TIMOTHY O'BRIEN


    Even before Diomedes arrives in the Greek camp with Criseyde, for whom the Trojans have exchanged the seemingly more valuable Antenor, the bold Greek hero positions himself as an inevitability. One of the requests he makes of Criseyde, in 21 lines of "and" clauses (5.127-47) building to the unavoidable conclusion that he is and always will be her "owne aboven every creature" (5.154), is this one: "And that ye me wolde as youre brother trete" (5.134).(FN1) Because that request is one of many in a rather astonishingly sudden "come on" by the Greek hero, the emphasis on the brotherly relationship is easy to overlook. Yet it results from what has to have been a remarkably careful selection of terms, and not just because that term is a timelessly effective exploitation of familiarity, as in the lyric "Brother, can you spare a dime?"(FN2) Diomedes' use of "brother" here serves as the climax to Chaucer's development throughout his poem of the theme of brotherhood and the complex ways in which that relationship and the term itself get exploited--by the poem's characters and even to a lesser extent by the narrator.
    Scholars have touched upon the brotherly relationship in the Troilus only to the extent that they focus on some related element--friendship, for instance, or the poem's claustrophobic setting and the close, even cliquish and in many cases familial relationships depicted in that setting, not to mention the related and certainly more sensational concern among scholars with hints of incestuous elements within the story and its allusions. Though the term "brother" and the relationship it names often comes up in these connections, I think it is productive to untangle it from them at least partially so that we can understand what Chaucer does with words, with cultural terms, in this poem.
    Such a focus is not lacking in discussions of the Canterbury Tales. In fact, because of David Wallace's identification of the social forces determining that work's "associational" structure, particularly the influence of the guild language, with its emphasis on horizontal, fraternal relationships, the poem's repetition of terms for brotherhood makes even more sense than it did before, when the term was seen primarily as a key element in Chaucer's portrayals of religious hypocrisy.(FN3) Such characters as the Friar in the Summoner's Tale and the monk in the Shipman's Tale use terms of familial attachment--brotherhood and cozenage--as a way to hoodwink the unsuspicious "consumer" of those terms. Emphasis on the guilds leads Wallace to regard the obviously religious satire implied by the use of "brother" within the Friar's Tale as, in fact, Chaucer's interrogation of the guilds' use of that term and of the confrontation of the urban and expansive associational structure with the more traditional, limited structure of the country parish.(FN4)
    According to Jean Jost, "brother" or a variant occurs 101 times in the Canterbury Tales. This frequency, she writes, "[suggests] the concept's strong linking function throughout the work," whether the term is employed positively or negatively. On the basis of these occurrences Jost draws the following picture of brotherhood within the Tales, the list going from the strongest to the weakest bonds:
    (1) literal brothers of the same mother such as Placebo and Justinus in the Merchant's Tale; (2) closely related kin such as the cousins Palamon and Arcite in the Knight's Tale; (3) the putative "cousins," the monk and the merchant, in the Shipman's Tale; (4) the three comrades who pledge sworn brotherhood in the Pardoner's Tale; (5) men connected in some affectionate or emotional bond such as the philosopher and his "leve brother" in the Franklin's Tale (V. 1607); (6) those bound together in a religious confraternity such as the Franciscans in the Summoner's Tale; and (7) simple acquaintances who acknowledge the other's friendship, as does Harry advising the Miller, "Robyn, my leeve brother" (I 3129).(FN5)
    Primarily, the first and fifth of these manifestations of brotherhood are in play in the Troilus. In addition, the appearance of the term in the Troilus and its allusions includes the relationship of brother to sister, of brother in law, and of heterosexual friends--as in Diomedes' request to become Criseyde's brother. As a linking device in the Troilus, "brother" connects the relationships between Troilus and Pandarus, Troilus and Criseyde, Diomedes and Criseyde, and the narrator and his readers, each of which involves a brotherly component. A term by which Chaucer depicts friendship, love, avuncular manipulation, and predatory sexuality, "brother" is also a problem to be explored in itself. It is a word whose utility seems to have intrigued Chaucer, its easy transfer-ability from one social order to another always enriching the word's complex and powerfully ironic function within the poem. Probably encouraged by the front piece picture to the Corpus manuscript depicting Chaucer reciting the Troilus--I anachronistically imagine Chaucer, not the persona/narrator, lifting his two hands to give the double quote sign, or being tempted to do so, whenever he uses the term brother. Those quotes, to extend this image, represent the cultural baggage that Chaucer and his actual, as opposed to the narrator's imagined, audience understand to be carried by that term. They represent the times in the narrative when the term activates a wider perspective then the one through which it is spoken by a particular character. They mark in simple terms the incongruity of irony. The temptation to lift the hands to form the quotations without actually doing it represents Chaucer's resistance to an irony that he knows is there but which he refuses to activate, largely because he is a participant in the world of the particular brotherhood he is tempted to criticize.
