Chapter 19 - Rich Words: Gower’s Rime Riche in Dramatic Action

Summary

Close readings of Gower's poetry are not as common as broader or more thematic assessments, but such attention highlights the linguistic skill which makes Gower fit to stand with Chaucer among England's early makers of poetry. This essay will compare the two poets by exploring a particular formal aspect, namely rime riche, in which rhyme partners appear identical but diverge in meaning. Rich rhyme has received attention from scholars in diverse periods and provinces, most notably in Tony Hunt's recent book on Gautier de Coincy, Miraculous Rhymes. A medieval aesthetic that used such rhymes was once described almost apologetically by scholars, as though it were a phase of mannerism now outgrown, but medievalists today are not alone in appreciating rich rhyme, as Marjorie Perloff's recent discussion of W. B. Yeats attests. There is growing awareness of how rich rhymes, in medieval poetry as much as modern, can be not just ornamental to a poem's surface but at the heart of a poem, pointed and integral to its purpose.

Rime riche in medieval poetry is very frequent, featuring in 650 couplets of the French and English poetry of Gower alone. It reflects sophisticated literary culture, and Hunt has deepened our sense of the sententious, virtuoso and satirical nature of the device in the hands of a poet like Gautier, who positions many of his rich rhymes at the end of miracle tales as a moralizing coda. Rhyme reflects the poet's brilliant, authoritative voice. But what is the dramatic power of rime riche? What brilliance and authority are conferred upon a character who speaks with such rhymes, and on what level do fellow characters hear them? As in Gautier and Chaucer, the majority of rime riche couplets in Gower's Confessio Amantis are delivered by a narrator, Genius, yet Genius's sententious style is not meant for our ears alone. Amans reacts to Genius's rime riche couplets in a sophisticated ‘couplet war’, in which the frame narrative's fictional characters indeed hear rhyme.