Poetry and Animals

THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY41

can signify animals because they share common ground, which in the
tale is literally the farm and figuratively Eden and the world. A kind of
community is suggested too by the detailed list of people and animals
who join the uproar and pursuit after Chauntecleer is caught by Russell
the fox, including “Colle oure [the narrator’s?] dogge” (3383). In the larger
frame of the narrator and Chaucer’s multiple allegories, we have a sense
of animal and human as categories always under construction and thus
tenuous. The most conspicuous blurring of animal and human occurs in
the tale’s epilogue.

“Sire Nonnes Preest,” oure Hooste seide anoon,

“I-blessed be thy breche, and every stoon!

This was a murie tale of Chauntecleer.

But by my trouthe, if thou were seculer,

Thou woldest ben a trede-foul aright.

For if thou have corage as thou hast myght,

Thee were nede of hennes, as I wene,

Ya, moo than seven tymes seventene.

See, whiche braunes hath this gentil preest,

So gret a nekke, and swich a large breest!

He loketh as a sperhauk with his yen

Him nedeth nat his colour for to dyen.

(3447–58)

In celebrating the priest’s body as manly and sexual (he takes note of his
buttocks, testicles, chest, musculature, eyes, and ruddy complexion), the
host has clearly understood the tale as allegorical of the priest’s physical
desire. The host’s response turns the priest back into Chauntecleer, a
“trede-foul” in need of many hens. He has been encouraged to read the
tale this way, however, by the multiple confusions between animal and
human I have described. As Wheatley puts it, the host “reads the body of
the human before him as an animal’s, and he fantasizes that body back
into a fabular setting, where it can abandon morality in pursuit of more
than one hundred females. This is a completely inverted reading of the
fable—and we should allow the inversion its full range of meanings.”^20