Page 163 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes Next, the Canon told the priest to bring him a chalk stone, promising to make a gold ingot of the
same shape. The Canon slyly inserted a metal rod into the chalk, and, when he threw into a bowl of
water, the chalk melted away leaving only the silver rod. The priest was delighted, but the Canon
decided to prove himself once more. Taking another ounce of quicksilver, the Canon took up a
hollow stick, filled at one end with silver filings, and, putting it above the bowl of quicksilver, made
it seem as if the silver (from the stick) had been translated from the quicksilver.

What physical disfigurement have the experiments caused the Canon’s Yeoman?
Thus by various tricks and schemes, the Canon filches the money from his unsuspecting audience,
and charges them huge amounts for his wisdom and his trickery. Moreover, by telling the priest
that, if he (the Canon) were caught, he would be killed as a sorcerer, the Canon secured still higher
prices for his services.
It is easy, the narrator concludes, for men to take the gold they have and turn it into nothing.
Moreover, after cataloguing some authorities (including Arnaldus of Villanova, Hermes
Trismegistus, and Plato) who wrote of the philosopher’s stone, the narrator firmly concludes that
God does not want men to know how to get it–and therefore, we should “let it goon”. If God does
not want it discovered, so it should remain.

Analysis

The Second Nun’s Tale is hardly over, when two new characters arrive on the pilgrimage, sweatily
riding up behind the pilgrimage and eventually overtaking them. The arrival of the Canon and his
Yeoman is such an unusual event–particularly at this point of the Canterbury Tales–that the compiler
of the Hengwrt manuscript (see “The texts of the Tales” for more information on the manuscripts)
actually left it out altogether. It is an unusual construction, and one with “transformation” and “change”
as its central themes-not surprisingly, then, it pins down a change already starting to occur within the
fabric of the Tales as a whole.
Alchemy is the subject of the Canon Yeoman’s tale, as he calls it, the “sliding” science: and alchemy
argues that all things are in a state of perpetual change, slipping from one thing to another. Coals
can become the philosopher’s stone, metal melts to become a false covering for a crucifix, and thanks
to the trickery of the tale’s false Canon, we are never quite sure what substance it is we are examining.
Can we ever tell what it is we are looking at–can we ever know the difference between true and
false?
The Canon himself is a mysterious, imposing and peripheral figure, and one who, at the very moment
his falsehood appears to be rumbled, runs away from the company, and from the Tales–for good.
He is almost silent, and yet his silence is not (like Chaucer’s) from shyness, or from high-status-clad
in a hooded black robe, with a glimpse of white underneath, he even physically appears shrouded
and covered up. Moreover, we never actually ascertain whether the Yeoman’s tale is about this
Canon, or–as he claims–about another Canon. It seems hugely improbable, even to take the Yeoman’s
words at face value (and the tale offers other warnings about doing that!), that the Yeoman would
have this amount of knowledge about an entirely different Canon. The Canon then is a liminal
figure, sitting somewhere on the border between reality and fiction, between true and false.
His Yeoman too starts his literary life as his advocate: praising the Canon as an extraordinary,
wonderful, skilled man, before immediately retracting all that praise (almost without any
provocation) to unmask his master as the tricky charlatan he is. Yet this casts huge doubt on the
veracity of what the Yeoman actually utters-there is a big difference between his initial claim that
the Canon could pave the way to Canterbury with gold, and the portrait of the Canon built up in his
tale. Moreover, the sweating arrival of the pair (their horses are so wet that they can hardly move),

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