Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Religious Parallels in Chaucer's "The Prioress's Tale"

I'm still in the midst of reading Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.  Last night, I read "The Prioress's Tale," and I noticed some religious parallels in the Prologue.  This stanza in particular:
'Weak is my skill in speech, O blissful Queen;
How then shall I declare thy worthiness
Or how sustain the weight of what I mean?
For as a child, a twelvemonth old, or less,
That hardly has a word it can express,
Just so am I, and therefore pity me!
Guide thou the song that I shall sing for thee!'
The only thing that's really happening here is the Prioress's asking Mary to help her tell her story.  In many ways, it's just like how the narrators of epic poems ask a muse to help them tell their story, except here, that invocation is based in Catholicism rather than the Greek or Roman religions.  In these invocations, narrators sometimes say something about how they don't have the necessary skills to tell their story without the muse's influence.

Because this invocation is cast in a religious sort of light, I realized that it's similar to what Moses says in Exodus 4.  After Moses encounters the burning bush, God tells him to go to Pharaoh and bring His people out of Egypt.  Moses replies, "Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue" (Exodus 4:10).

So while that stanza of the Prioress's Prologue functions in the same way as the invocations to a muse found in epic poems, in the Prioress's concern for accurately imparting her tale with the appropriate language, it simultaneously recalls the verbal ineptitude of Moses.