'Our Age Has No Chaucer'

“The suffering plough-share, or the flint may weare:

But heauenly poesie no death can feare.

Kings shall giue place to it, and kingly showes,

The bankes ore which gold-bearing Tagus flowes.”

I regret having never met William Bowman Piper, a specialist in eighteenth-century English literature for thirty years at Rice University, who died this week at the age of ninety. Piper, who had retired even before I went to work for Rice, represents an extinct species of academic: a scholar and teacher who loved the Western literary tradition. He devoted books to Sterne, Shakespeare’s sonnets and to common courtesy in eighteenth-century literature. He edited the Norton edition of The Writings of Jonathan Swift. I’ve been looking at two of his books: The Heroic Couplet (1969) and its complement, An Anthology of Heroic-Couplet Poetry (1977). The lines at the top, from Ben Jonson’s The Poetaster (1601), are excerpted in the latter volume.

It dawns on me while looking at these books that much of my favorite poetry (Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson) is written in heroic couplets, a dominant form in English from Chaucer to Keats, as represented in Piper’s anthology. Piper writes in his introduction to the earlier volume: “Since the decasyllabic line is the traditional heroic line of English poetry, every English decasyllabic couplet is a heroic couplet. Thus a history of this form must acknowledge poetic practice beginning gloriously with the great decasyllabic couplet poems of Chaucer and running up to the present day.”

  

Read together, Piper’s books serve as a valedictory to an essential, enjoyable and often very witty form, one that thrived from roughly 1585 to 1785. He notes that “the romantic poets degraded and rejected it” and “our age has no Chaucer.” Piper takes an appropriately commonsensical approach to his subject. Here he is on Swift: “Swift also reduced the couplet itself, turning it into a flat, talky, completely unelevated medium of communication.” He goes on to quote the great closing triplet in “A Description of a City Shower” (1710):

“Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,

Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,

Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.”

Swift, Piper tells us, “spares nothing,” and goes on: “In reducing both the objects of his satiric attention and his satiric medium itself – the medium which asserts and, indeed, symbolizes the comprehension and the detachment of such satirists as Dryden and Pope – Swift has composed several compelling degradations of human actions and the human intelligence.”