    Let's acquiesce to Wallace's notion that Chaucer was not just textual in his observations of life, that he was partly shaped by the customs and the language of the guilds, that he "was influenced ... by his daily acquaintance with a pattern of social practice that is drastically undertheorized: the Germanic tradition of the guilds."(FN6) Though Wallace's claim relates primarily to Chaucer's great associational project of the Canterbury Tales, it applies to an earlier period in his life as well. In other words, the language of the guilds, the pervasive use of "brother" and "sister" as designators of its members and as expressions of an egalitarian, rather than authoritarian view of social behavior, exists as an important context within which Chaucer, a vintner's son, understood the meaning(s) of the term brother. Not just an institution, the guilds, according to Wallace, comprised "a form of consciousness, a mentality."(FN7)
    At the same time, however, Chaucer was a friend to knights and a servant of the royal family. In Russell's words,
    he understood them, surely better than they understood themselves: he understood their compelling, almost inborn sense of noblesse oblige, their principles, their truculence, their violence, and their unpredictability. . . . He could understand . . . their irresistible romance with the past, what Donald Howard would have called their obsolescence. He could understand from his distance their obsession with bloodlines, with generations and family honor, considerations that loomed all the larger as economic upheavals of the fourteenth century made them less and less the center of society.(FN8)
    Existing between these two fraternal cultures, the guilds and the court, Chaucer also might very well have been close to a more intimate fraternal association, that of brother-in-arms. Even without the evidence in the Knight's Tale of the relationship between Palamon and Arcite, Chaucer's connections with such knights as John Clanvowe and William Neville, for instance, make it likely that he knew well the language and conventions of sworn brotherhood. It is probably going too far to imagine that Chaucer himself was party to such an association as might be suggested, for instance, by Clanvowe and Neville's serving as witnesses to Cecily Campaigne's signing of the document releasing Chaucer from the charge of raptus in 1380. Their doing that, however, has all the signs of the response of members of a fraternal organization--a brotherhood of knights--to the predicament of one of its members, whom they are bound to assist even in legal and personal affairs.
    It is not going too far, however, to imagine that Chaucer knew of such a brotherhood between two knights, perhaps between Clanvowe and Neville themselves, who died in 1391 near Constantinople, either on a pilgrimage or crusade. The knights were entombed together in a Dominican church. The tomb slab, depicting their arms impaled, all but certainly signals that they were brothers in arms.(FN9) Such an agreement would require the knights to swear allegiance to one another. A legally enforceable agreement according to the documents that Maurice Keen examines, brotherhood-in-arms created a relationship in which the sworn brother was to act as heir to his companion's military fortune, was to aid his companion in right and wrong, and was to be his companion's counsel not just in ordinary matters, but in the most private, intimate and secret concerns.(FN10) Such intimacy, such familial closeness, emerges from the fact that the impaling of the arms on Neville and Clanvowe's tomb slab is extremely rare, usually being reserved as a way to represent the unity of husband and wife.(FN11)
    I dwell on these details about the brother-in-arms relationship between Chaucer's friends for two reasons. To do so emphasizes the representational and real basis for Chaucer's depiction of brotherhood, not just the intertextual aspect of it. It also provides us with a sense of how Chaucer's use of the term brother and his interest in that term can be seen not just as a subset of a Ciceronian or Ovidian concept of friendship against which he sets up Pandarus and others for criticism. His interest is as much in the complexities involved in various appropriations of brotherly relationships as in friendship; and though that interest is intensely ironic, it is at the same time authentically sympathetic and nuanced.(FN12)
    The relationship between Palamon and Arcite, of course, is founded on the brother-in-arms agreement. Palamon tells Arcite that the latter should provide him with support in his love for Emily. After all, he saw her first and told Arcite about her precisely because that formal agreement calls for Arcite, as his "brother sworn" (A. 1147) to "forthren him" "In every cas" (A. 1137-38):
    I loved hire first, and tolde thee my wo As to my conseil and my brother sworn To forthre me, as I have toold biforn. For which thou art ybounden as a knight To helpen me, if it lay in thy might, Or elles artow fals, I dar wel seyn.
    (A. 1146-51)
    The limitations of such an agreement emerge as Arcite distinguishes between Palamon's love of Emily as goddess and his own love of her as woman. He says that he confided in Palamon, his "cosyn and . . . brother sworn" (A. 1161) about his love precisely because of that agreement, whose limitations, as with the conflicts of loyalty occurring between knights in Malory, are exposed in this matter of love. That Arcite goes on to claim that love has no law suggests how specifically aware he--and of course Chaucer--is of the legal, enforceable basis of the pact--"And therfore positif lawe and swich decree/Is broken al day for love in ech degree" (A. 1167-68).
    More important, though, than the accuracy with which Chaucer describes the bond of brother-in-arms is the emphasis he gives it in the "Knight's Tale." In Teseida Boccaccio's treatment of the prison episode, during which Arcita and Palemone fall in love with Emilia, does not foreground anything like a brotherhood between the two. They share their despair at being in love with Emilia when they, because of their imprisonment, will never be able to fulfill it. In fact their servants have to give them aid--and even a scolding--for their despair.(FN13) When they encounter each other later, after Palemone's escape, they both reassert their claims to Emilia and decide to settle the matter by fighting, as do the two knights in Chaucer. However, only a little is made of their having some duty toward each other as friends, and nothing resembling Palamon and Arcite's invocation of their formal brotherhood-in-arms, let alone Chaucer's rather thorough display and even interrogation of it, occurs in Boccaccio's treatment of the relationship. I think this addition to the Teseida suggests quite strongly Chaucer's special concern with brotherhood and its implications. As we shall see, his clearest single addition in the Troilus to II Filostrato also involves a pronounced display of brotherly relationships.
