Oliveres wordes to Patrick his brother upon the way to Golden Moone

Initial note: This is the very first poem I ever wrote for the SCA, and it was certainly my first attempt at Middle English (let alone any medieval tongue). It was published in issue 20 of The Oak, Atlantia's arts and sciences journal.

This poem was written in Middle English, with a style and sound much like that of Chaucer’s more personal and less courtly poems, after several of which this attempts to imitate. The tone and subject matter are fairly comical and trivial in overall respective importance, and purposefully so. The technical skeleton of the work is a three-stanza ballade (minus an envoi - while Chaucer himself preferred the final half-stanza envoi, many of his immediate contemporaries and "students" did not).

With regard to the tone of the poem, “Oliveres wordes...” means to emulate a rather short poem of satirical grief and ire written by Chaucer, usually titled “Chaucers wordes unto Adam, his own scriveyn,” in which Chaucer derides his copyist for the latter’s continual inability to copy manuscripts properly and legibly (Riverside Chaucer pp. 650). As Chaucer pronounces a curse upon his copyist to receive an irritating scalp disease known as the “scalle” if he does not properly duplicate manuscripts, so does the narrator of my poem seek to pronounce all sorts of insults and woeful exclamations in response to his brother’s inability to write down directions correctly.

A second poem of Chaucer’s also serves to provide an influence of tone and subject matter for my own work; within “Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan” Chaucer constantly proclaims his woes upon the apparent apocalypse because his friend Scogan mistreated his lady over the holidays (pp. 655). Building off of this example, the narrator in my poem continually refers to his own end, and that of his brother, due to the error which his brother made in incorrectly copying the directions to an SCA event. However, the environment of traveling companions en route to a revel cannot be provided without some mention of The Canterbury Tales, however subtle its influence. The rather comical tragedy of my poem’s characters is just one offshoot of the disasters that could befall pilgrims in worse situations than those of Chaucer’s epic, from which I offered only tribute to the traveling situation of the characters.

The structure of this poem is derived specifically from both of the shorter poems of Chaucer - that is, “Chaucers wordes...” and “Lenvoy” - which utilize a stanza and rhyme form established by Chaucer and seen in later fourteenth and early fifteenth century works by poets such as John Lydgate, who utilizes this form in works such as “A Balade in Commendation of Our Lady” and “An Exclamacioun of the Death of Alcibades,” the latter of which is from his epic The Fall of Princes (John Lydgate: Poems, pp. 25 and pp. 14). These poems’ stanzas are constructed of seven lines apiece, which follow a strict ABABBCC rhyme pattern for Middle English; it follows pronunciation rules and in some cases, rhyming syllables prior to the ending -e, where appropriate for certain nouns of verb forms (as there are no silent vowels in Middle English). The short poem of “Oliveres wordes” faithfully follows this guideline in construction. With regards to meter, Chaucer roughly follows what would later be called "iambic pentameter" though his lines do not always strictly follow the decasyllabic formula. I have tried my best to do so as well.

Works Cited

Norton-Smith, John. ed. John Lydgate: Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
Benson, Larry. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.