Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History Bookall understand who is meant. The name _Alcanor_ occurs in Vergil, but does not help us. 518. _Cipris_, Venus, goddess of Cyprus; called _Cipryde_ in Parl. Foules, 277. Dante has _Ciprigna_; Par. viii. 2. 519. _Favour_, favourer, helper, aid; not used in the ordinary sense of Lat. _fauor_, but as if it were formed from O.F. _faver_, Lat. _fauere_, to be favourable to. Godefroy gives an example of the O.F. verb _faver_ in this sense. 521. _Parnaso_; the spelling is imitated from the Ital. _Parnaso_, i.e. Parnassus, in Dante, Par. i. 16. So also _Elicon_ is Dante's _Elicona_, i.e. Helicon, Purg. xxix. 40. But the passage in Dante which Chaucer here especially imitates is that in Inf. ii. 7-9:-- 'O Muse, o alto ingegno, or m' aiutate; O mente, che scrivesti ciò ch' io vidi, Qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.' This Cary thus translates:-- 'O Muses! O high genius, now vouchsafe Your aid. O mind, that all I saw hast kept Safe in a written record, here thy worth And eminent endowments come to proof.' Hence _ye_ in l. 520 answers to Dante's _Muse_, the Muses; and _Thought_ in l. 523 answers to Dante's _mente_, Cf. also Parad. xviii. 82-87. And see the parallel passage in Anelida, 15-19. The reason why Chaucer took _Helicon_ to be a well rather than a mountain is because Dante's allusion to it is dubiously worded; see Purg. xxix. 40. 528. _Engyn_ is accented on the latter syllable, as in Troil. ii. 565, iii. 274. 529. _Egle_, the eagle in l. 499; cf. ll. 503-7. 534. Partly imitated from Dante, Purg. ix. 28-30:-- 'Poi mi parea che, più rotata un poco, Terribil come fulgor discendesse, E me rapisse suso infino al foco.' Cary's translation is:-- 'A little wheeling in his aëry tour, Terrible as the lightning, rushed he down, And snatch'd me upward even to the fire.' But Chaucer follows still more closely, and verbally, a passage in Machault's Jugement du Roi de Navarre, ed. Tarbé, 1849, p. 72, which has the words-- 'la foudre Que mainte ville mist en poudre'; i.e. literally, 'the _foudre_ (thunder-bolt) which reduces many a town to powder.' Machault nearly repeats this; ed. Tarbé, p. 97. Curiously enough, almost the same words occur in Boethius, bk. i. met. 4, where Chaucer's translation has:--'ne þe wey of thonder-leyt, that is wont to smyten heye toures.' It hence appears that Chaucer copies Machault, and Machault translates Boethius. There are some curious M.E. verses on the effects of thunder in Popular Treatises on Science, ed. Wright, p. 136. _Foudre_ represents the Lat. _fulgur_. One of the queer etymologies of medieval times is, that _fulgur_ is derived _a feriendo_; Vincent of Beauvais, Spec. Nat. iv. 59. It was held to be quite sufficient that both _fulgur_ and _ferire_ begin with _f_. 537. _Brende,_ was set on fire; cf. l. 163. The idea is that of a falling thunderbolt, which seems to have been conceived of as being a material mass, set on fire by the rapidity of its passage through the air; thus confusing the flash of lightning with the fall of a meteoric stone. See Mr. Aldis Wright's note on _thunder-stone_, Jul. Cæs. i. 3. 49. 543. _Hente_, caught. We find a similar use of the word in an old translation of Map's Apocalypsis Goliæ, printed in Morley's Shorter Eng. Poems, p. 13:-- 'And by and by I fell into a sudden trance, And all along the air was marvellously _hent_.' 