    In addition to the guild, the court, and the more specific knightly "mentalities" amid which Chaucer lived stands of course the ecclesiastical culture and its use and misuse of a term that in its most idealistic sense captures the meaning of caritas, a love that is strong but undifferentiating, essentially oblivious to individuality. It is also asexual. In the Book of the Duchess, for instance, Blanche's pure love for others expresses this idea: "She loved as man may do hys brother" (892). The Parson communicates it as well when he says that a man should love his wife as if she were his sister (318). The Parson's recommendation is a more extreme version of the recommendation in the Secreta Secretorum that when a wife is with child, the husband ought to treat her as if she were his sister.(FN14) Though use of the term tries to de-sexualize relationships, the dangers of its use are clear, as illustrated in a warning by Jerome and another in the Ancrene Riwle about the danger to nuns of exchanging letters with male religious figures in which the language is too full of extravagant rhetoric of friendship and brotherhood.(FN15) The term also describes the relationship between the Parson and the Plowman, "his brother" (A. 529), in the Canterbury Tales, who are, if not actual brothers, at least spiritual kin. The abuse of the term brotherhood, as I have suggested, occurs most clearly in the "Friar's Tale," where it appears twenty times as a way of satirizing the hypocrisy of the religious fraternal orders. As a representative of these orders, the Friar exposes his unreliability through the particular kind of vocabulary in which he narrates his tale.(FN16) All of these various associations of the term brother, regardless of the Troilus' pagan and historical themes, constitute the conventions, the mentalities, amid which, and at the same time apart from which, Chaucer operates in employing the term "brother" and depicting the relationships it describes. Whereas Boccaccio remains satisfied with depicting the brotherly relationship as a conventional marker of friendship and an occasion for a satiric volley at Friars, Chaucer fully explores the brotherly attachment by building key episodes in ways that emphasize the dynamics of sibling relationships, by occasionally bringing into focus the Oedipus-Eteocles-Polynices story and the Tereus-Philomel-Procne tale, and by using the term to imply connections from episode to episode and from one level of the narrative to another.
    In the Troilus Chaucer significantly alters Boccaccio's "Proem" in a way that magnifies the importance of this theme of the brotherly relationship. Drastically shortening the "Proem" of Il Filostrato, he makes it part of his first book, coming after the epic statement of theme. Whereas Boccaccio addresses at great length Maria d'Aquino, his inspiration for representing himself as Troiolo in the poem, Chaucer's narrator invokes Thesiphone in the poem's first stanza, one of three Furies whose punishments are directed primarily toward those who commit crimes against family members. In Book 5 of Teseida, for instance, Tisiphone is described as turning one "brother" against another: "And just as Tisiphone, when summoned by Oedipus in that dark place where he was living in perpetual night, used her cunning to kindle the two brothers' desire for the kingdom--so also through the poison that she has the power to convey, she made desire for Emilia to take root in him, saying : 'Neither power nor love can well be shared with others.'"(FN17) After invoking Thesiphone, the narrator addresses a community of lovers of which he is the servant, relegated to that secondary role, it seems, because of his "unliklynesse" (1. 16) as a lover. The transition from this introduction to the narrative occurs over the span of five lines in which the narrator situates himself in relation to his audience and purpose:
    For so hope I my sowle best avaunce, To prey for hem that Loves servauntz be, And write hire wo, and lyve in charitee, And for to have of hem compassioun, As though I were hire owne brother dere.
    (1. 47-51)
    The narrator positions himself as brother to those for whom he is writing. Lisa Kiser regards this gesture as a means by which the narrator too easily detaches himself to a superior position of Christian charity, able to feel compassion for his "brothers" but separated from loving involvement in their suffering.(FN18) More simply and directly, it suggests that as brother the narrator will be reliable, trustworthy, and sympathetic to the needs of his readers, the lovers who comprise his audience. Nearly as soon as he stabilizes this relationship by framing it as a brotherhood, however, he announces that he will turn to the subject of Troilus's love of Criseyde, which is also about "how that she forsook hym er she deyde" (56). Side by side the narrator's claim of affinity with his readers and the subject of Criseyde's forsaking Troilus is enough to hint at the instability in any claim of closer relationship. So too is the invocation of the fury concerned with punishing, particularly, family crimes and with turning brother against brother.
    The relationship between Pandarus and Troilus, like the one suggested between narrator and reader, hinges on a kind of brotherhood, perhaps even something like the brother-in-arms relationship described earlier, despite the fact that Pandarus is not a warrior and that he seems older than Troilus. Because Criseyde is the focus of this relationship, her love of Troilus, if Pandarus can produce that love, becomes the proof of their special bond. In Boccaccio, however, the relationship between Troiolo and Pandaro does not take on the character of brotherhood, as it does in the Troilus. Chaucer nearly duplicates Boccaccio in displaying Pandarus' rhetorical use of kinship to get Troilus to reveal the name of his beloved. In both the Italian and English narratives, Pandarus tells Troilus that even if Troilus were in love with Pandarus' sister he would give her over to Troilus in an instant, though in Boccaccio there is the caveat "were it in my power."(FN19) In Chaucer, however, Pandarus makes his ability to yield up a sister to Troilus a certainty, his oath giving the claim particular power: "To Cerberus yn helle ay be I bounde, / Were it for my suster, al thy sorwe, / By my wil she sholde al be thyn to-morwe" (1. 859-61). Ostensibly, Boccaccio highlights the issue of kinship, for just before Troiolo responds to this ultimate claim by Pandaro that he is so loyal that he would hand over even one of his sisters to Troiolo, Troiolo delivers a set piece on how the law of love transcends even familial ties: sometimes sisters and brothers fall in love, sometimes daughters and fathers, sometimes stepfathers and stepdaughters, and sometimes even stepmothers and stepdaughters (41). After this, Troiolo's timid revelation that he loves Pandaro's cousin seems anti-climactic, and of course the set piece nearly irrelevant, especially because Boccaccio does little more with the theme for the rest of the poem. On the other hand, Chaucer cuts out the set piece, but seems to have been impressed enough by its implications to texture the following scenes with the pressures of kinship ties, especially those of siblings, the role of the brother being central.
