It may seem odd to look to a 14th-c. poet such as Chaucer for help with the COVID-19 crisis. But his poems do provide some support—beyond the balm for the soul that reading good poetry always offers.
On February 29, 2020, the New York Times ran an opinion piece, “How to be a Smart Coronavirus Prepper,” by Annalee Newitz. While I admired the article’s optimism, I question its analysis of Chaucer’s response to the Black Death or bubonic plague, which carried away nearly half of the population of Europe when the poet was only six years old. Newitz writes that Chaucer “grew up in a world forever changed by a pandemic, and yet he mentions the plague only once in his enormous body of work.”
In fact, however, Chaucer’s poetry is haunted by the plague. His first major work, The Book of the Duchess, is a moving elegy for John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche, who died in the pandemic. Chaucer understood that pandemics do not respect our facile social categories. The poem is a lesson in the kind of empathy we need today, if we’re to survive the COVID-19 crisis. And then there are Chaucer’s more direct warnings about pandemics, that we would likewise do well to heed. Although he’s a devout pilgrim, Chaucer’s Physician in the Canterbury Tales is also a plague profiteer: “He kepte that he wan [earned] in pestilence.” The Physician cashes in by implying—like Jude Law in the movie Contagion (2011)—that he has a cure. (In the Middle Ages, there was no cure for the Black Death, as there isn’t, yet, for COVID-19.) Consider, too, the three young drunks in Chaucer’s most famous story, the Pardoner’s Tale, who are so loaded that they fail to notice that one of their friends has succumbed to the plague. In their cups, they resolve to kill Death—only to fall victim to him, because of their pride.
I’m teaching a Medieval Drama seminar this term. Just before my students were sent home because of the pandemic, we were talking about the figure of Death in the morality plays: he’s often represented as a skeleton lurking behind people, because no one wants to believe he’s there. Well, he’s with us now. There’s hope, nevertheless, in the form of ongoing scientific research—and in the lessons of Chaucer’s poetry. Empathy, honesty, vigilance, and humility: in the midst of a pandemic, these never lose their healing power.
This article was also published in The Advocate: Letters: Chaucer offers age-old lessons in face of a pandemic
Michael Kuczynski – professor of English, Tulane University, New Orleans on March 25th, 2020.
Michael Kuczynski took his BA in English from St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia (1979), and his MA and PhD degrees in English and American literature from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1981, 1987). He specializes in Middle English literature (especially Chaucer), intersections between religion and literature in medieval and early modern England, and the relationship between poetry and the visual arts. He has published widely on medieval manuscripts, early modern books, and nineteenth-century antiquarianism.