The Garden Lover's Guide to Italy

by Penelope Hobhouse, Nicholas Harris Nicolas

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As water that doun renneth ay,
But never drope retourne may;
Ther may no-thing as tyme endure,
Metal, nor erthely creature;
For alle thing distroyeth he..."
-Fragment A, "Time"

"The Romaunt of the Rose" actually required me to do some proper research. Apparently, this is merely Chaucer's partial translation of Guillaume de la Lorris' "Le Roman de la Rose". At the time, the work was very popular with Parisians, so a fairly fresh Chaucer took it upon himself to start a translation into Middle English. Beyond this, I couldn't actually find a lot about this work in particular. Well, the other interesting fact is that this poem is widely thought to be be Chaucer, but Fragment B has a distinctly Northern style that has puzzled scholars for years. Hmm.

Now, to actually talk about the poem. Just for the sake of this review, I suppose I'll treat the poem like it's actually Chaucer's, as I'm not sure if this is a close translation from Lorris' work. No medieval poem would be complete without a healthy dose of allegory and dreams (and allegories INSIDE of dreams!!)- this includes an entire garden full of humanized virtues and vices and the love of the author represented by a single rose. Mostly, I feel as if "Romaunt" is an exploration of aspects of love as well as vices more than it is an actual story.

So to me the rhythmic flow of the poem is what actually was keeping me interested. Chaucer has this way of getting a good funky thing going on with a lot of good funky words, so even if he's talking about the most boring thing in the world I can still manage to get through. Phew, thanks Geoffrey!

[Tricia Halili-Felse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Middle English will kill me

[Marie (find me on StoryGraph) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A literary milestone, what else?