    When Pandarus tells Troilus that he would hand his sister over to him if Troilus loved her, he is for a third time in this encounter playing on the brotherly relationship as proof of his loyalty to Troilus. Earlier in this same conversation he tells the young knight:
    Ne, by my trouthe, I kepe nat restreyne The fro thi love, theigh that it were Eleyne That is thi brother wif, if ich it wiste: Be what she be, and love hire as the liste!
    (1.676-79)
    Pandarus is so loyal to Troilus that he would promote a relationship between Troilus and Helen, the wife of Troilus' brother. Willingness to wreck the tie of brothers to one another proves the depth of loyalty. And yet brotherhood and family ties represent one of the wedges by which Pandarus succeeds in gaining Troilus' trust and then completing his project of mating him with Criseyde. Just before this hypothetical offer to be loyal to Troilus even in betraying his brother, Pandarus inserts himself into an almost familial relationship with Troilus. He does this in the course of arguing why, as a failure in love, he nevertheless ought to be heeded. He refers to a letter Oenone wrote Paris, who of course left her for Helen, in which she compares her own condition of lost love to that of Phoebus, who when love-sick for Admetus' daughter could not find a cure for himself even though he invented the art of medicine:
    "I woot wel that it fareth thus be me As to thi brother, Paris, an herdesse Which that icleped was Oenone Wrot in a compleynte of hir hevynesse. Yee say the lettre that she wrot, I gesse?" "Nay, nevere yet, ywys," quod Troilus. "Now," quod Pandare, "herkne, it was thus."
    (1. 652-58)
    Pandarus' sly question to Troilus--"Yee say the lettre that she wrot, I gesse?"--implies Pandarus' intimacy with the family and more importantly insinuates that the brotherly relationship between Paris and Troilus is not nearly as close as the one Pandarus has--and is establishing--with Troilus. He is the one willing to share the most intimate details with Troilus. During this successful attempt to persuade Troilus to disclose the object of his love, then, Pandarus dramatizes the dispensability of the brotherly relationship as a way to position himself paradoxically as Troilus' brother: in Books 3, 4 and 5, in fact, the two address each other a dozen times as either "leve" or "deere" brother. Thus while the exchanges between Pandarus and Troilus in many ways confirm the intimacy and loyalty of something like the brother-in-arms bond, Chaucer writes into them the very dispensability of that bond.
    This theme of sibling obligation as rhetorical and emotional leverage emerges as a pageant of brotherly and sisterly obligation in the episode at Deiphebus' palace, which John Fleming identifies as one of two that "constitute Chaucer's main contribution to the mythic plot of Trojan tragedy."(FN20) Directing this pageant, Pandarus begins by asking Troilus which brother he loves most (1. 396) so as to ascertain where best to stage a drama of family solidarity for the purpose of securing Criseyde for Troilus. Criseyde, after all, is apparently without family: Calkas has deserted her for the safety of the Greek camp; as widow she is adrift from other family ties. The narrator has highlighted this familial ambiguity, moreover, by pointedly observing that he does not know if she has children, even though in II Filostato she is clearly childless (1. 132-33).(FN21) As for the arranged meeting at Deiphebus' home, Pandarus tells Deiphebus that Criseyde is being "oppressed" by someone in Troy and that he would like to enlist his help to intimidate this imagined oppressor (2. 1416-21). Pandarus also asks Deiphebus to have some of his "bretheren" with him when Criseyde visits (2. 1438). During the visit Troilus is to feign sickness so that Pandarus can get him and Criseyde together and at the same time put social constraints on Criseyde's reaction to the meeting.
    As the episode unfolds, sibling relationships and concern for the illness of "brother" Troilus emerge as its themes. The narrator says, "What nedeth yow to tellen al the cheere / That Deiphebus unto his brother made" (2. 1541-42). Helen's arrival involves the same emphasis on sibling relationships: "as [Deiphebus'] suster, homly, soth to seyne, / She corn to dyner in hire pleyne entente" (2. 1559-60). Antigone, with her "suster Tarbe also" (2. 1563), joins the group. However much Deiphebus acts the cheerful host, throughout the evening, his "refreyn" was "evere mo: 'Allas! . . . / My goode brother Troilus, the syke, / Lith yet'" (2. 1571-73). When the subject finally turns to the suit against Criseyde, the subtext remains sibling bonds. On hearing from Pandarus that Crisyede's foe is Poliphete, the entire party "gonnen thus to warien: / 'Anhonged be swich oon, were he my brother!'" (2. 1619-20). And the very next words come from Helen, who asks, "Woot ought my lord, my brother, this matere--/ I meene Ector--or woot it Troilus?" (2. 1626-27). This query leads to a discussion of how to approach Troilus with the problem of Poliphete's suit against Criseyde, a discussion that again emphasizes the sibling relationship. First Helen, having taken Pandarus' hint, argues that she and Deiphebus will discuss the matter with Troilus before having Criseyde approach him directly. Though embraced by all, Criseyde is treated as outsider: Helen says that Criseyde should visit Troilus later because "she is straunge" (2. 1660). When Deiphebus and Helen visit Troilus in his room, Helen invokes familial relations as leverage to get him to assist Criseyde, addressing him as "faire brother" (2. 1670) and referring to Deiphebus as her "deere brother" (2. 1675). Ironically, Troilus employs the same leverage to send them away with the ruse of examining an execution letter: "Deiphebus and my suster lief and deere, / To yow have I to speke of o matere" (2. 1693-94).
