted to Pearl follow. In "Pearl's 'Maynful Mone'," Borroff executes a short, masterful analysis of the full moon in Pearl, alongside other images of roundness, perfection, and heavenly time: the pearl, the crown, the garland, and the penny of the parable of the vineyard. In "The Many and the One: Contrasts and Complementarities in the Design of Pearl," Borroff traces the vision's three phases toward "emotional, imaginative," and"intellectual enlightenment" by the dreamer (131). In this most complex of poems, she finds that its "stylistic variety" signals different emotional stages, as "the increasingly dynamic character of the verbs the dreamer uses" (144) signal the dreamer's more and more direct apprehension of his daughter in the celestial paradise. The verbal resonances and echoes Borroff details in this essay, and particularly the "metonymic presentation of Christ" (150) throughout the vision, leave one in awe of what such attention can indeed accomplish.
Two additional essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight deal almost exclusively with the matter of making poems. In "Systematic Sound Symbolism in the Long Alliterative Line: Beowulf and Sir Gawain" Borroff contrasts the constellations of alliterating words in these two landmarks of English literature, focusing on the word "god" [good] in each case. In Beowulf, "god" alliterates with "Geats," "guth" (battle), "gold," and other terms that contribute to Beowulf's identification as a Germanic hero. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, however, Borroff finds that the alliteration of "god" with"Gawain" serves frequently as an epithet for the hero, a way of asserting his reputation, a reputation which will be severely tested in this poem. One short quotation here gives a small sense of the detailed analysis Borroff lavishes on these two poems: "When we compare the lines in which Beowulf and Sir Gawain are first called 'good,' we sense, in little, a crucial difference in tone between the two poems which depends in part on differences in meter" (167). While this may strike the casual reader as easy to assert and easy to debunk (one imagines a student saying in retort: "I don't read the meter in that way, Professor Borroff"), Borroff's interpretive skill at the level of the poetic line is unimpeachable. What is shameful is how many of our students remain blissfully ignorant of meter, rhyme, and diction; of the history of the words we use; and of the power and underlying structures of poetic language.
The last two essays reinforce this trajectory, this close attention to words and their sounds. "Reading Sir Gawain Aloud" and "A Cipher in Hamlet" both show Professor Borroff at work. I have not met Marie Borroff, but one hears in her written prose the voice of a master teacher. She points us to a passage, to the workings of the sound in the line, to another passage for a similar look, and then, as we are forming our own conclusions about these two places in the poem and wondering what larger issues they connect, Professor Borroff suggests her own interpretation. And, for the most part, we agree. This collection provides us the welcome chance to look again at Marie Borroff's contributions to the field of Middle English poetry. In addition to her enormous influence as translator of the Gawain-poet, an influence hard to overestimate, Marie Borroff recalls us with these essays to the fact that, to the very best poets, words matter. We would do well to listen.