Fire in the House: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Misreading of Lines 1139-45 in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale

If I were a professor, I should make all young people with a poetic talent, read Chaucer, Herrick, and Shakspeare.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson ¹

The rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson ²

There is no question that Emerson knew and admired the works of Chaucer, though his references to Chaucer tend mostly to be general, as in my two epigraphs above. Only once does he make a more extended allusion to Chaucer. That allusion comes in his 1844 essay, "The Poet." In 1925 Caroline Spurgeon briefly mentioned this allusion to Chaucer, ³ but so far as I have been able to determine, virtually no one, among either Emerson scholars or Chaucer scholars, has discussed the allusion. Indeed, most editions of Emerson's essay "The Poet" do not bother to give the reference for Emerson's allusion. Although Spurgeon did not tell what incident Emerson is alluding to, it is not hard to discover that the reference is to the old wife's pillow lecture in the Wife of Bath's Tale. My central point in this essay is that in his brief allusion to the Wife of Bath's Tale in "The Poet," Emerson quite misreads the Chaucerian passage that he refers to. I shall begin by discussing what Chaucer was about in the passage, then show in what ways Emerson misreads that passage, then suggest some reasons why Emerson may have misread it, and, finally and perhaps most interestingly, indicate why I believe Emerson may well have known that he was misreading the passage, and may, indeed, have done so willfully.

Emerson does not give us the context for the lines he cites and the paraphrases in "The Poet," but they appear in the pillow lecture of the new old bride to her reluctant young husband on their wedding night in the Wife of Bath's Tale. In the passage below I quote from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Other Poems, published in London between 1823 and 1832. ⁴ I use this edition, which reproduces almost exactly Tyrwhitt's late eighteenth-century text, because this is the one that Emerson almost certainly read in the 1840s. ⁵ In these difficult lines the bride is responding to her new husband's unchivalrous complaint that she is loathly, old, and low-born. She answers his charge by pointing out to him that true gentility or "gentillesse" is not something we are born with, not something we inherit from our ancestors, not something that comes with wealth or possessions. Part of her argument is that if gentility were an inherited characteristic, it would be like fire, true to its own quality, consistent in its own elemental nature, no matter what the consequences. The specific lines that Emerson alludes to, in my boldface below, are spoken by the new old wife to her new young husband:

    "Eke every wight wot this as wel as I,
If gentillesse were planted naturelly
Unto a certain linage doun the line,
Prive and apert, than wol they never fine
To don of gentillesse the faire office,
They mighten do no vilanie or vice.
    "Take fire and bere it into the derkest hous
Betwix this and the mount of Caucasus,
And let men shette the dores, and go thenne,
Yet wol the fire as faire lie and brenne
As twenty thousand men might it behold;
His office naturel ay wol it hold.
Up peril of my lif, til that it die."

(Cumberland, 194; cf. III 1133-45, Tyrwhitt 6715-27)

We can read Chaucer's passage, roughly, thus: if men took fire and carried it...