    Without an equivalent in Il Filostrato, this episode offers a complex array of social gestures and narrative patterning, not the least of which is this emphasis on sibling relationships.(FN22) And this emphasis goes beyond just Pandarus' attempt to hedge Criseyde in with a sense of family solidarity and power. Criseyde is not involved in all the passages having to do with brother and sister relationships. She has no part in the conversations arranging this pageant--those between Pandarus and Troilus and between Deiphebus and Pandarus, in which the affair is set up on the basis of brotherly allegiance, and that among Troilus, Deiphebus, and Helen when Criseyde is waiting to enter the room in which Troilus feigns sickness. As readers, of course, we experience all these conversations and sense the familial, sibling obligations within the affair. And it is appropriate that we should because we too, according to the opening to Book I, are the narrator's brothers and sisters. On the surface we get to see what it means to be treated like a brother or sister: it means support, a sense of community, and comfort when sick, or feigning sickness even. On the other hand, we see how dispensable the brother is: the family, after all, curses Poliphete with "Anhonged be swich oon, were he my brother!"
    Complicating this sense of instability in the brotherly relationships is a fact first observed by McKay Sundwall, and later picked up on by John Fyler, John Fleming, and Lisa Kiser, that Troilus' sending Deiphebus and Helen off together alludes to the depiction of them, in Dictys and by implication Virgil, as having betrayed Paris by running off together.(FN23) The scene between Troilus and Criseyde and essentially the episode at Deiphebus' house closes with the return of the manipulated host and Helen to the room containing Troilus, who groans "His brother and his suster for to blende" (3. 207). And this closure is wholly appropriate because the entire scene has played out both the power and deceit in brotherly relationships. Moreover, Chaucer follows up the scene, as we shall see, with an intimate exchange between Troilus and Pandarus in which "brother" again serves as an important currency between them.
    Chaucer's use of Philomela-Procne-Tereus story in Book 2 also builds upon this theme. It certainly anticipates and, if held in mind, tinges with irony all that unfolds soon thereafter among siblings in the episode set at Deiphebus' house. Also Chaucer's addition to Filostrato, it begins with Pandarus waking to Proigne's "sorrowful lay" about "How Tereus gan forth hire suster take" (2. 69); and it ends with Criseyde falling asleep while listening to the nightingale's song and then dreaming of the elegant but nevertheless violent exchange the white eagle makes of his heart with hers (2. 918-31). This section of narrative dramatizes those concerns about incest that are merely spoken of by Troiolo in Il Filostrato. Tereus, remember, rapes Philomela, his sister-in-law, as she journeys from her homeland with Tereus to visit her sister. Thus the songs both Pandarus and Criseyde hear at the border of sleep and wakefulness are about love troubled with brotherly betrayal.(FN24) The very details of Tereus' rape of Philomela are echoed later when Troilus and Criseyde finally consummate their love. Once enclosed within the ship and later raped by Tereus, Philomela is described as a shrinking hare that Jove's eagle has just dropped from his talons helpless into his nest, and then, after being raped, as a pigeon, "blood-winged and throbbing from the claws that pierced it."(FN25) When Troilus takes Criseyde in his arms at the end of Book 3 of the Troilus, the narrator describes her as the helpless lark captured by the sparrow hawk: "What myghte or may the sely larke seye, / Whan that the sperhauk hath it in his foot?" (3. 1191-92).(FN26)
    In addition, the romance of Thebes to which Criseyde listens when Pandarus arrives at her house concerns the struggle between Oedipus' two sons, not to mention incest. And this struggle between Polynices and Eteocles emerges again, even in more detail, when Cassandra uses legendary history to explain the meaning of Troilus' dream of the boar (5. 1471-519). Also part of that legendary history is Meleager's slaying the boar and his murder of the brothers, Plexippus and Toxeus, which causes their sister, Althaea, to put her son Meleager to death. All these suggestions color the events of this book. They emphasize the peculiarity of Pandarus' behavior toward Criseyde when he comes upon her listening to the story of Thebes, his raucously demanding that she uncover her hair, lift her veil, and "rise up" and dance (2. 109-12); his aggressively staring at her (2. 264-77); and, in her terms, his betraying the trust between niece and uncle (she is his sister's child) in urging her to love where he should be recommending restraint (2. 409-20). These background stories also blur the line between familial and romantic love, and generally undermine claims made for the brotherly relationship as a stable, unassailable bond.(FN27)
    The emphasis on the brotherly relationships within both the foreground and background of the story also reflects upon the relationship between narrator and audience. This reflexivity occurs in other areas of the narrative when a letter or text serves to advance plot and also to reflect upon the contingencies of telling and reading/listening. Here, the letter that Troilus uses to get Helen and Deiphebus out of the room so that he can be alone with Criseyde reflects upon the implications of a narrative relationship between teller and audience that the narrator originally has established as a brotherhood. Troilus gives his brother and sister-in-law a letter to read, ostensibly so that they, as trusted brother and "sister," can offer him advice that he in turn can use to counsel his brother Hector about whether or not to put some accused man to death. But of course he has them read the letter in order to distract them (1700).
