7 - Gower in Striped Sleeves: Mirour de l’Omme as Gower’s Early Humanism

Summary

GOWER's EARLIEST DATABLE POEM, the French Mirour de l’Omme (c. 1378), has had its modern readers, and increasingly its critical defenders. But many readers of Gower, in modern times and, it seems, his own (judging by Mirour's single surviving copy), seem eager to pass it by. At best it is treated as a reference point for and way-station to the generic and social innovations of the Latin Vox Clamantis, with its dream-vision of the Rebellion of 1381 and its dense reapplications of Ovid's verses, and the more widely read Confessio Amantis, with its unpredictable moralizations of tales from Ovid and other sources. Gower's mention of Mirour in a late colophon listing his major works, not to mention his tomb's location of it among his effigy's triplex head-rest of books, shows his view of its importance, but the colophon's summary of Mirour is the briefest and thinnest of any of the summaries of Gower's books, and the tomb gives it a Latin title that matches neither the colophon nor the book itself. Even the editor of Mirour, G.C. Macaulay, offers outright discouragement from reading it in full:

[Gower] is a poet in a different sense altogether from his predecessors, superior to former Anglo-Norman writers both in imagination and in technical skill; but at the same time he is hopelessly unreadable, so far as this book as a whole is concerned, because, having been seized by the fatal desire to do good in his generation, “villicacionis sue racionem, dum tempus instat, … alleviare cupiens” [“desiring, while time allows, to mitigate the debt of his stewardship”] as he himself expresses it, he deliberately determined to smother those gifts which had been employed in the service of folly, and to become a preacher instead of a poet. Happily, as time went on, he saw reason to modify his views in this respect (as he tells us plainly in the Confessio Amantis), and he became a poet again; but meanwhile he remains a preacher, and not a very good one after all.