Knight's Lament

I have a friend who is occasionally called "Kermit two-legs" on accout of he walks around on a couple of twigs where proper limbs ought to be. Sometimes he signs his checks as Kermit Two-Legs. This friend also sings a little song of his own invention, most of which I can't remember, but the refrain of which is something like "Every day is a new day." Many of my friends are musicians, which means I am allowed to hear interesting and amusing musical accidents, which sometimes become standard jokes...it also means I have to do a fair bit of waiting, because if I've learned anything, it is that musicians are tardy or truant. I find it helpful to think of them as symptomatic of the type rather than as personally careless. But back to the task at hand.

I wanted to talk about the black knight's lament in "The Book of the Duchess." He gives in to the narrator's request that he uncover the source of his woe. Now, the knight could have just said, "My lady is dead," which eventually he does at the very end, but he has to lead up to the point, just like Adam and Eve do in Genesis 3. ("Blah blah blah. And I did eat." Guilty. Next.) Not that loving a lady and being sorrowful at her death is a sin, of course, but even our lovesick narrator tells the knight to loosen up a little. One thing the narrator does is warn the knight against suicide, and there is a sense in which the knight is in a state of mortal peril, whether because of mortal fault or not, it is hard to say. But how did he get there?

In order to explain that, the knight goes back to his early youth and says that since he could first think a rational thought and know Love in his own mind, he has been a servant to it and had prayed for many a year that Love would set his heart on what lady should please him (Love). Well...more prayers cast up to desires and to personified virtues. This one is most akin to Venus, and if any of us knows anything about mythology, it's that if you start getting Venus involved, you're asking for trouble. Not that medieval Venus is at all the same as classical Venus, and Venus isn't even mentioned in the poem, but there are a lot of prayers to gods floating around. It reminds me of something I read in Orthodoxy: "The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone." Chesterton is talking about the "modern world," though honestly I don't think it applies only to us in our day, or to Chesterton in his own. I rather think it is a universal human tendency spanning all times to pick our goods and pray to them, to presume to "know" good and evil apart from God and to isolate them from God, and so also from each other. Original sin more than modernity per se. So I probably wouldn't have been much comfort to our black knight. I can see it now. I probably would've said something like, "Well...shouldn't've done that. Mistake number one. But go ahead, I'm interrupting, sorry."

I do think, however, that the medieval mind had more of a tendency to be responsible to its decisions, to see its past actions and thoughts in solidarity and as something to be seen through. I rather think it would've been unthinkable for our mourner to be the black knight one day and the next day sing "Every day is a new day" and sign his checks as Kermit Two-Legs. Hey nonny nonny. No, this is who he is, and it has a trajectory which he recognizes. The problem for him is, the trajectory has led him to despair, which is a mortal sin. That which he does now--whether composing sorrowful love poems or unfolding his bosom to our narrator--he only does to drive away the time, to drive away the Night, much as the narrator does at the poem's opening when he calls for his book and longs for sleep. Sleep drives away the night, but it is natural, God-given. Adam sleeps by God's granting, and wakes to Eve. Our narrator is awake for his Eve and must pray to nature for sleep. When he does, he only dreams a dramatic mirror of himself, and Eve is still far from him.

So there's some stuff. I'm not quite done, but I must sleep as well.