    As we have seen in the opening pages of the poem, anxiety about the mutual relationship of narrator and reader emerges in terms of familial relationships. In the Canterbury Tales this anxiety rises to the surface even more clearly in the narrator's apology for relating rude tales in order to avoid telling a "ale untrewe":
    He may nat spare, althogh he were his brother; He moot as wel seye o word as another. Crist spak hymself ful brode in hooly writ, And wel ye woot no vileynye is it. Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede, The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.
    (737-42)
    Even the brother-audience cannot be spared when it comes to a narrator's telling the truth. The trouble is, the accurate, true relationship between truth and deed is described in terms of a relationship between cousins. On the one hand that relationship has the same disinterested, asexual purity as that between brother and sister or between brothers; on the other hand it is displayed as dispensable and subject to corruption, as in the case of the cousins Arcite and Palamon, who turn against each other, and the "cousins"--the monk and the merchant--in the "Shipman's Tale," one of whom uses "cozenage" as a vehicle for self-satisfaction and deceit.(FN28) The emphasis in the Troilus on sibling relationships and on Pandarus the surrogate author's attempts to stage the event at Deiphebus' house as a family pageant expresses this anxiety about the narrator-audience relationship. And so too does the narrator's unnecessary admission that he does not know the name of the man whose pending execution is the subject of the letter that Troilug hands to his brother and sister-in-law: "Woot I nought who" (2. 1700). At the very time that Chaucer adds to his source narrative an extended episode that calls into question the reliability claims of brothers, he highlights even more fully the issue by displaying his narrator's own unreliability and disingenu-ousness in claiming not to be able to recover the name of the man mentioned in this letter. Chaucer's treatment of the relationship between his narrator and readers calls to mind the more overt outburst at the end of "The Buriel of the Dead," in The Waste Land. There Eliot suddenly quotes Baudelaire's Preface to Les Fleurs du mal: "You! hypocrite lecteur!--mon semblable,--mon frère!"(FN29)
    Just as this episode at Deiphebus' home reflects upon the narrator-reader relationship as established earlier in the poem, so too does it build upon Criseyde's attempt to formulate her relationship with Troilus, after having received his letter of love, or rather having it physically forced upon her by Pandarus. In a letter she writes to him at Pandarus' urging, she sets up what she thinks are the ground rules of any relationship she will have with Troilus. In a curious extension of the narrator's claims of guile-lessness and rudimentary skills as an inventor of his love story, she claims that it is the first letter she ever wrote.(FN30) And the narrator complicates the matter by paraphrasing rather then quoting it, but not without the typical disclaimer that he relates its contents only in so far as he knows them:
    She thanked hym of al that he wel mente Towardes hire, but holden hym in honde She nolde nought, ne make hireselven bonde In love; but as his suster, hym to plese, She wolde fayn to doon his herte an ese.
    (2. 1221-25)
    In Il Filostrato Criseida expresses the same desire to be Troilus' sister, but in different circumstances. First of all, she tells Pandaro, not Troiolo in a letter, that she wants to love Troiolo "as a brother because of his great goodness and his virtue."(FN31) As with Criseyde Criseida's desire to love Troiolo as brother is an initial line of defense against the pressure that Pandaro puts on her to grant Troiolo her full love. However, Criseida's saying this does not ramify in quite the way that it does in Chaucer's poem. In Boccaccio, it seems as much an opportunity to satirize the clerical orders as one to portray the complexity of Criseida's psychological and social situation. She tells Pandaro that she wants to love Troiolo as a brother, and she does this after calling her cousin Pandaro her own "dear brother." Pandaro responds sarcastically: "The priests praise this crown in those they cannot rob of it; and each of them discourses like a saint; and then they steal upon as many of you as they can in your sleep."(FN32) The term brother and the talk of virtue leads to the kind of ridicule of religious hypocrisy that Chaucer offers, say, in the "Shipman's Tale." Moreover, the pious talk of a sisterly relationship with Troiolo does not fit Boccaccio's Criseida, who in fact only postures as one seeking a sexless connection. No surprise, then, that the conversation turns almost immediately to preparations for arranging a meeting between Troiolo and Criseida, Criseida's only worry being the preservation of secrecy and the appearance of her virtue.
    In Chaucer, Criseyde's wanting to treat Troilus as a brother is more complex in two ways: it delves into her character and marks the problems of her social circumstances; and also it moves outward from characterization to reflect on the narrator's own concern with being the reader's brother. Thus the link between the narrator's own "story" and the story he tells is carried through this detail in Criseyde's letter, not to mention the fact that it occurs in a letter, a text, rather than in dialogue between Criseida and Pandaro. As we have seen, the narrator's "story" is picked up in a pattern of sibling relationships running through the entire episode at Deiphebus' house. What's more, that same episode enriches the detail in Criseyde's letter, just as that detail in her letter enriches the complex texture of that episode. That episode offers all sorts of variations on the kind of relationship Criseyde tries to choose for herself and Troilus; and those variations function almost to mock Criseyde's earlier telling Troilus in her letter that she wants to love him as a sister.
    In addition the relationship of brother to brother or brother to sister unfolds as an unreliable one. This is the case in Troilus' use of Deiphebus and Helen's trust as a way to get them out of his and Criseyde's way, in Pandarus' professed readiness to hand his sister over to Troilus, in the siblings' curse that they would kill their brother if he made the same claim against Criseyde as Poliphete makes, and in the narrator's unaccountable disclosures and lack of disclosures to his sibling readers. In fact the entire episode, in one way, impresses upon Criseyde the fact that these sibling relationships are unreliable: as Troilus' beloved, not his sister, she has more power to cure his love-sickness than any of the siblings who try to console him, as she secretly admits: "But ther sat oon, al list hire nought to teche, / That thoughte, 'Best koud I yet ben his leche'" (2. 1581-82).
