The Wife of Bath and a Cockle Hat

In which the journey becomes a pilgrimage becomes a New Age guide

Resuming our literary travels, it occurred to me recently that for the pilgrim the journey may be more engaging, (and entertaining?) than the arrival. There’s no doubt about that being the case for the travellers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. So much so that the landlord of the Tabard in Southwark offers to accompany the motley group, to his own financial detriment, and cook for them if they will each tell a story on the way to and from Canterbury.

Canterbury Cathedral Photo by David George on Unsplash

He was well rewarded with tales from the red-stockinged, gap-toothed (sign of lechery!) Wife of Bath, five times married; the prioress who ‘was nat undergrowe’; the monk whose hood was fastened with a gold love-knot; a wine-loving shipman; a gold-loving doctor and a friar who was popular with the ‘worthy women of the town’ because

 Ful swetely herde he confessioun,

And plesaunt was his absolucioun.

Easy seen that the pilgrimage is a pretext for Chaucer as much as for his characters whose tales range from the bawdy to the moralising and melodramatic, all of which is grandly ironic given the purported objective of the journey.

Indeed the Wife of Bath is a veteran of pilgrimages and it’s not hard to imagine that may be where she picked up at least some of her five husbands. Indeed in Irish lore it was said that many people suffered the rigours of the pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg (scant sleep, bare feet, black bread and black tea) in order to find a mate.

Exactly six hundred years after Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury, the Brazilian writer, Paolo Coelho published his novel, The Pilgrimage (1987) tracing the route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Today, that path is well-worn by walkers and cyclists from all over the world. Friends who have walked at least part of the route tell me it’s a great way to clear the mind, and that it’s all about the people you meet along the way.

We’ve yet to see a modern day Chaucer make copy of the route. But somewhere along the way, between the communal activity of the early pilgrimage and the personal mysticism of the modern one, the journey has become an exploration of one’s self, a search for meaning in the face of despair.

---

Between the two books lies John Bunyan’s Puritan allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which, while being more a work of instruction than diversion or amusement, offers an insight into this changed focus. In the dream described by Bunyan’s narrator a man called Christian, learning that he must die, leaves the City of Destruction in search of the Celestial City, template perhaps for the journey of the Pilgrim fathers to the New World.

Christian encounters distractors and detractors, slogs through the Slough of Despond, up the Hill Difficulty and through the Valley of Humiliation to reach salvation. The lessons he learns as he goes are drawn from the Bible and are intended to guide the reader along the path of grace. Here, the idea of personal revelation and salvation are paramount and it is this, I think, which feeds into more recent poetic versions of pilgrimage as autobiography, among them, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Heaney’s Station Island.       

---

Portrait of Lord Byron frontispiece to my copy of his Works, published in 1823, inherited from my grandfather.

 

The first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1812, were an instant success. In his preface Byron says that most of the poem was written in the places it describes. His antihero, Harold, jaded with his dissolute life in England sets off on what was known then as the Grand Tour, visiting battle sites and reliving the bloody conflicts in imagination, then retreating to the alien solitude of the natural world.

Here in the sultriest season let him rest,

Fresh is the green beneath those aged trees;

Here winds of gentlest wing will fan his breast,

From heaven itself he may inhale the breeze:

The plain is far beneath – oh let him seize

Pure pleasure while he can; the scorching ray

Here pierceth not, impregnate with disease;

Then let his length the loitering pilgrim lay,

And gaze, untired, the morn, the noon, the eve away.

(Canto II v. L)

Part of the fascination of the poem lies in the lengthy footnotes provided by Byron, which amount in effect to a travelogue with sharp comments on contemporary politics and culture wars. For example, over two and a half pages he lets rip at Lord Elgin, whose theft of marbles from the Parthenon remains the object of some anger* ‘. . . thus may Lord Elgin boast of having ruined Athens.’ Read together the poem and footnotes are complementary, the one the diary of a soul, distressed by self-destructive humanity, the other the diary of a traveller observing the art, manners and history of foreign lands.

In this way the poem becomes the pilgrimage, a progress that Wordsworth developed more profoundly in The Prelude. Begun in 1799, and revised in 1805 and 1850, it was published some months after his death. The title, given by his widow, refers to the poem’s inception a prelude to a philosophical epic, The Recluse, planned by him and Coleridge. In the gap between 1805 and 1850 the influence of Byron comes to bear on the poem. Extending a passage in Book I Wordsworth inserts the lines:

Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive,

But as a Pilgrim resolute I took

The road that pointed towards the chosen Vale.

(Book 1 ll 90-93)

By the time Byron wrote the last part of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage he had abandoned all pretence that the poem was not autobiographical. In the dedication to his friend John Hobhouse he writes,

With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person.

Wordsworth’s long poem is openly autobiographical, tracing the course of his early life to his travels in Germany and through revolutionary France into Switzerland, and finally his return to his childhood home. He had set off on what today would be called a gap year, reluctant to take up the church living that his relatives could have arranged for him but uncertain what else to do with himself. The context of his malaise may have differed from Harold’s but unease it was nonetheless.

Byron’s poem ends with recollection of the Pilgrim, saying ‘He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell’, echoing Ophelia’s song about a woman seeking her lost lover, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, describing a pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela, whose symbol remains the scallop shell. And so we return to the modern walkers who follow that ancient way, some for the pleasure of walking alone or in company, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, others, like Harold in search of spiritual balm, others still like Christian and Coelho seeking salvation.

From the pilgrims on the path to the pilgrims on the page little has changed over the centuries save that the poetry has laid a track to the inner recesses of the human soul, its torments and its joys.

---

I’m sure I’ve left out many examples of pilgrim poems or novels. Are there any that spring to your minds?

*On 18 June last a group of theatrical luminaries read Byron’s tirade against Elgin, The Curse of Minerva to mark the 14^th anniversary of the Acropolis Museum, an event organised by the British Committee for Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.