And like the previous meeting with the“lady of goodly age,”the encounter
with Pucell herself is characterized by verbal obliquity and inexplicable
redundancies, signs of excess. The lady asks if Amour’s love is in the vicinity,
and seems to acknowledge ( 773 – 75 ) that she knows herself to be the lady
in question. But Amour mysteriously claims that at this time he can only
contemplate his love’s beauty“inwardly”( 781 ), since his eyes are dimmed
by weeping. A little later, Pucell’s“Tell me who it is ye loue so sure”( 800 )
continues as though this exchange had not taken place, and Amoure must
actually inform her that“It is your grace that hath the intresse / In my true
herte”( 808 – 09 ). His love is acknowledged twice, and Pucell asks further
questions to discover what she already knows. The situation points back to
the similar treatment of the Black Knight’s acknowledgement of loss inThe
Book of the Duchess.Hawes, assiduous builder of lines of communication
with an English literary past, seems to recollect one of that past’s most
influential texts at what is–however we choose to gloss Chaucer’s strategy–
its own most desolate moment of failed communication and narrative
disjunction. The words with which Amour initially prompts the exchange–
“I speke vnknowen”( 770 )–prove to be all too accurate.
Recognition emerges through the mention of a text. The passages are
separated by the following dialogue:
pucell
Of late I sawe aboke of your makynge
Called the pastime of pleasure, which is wond[rous],
For I thyn[k]e and you had not ben in louynge,
Ye coude neuer haue made it so sentencyous.
I redde there all your passage daungerous;
Wherfore I wene for the fayre ladyes sake
That ye dyd loue, ye dyde that boke so make.
amour
Forsothe, madame, I dyde compyle that boke,
As the holy goost I call vnto wytnes,
But ygnorauntly, who so lyst to loke;
Many meruelous thynges in it I do expresse,
My lyue and loue to enserche well doub[t]lesse.
Many a one doth wryte I know not what in dede,
Yet the effecte dooth folowe the trouthe for to spede. ( 785 – 98 )Not until this point is Amour fully identified with the historical being of
Stephen Hawes. Pucell, like Gower’s Venus, furnishes the lover with a
signature, which writes the prior poem intoThe Comfort’sownlogicof
prophecy and fulfillment. As such, it is the poem’s fullest act of authentication:
Mémoires d’outre-tombe 139