    From a vantage point a little later on in the narrative, the instability of "brother" becomes even clearer. In Book 3, after the affair at Deiphebus' house, Pandarus and Troilus discuss the progress they have made with Criseyde, Pandarus expressing some regret that he might be regarded, in fact, as a panderer. He tells Troilus, "For the have I bigonne a gamen pleye / Which that I nevere do shal eft for other, / Although he were a thousand fold my brother" (3. 250-52). Here again the relationship of brother, even while Pandarus in the same conversation refers to Troilus as his brother dear (3. 239) and good brother (3. 264), is invoked as a standard to be surpassed in order to prove some ultimate form of loyalty. Troilus' response participates in the same sort of thinking. In one of the poem's most notorious passages, Troilus consoles Pandarus and goes on to prove that he does not think of Pandarus' service as anything but loyal and noble:
    And that thow knowe I thynke nought ne wene That this servise a shame be or jape, I have my faire suster Polixene, Cassandre, Eleyne, or any of the frape--Be she nevere so fair or wel yshape, Tel me which thow wilt of everychone, To han for thyn, and lat me thanne allone.
    (3. 407-13)
    Criseyde at first formulates her relationship with Troilus as that between sister and brother: in that way she tries to establish boundaries, maintain control, and fend off what comes through occasionally as her overwhelming sense of vulnerability as outsider and female within the martial setting of Troy. From the perspective of this conversation between Pandarus and Troilus, her sense of vulnerability is ultimately justified. However, in keeping with John Hill's critique of Dinshaw's now commonly accepted notion, she is not vulnerable just because Chaucer depicts women as currencies of exchange.(FN33) What Calkas wants back just happens to be a daughter; and the Trojans make the best of this exchange by getting Anterior in return. That transaction in and of itself does not prove that women are currency. What is important, at least in terms of Chaucer's examination of "brother" and how it, in fact, is used as a currency, is that the sense of security Criseyde tries to establish by configuring Troilus as her brother is undermined by the way he treats his relationship with his sisters during this conversation with Pandarus. To that extent, David Aers is accurate in contending that Criseyde's very efforts to control her circumstances in the poem situate her even more inextricably within the system that controls her.(FN34) In this scene between Pandarus and Troilus, then, "brother" gets highlighted as an expression of a special bond between two men and at the same time devalued as the connection that can be dispensed with in order to prove the security of that very same, intimately concerned bond of brotherhood. I would like to emphasize, however, that Chaucer's use of brother in this episode seems authentically ambivalent: it combines a sense of admiration for the mutual, brotherly bond between Troilus and Pandarus, the kind of bond that evidence suggests existed between Clanvowe and Neville, with a sense also of the dangerous transferability of the term "brother."
    We do not need the insight that the narrator gives us into Diomedes' competitive intentions, then, to appreciate the devastating irony of his request that Criseyde treat him as if he were her brother (5. 134): not only does it mock Criseyde's words to Troilus in her initial letter--her wanting to treat Troilus as if she were his sister--but it also grows out of what we know is the ambivalence of the brotherly relationship, its sense of security, its rhetorical function as means to an end, and its fundamental instability.(FN35) Diomedes' gambit here is clearly Chaucer's addition; even Benoit's depiction of Diomedes' "sudden" attempt to persuade Briseida, which Chaucer largely adopts, lacks this telling detail about Diomedes offering to serve as Criseyde's brother. In addition, the speech immediately surrounding Diomedes' request that Criseyde take him as her brother repeats the tenor of the narrator's words to the readers as he positions himself as their brother, the one who out of "charite" (1. 49) lives and writes in order to support those who will serve love. Diomedes tells her:
    And though youre sorwes be for thynges grete--Not I nat whi--but out of more respit Myn herte hath for t'amende it gret delit; And if I may youre harmes nat redresse, I am right sory for youre hevynesse.
    (5. 136-40)
    Once again the parallel between the narrator and one of the narrative's characters speaks to the unreliability of his relationship with his audience: the narrator's claim to be his readers' charitable brother exists within the same context, ultimately, as Diomedes' claim to Criseyde. In his treatment of Diomedes, moreover, the narrator inflicts an irony upon Criseyde, having what she at first did to Troilus being done to her by Diomedes. However, the narrator is inflicting this irony upon her by using the metaphor by which he intended--and presumably continues to intend--to secure the good will and allegiance of his readers. Once again the rhetoric of brotherly stability and trust works to undermine any sense of stability and trust. Emphasizing this theme even more is the fact that as Diomedes is coming on to Criseyde by assuming the role of her brother, Troilus and Pandarus are more often than at any time in the poem referring to each other as brother (see 5. 307, 414, 521, 1155, 1731).
