7. The sicke mette he drinketh of the tun: The sick man dreams
that he drinks wine, as one in health.
8. The significance of the poet’s looking to the NNW is not
plain; his window may have faced that way.
9. The idea of the twin gates, leading to the Paradise and the
Hell of lovers, may have been taken from the description of the
gates of dreams in the Odyssey and the Aeneid; but the iteration
of “Through me men go” far more directly suggests the legend
on Dante’s gate of Hell:—
Per me si va nella citta dolente,
Per me si va nell’ eterno dolore;
Per me si va tra la perduta gente.
(“Through me is the way to the city of sorrow,
Through me is the way to eternal suffering;
Through me is the way of the lost people”)
The famous line, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate” —
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here” — is evidently
paraphrased in Chaucer’s words “Th’eschewing is the only
remedy;” that is, the sole hope consists in the avoidance of that
dismal gate.
10. A powerful though homely description of torment; the
sufferers being represented as fish enclosed in a weir from
which all the water has been withdrawn.
11. Compare with this catalogue raisonne of trees the ampler
list given by Spenser in “The Faerie Queen,” book i. canto i. In
several instances, as in “the builder oak” and “the sailing pine,”
the later poet has exactly copied the words of the earlier.
The builder oak: In the Middle Ages the oak was as
distinctively the building timber on land, as it subsequently
became for the sea.
The pillar elm: Spenser explains this in paraphrasing it into “the
vineprop elm” — because it was planted as a pillar or prop to
the vine; it is called “the coffer unto carrain,” or “carrion,”
because coffins for the dead were made from it.
The box, pipe tree: the box tree was used for making pipes or horns.
Holm: the holly, used for whip-handles.
The sailing fir: Because ships’ masts and spars were made of its
wood.
The cypress death to plain: in Spenser’s imitation, “the cypress
funeral.”
The shooter yew: yew wood was used for bows.
The aspe for shaftes plain: of the aspen, or black poplar, arrows
were made.
The laurel divine: So called, either because it was Apollo’s
tree — Horace says that Pindar is “laurea donandus Apollinari” (“to
be given Apollo’s laurel”) — or because the honour which it
signified, when placed on the head of a poet or conqueror, lifted
a man as it were into the rank of the gods.
12. If Chaucer had any special trio of courtiers in his mind when
he excluded so many names, we may suppose them to be
Charms, Sorcery, and Leasings who, in The Knight’s Tale, come
after Bawdry and Riches — to whom Messagerie (the carrying
of messages) and Meed (reward, bribe) may correspond.
13. The dove was the bird sacred to Venus; hence Ovid
enumerates the peacock of Juno, Jove’s armour bearing bird,
“Cythereiadasque columbas” (“And the Cythereian doves”) —
“Metamorphoses. xv. 386
14. Priapus: fitly endowed with a place in the Temple of Love,
as being the embodiment of the principle of fertility in flocks
and the fruits of the earth. See note 23 to the Merchant’s Tale.
15. Ovid, in the “Fasti” (i. 433), describes the confusion of
Priapus when, in the night following a feast of sylvan and
Bacchic deities, the braying of the ass of Silenus wakened the
company to detect the god in a furtive amatory expedition.