544. _Sours_, sudden ascent, a springing aloft. It is well illustrated by a passage in the Somp. Tale (D 1938):-- 'Therfor, right as an hauk up, at a _sours_, Up springeth into their, right so prayeres Of charitable and chaste bisy freres Maken hir _sours_ to Goddes eres two.' It is precisely the same word as M.E. _sours_, mod. E. _source_, i.e. rise, spring (of a river). Etymologically, it is the feminine of O.F. _sors_, pp. of _sordre_, to rise (Lat. _surgere_). At a later period, the _r_ was dropped, and the word was strangely confused in sound with the verb _souse_, to pickle. Moreover, the original sense of 'sudden ascent' was confused with that of 'sudden descent,' for which the correct term was (I suppose) _swoop_. Hence the old verb to _souse_, in the sense 'to swoop down,' or 'to pounce upon,' or 'to strike,' as in Shak. K. John, v. 2. 150; Spenser, F. Q. i. 5. 8; iii. 4. 16; iv. 3. 19. 25; iv. 4. 30; iv 5. 36; iv. 7. 9. The sense of 'downward swoop' is particularly clear in Spenser, F. Q. ii. 11. 36:-- 'Eft fierce retourning, as a faulcon fayre, That once hath failed of her _souse_ full neare, Remounts againe into the open ayre, And unto better fortune doth her-selfe prepayre.' Such is the simple solution of the etymology of Mod. E. _souse_, as used by Pope (Epilogue to Satires, Dial. ii. 15)--'Spread thy broad wing, and _souse_ on all the kind.' 557. Cf. Dante, Inf. ii. 122:--'Perchè tanta viltà nel core allette?' Also Purg. ix. 46:--'Non aver tema.' 562. 'One that I could name.' This personal allusion can hardly refer to any one but Chaucer's wife. The familiar tone recalls him to himself; yet the eagle's voice sounded kindly, whereas the poet sadly tells us that his wife's voice sounded far otherwise: 'So was it never wont to be.' See Ward's Chaucer, pp. 84, 85; and cf. l. 2015 below. Perhaps Chaucer disliked to hear the word 'Awak!' 573. It would appear that, in Chaucer, _sëynt_ is sometimes dissyllabic; but it may be better here to use the feminine form _seynt-e_, as in l. 1066. Observe the rime of _Márie_ with _cárie_. 576. 'For so certainly may God help me, as thou shall have no harm.' 586. _Ioves_, Jove, Jupiter; cf. l. 597. This remarkable form occurs again in Troil. ii. 1607, where we find the expression '_Ioves_ lat him never thryve'; and again in Troil. iii. 3--'O _Ioves_ doughter dere'; and in Troil. iii. 15, where _Ioves_ is in the accusative case. The form is that of an O.F. nominative; cf. _Charles_, _Jacques_, _Jules_. _Stellifye_, make into a constellation; 'whether will Jupiter turn me into a constellation.' This alludes, of course, to the numerous cases in which it was supposed that such heroes as Hercules and Perseus, or such heroines as Andromeda and Callisto were changed into constellations: see Kn. Tale, A 2058. Cf. 'No wonder is thogh Iove hir stellifye'; Leg. Good Women, prol. 525. Skelton uses the word (Garland of Laurell, 963); and it is given in Palsgrave. 588. Perhaps imitated from Dante, Inf. ii. 32, where Dante says that he is neither Æneas nor Paul. Chaucer here refers to various men who were borne up to heaven, viz. Enoch (Gen. v. 24), Elijah (2 Kings ii. 11), Romulus, and Ganymede. Romulus was carried up to heaven by Mars; Ovid, Metam. xiv. 824; Fasti, ii. 475-512. Ganymede was carried up to heaven by Jupiter in the form of an eagle; cf. Vergil, Æn. i. 28, and see Ovid, Metam. x. 160, where Ovid adds: 'qui nunc quoque pocula miscet, Invitaque Iovi nectar Iunone ministrat.' In the passage in Dante (Purg. ix. 19-30), already alluded to above (note to l. 534), there is a reference to Gan |