    The effectiveness of Diomedes' advances, including his posturing as Criseyde's protective brother in the Greek war camp, and the ineffectiveness of the brotherly relationship between Pandarus and Troilus in reclaiming Troilus' state of idealized satisfaction with Criseyde, exhibit "brother" as a kind of false coin, to use Shoaf's way of discussing words as currency.(FN36) And yet Pandarus and Troilus do represent much of the best in the brotherly relationship. Despite Pandarus' readiness to have Troilus shrug off his devotion to Criseyde by seeking intercourse with another woman, advice that in fact coincides with medieval doctrine on how to cure love-sickness, and despite, perhaps, his willingness to let Troilus delude himself about Criseyde's imminent return from the Greek camp, he remains loyal: he tells Troilus, for instance, that he will enlist his own family in helping Troilus escape from Troy with Criseyde.(FN37) The trouble is--and this is largely the trouble with the poem's ending--the relationship of siblings, always a means to an end in this poem, has been trumped by something more powerful. In the case of Troilus' love for Criseyde, it is idealized love and disillusionment; in the case of the poem's ending it is the perspective from the afterlife that condemns all relationships between differentiated beings, it seems, as vanity.(FN38)
    Part of this trumping of the brotherly relationship is the narrator's having abandoned the audience he defined at the beginning of the poem as his brothers and sisters.(FN39) He replaces that audience with "yonge, fresshe folks" (1835), whom he advises against following worldly vanities; with "moral Gower" and "philosophical Strode," editors and protectors of the manuscript; and with Christ and the Trinitarian God. For our purposes the concluding depiction of this deity is particularly interesting because it at once abandons and confuses all lines of relations cultivated in the poem. It turns what is troubling, ambiguous, even taboo in human relationships into the all powerful, finally incomprehensible and inexpressible mystery of the undifferentiated, inclusive divine. The narrator addresses God as "Thow oon, and two, and thre, eterne on lyve, / That regnest ay in thre, and two, and oon" (5. 1863-64), and then he asks Jesus, out of love for his virgin mother/wife, to make everyone, the narrator and his audience finally, worthy of mercy. The human community, the brotherly relationship more particularly, fails as remedy for loss: all that remains is a power that defies human notions of relationship.
ADDED MATERIAL
    TIMOTHY O'BRIEN
    United States Naval Academy

Footnotes
1 This and all subsequent quotations from Chaucer's works are from Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
2 This 1932 lyric by E. Y Harbug is mentioned by Jean Jost, "Ambigous Brotherhood in the Friar's Taleand Summoner's Tale," in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter Beidler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 1998), 78.
3 David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. (Stanford U. Press, 1997), 73-105 primarily.
4 Ibid., 142.
5 Jost, 78.
6 Wallace, 75.
7 Ibid.
8 J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (U. of Florida Press, 1998), 99.
9 S. Dull, A. Luttrell and M. Keen, "Faithful Unto Death; The Tombe Slab of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe," The Antiquaries Journal 71 (1991): 183-84.
10 Marice Keen, Nobles, Knights, and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages (London: The Hambledon Press, 1996), 53-54.
11 Dull, et al., 183
12 With regard to this theme of friendship, which is often difficult to untangle from brotherhood, see Alan Gaylord, "Friendship in Chaucer's Troilus," Chaucer Review 3 (1969): 239-64. In this seminal and influential article on the theme, Gaylord argues that Pandarus' actions represent a parody of friendship, especially the Boethian concept of friendship. Leah Rieber Freiwald, "'Swych Love of Frendes': Pandarus and Troilus," Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 120-29, echoes Gaylord, though with the slant that friendship in the poem is limited because it is ruled by fortune. Robert G. Cook, "Chaucer s Pandarus and the Medieval Ideal of Friendship," JEGP69 (1970): 407-24, sees Chaucer as cultivating a double point about friendship between Pandarus and Troilus: the moral one, that Pandarus and Troilus are false friends because the relationship has no fundamental basis in virtue; and the human one, that they act as friends by engaging to fulfill each other's needs, even if that engagement involves at times trickery and deceit. John Hill, "Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love, and Ciceronian Brotherhood in Troy," in New Readings of Chaucer's Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson (Camridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 165-82, attempts to correct the tendency among scholars to regard Chaucer's portrayal of the friendship between Pandarus and Troilus as ironic.
13 N. R Havely. Chaucer's Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight's andFranklin's Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), 113-15.
14 Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum, ed. Robert Steele, EETS e.s. 74 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr[ibner, 1898), 195.
15 Lee Patterson, "Ambiguity and Interpretation: a Fifteenth-Century Reading of Troilus and Criseyde," Speculum 54.2 (1979), 313.
16 Wallace, 147. For a full discussion of the implied sexual deviancy and hypocrisy involved in the Friar's sense of brotherhood, see Jean Jost, "Ambiguous Brotherhood," 77-90.
17 N. R. Havely, 118.
18 Lisa J. Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry (U. Press of New England, 1991), 59. She goes on to document the ways in which the narrator fails to maintain this distanced posture, unaware of how much he drifts toward involvement in the narrative and the world he depicts: "Thus, when the narrator opens Book I, he has no idea just how much he already is his characters' 'owne brother dere'" (61).
19 R. K. Gordon, ed. and trans., The Story ofTroilus (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964), 41.
20 John V. Fleming, "Deiphoebus Betrayed: Virgilean Decorum, Chaucerian Feminism," Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 183.
21 Kiser, in Truth and Textuality, regards this as an expression of the narrator's mistaken faith and "confidence in his own and his source's objectivity" (61). Carolyn Dinshaw, in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), analyzes this sort of play with sources as an example of the erotic intermittence that the narrator cultivates in his vicarious relationship with his heroine (44, for instance). David Aers, in Chaucer Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 132-35, was one of the first commentators to discuss the social pressures of Criseyde's isolated, marginal condition in terms of Trojan power structures.
22 Fleming, in "Deiphoebus Betrayed," argues that Chaucer uses "the theme of the love of brothers to advance the cause of a certain kind of feminism" in this episode (199); Chaucer subverts the antifeminist view of women as the cause of Troy's defeat by depicting Troilus as a deceiver of Deiphebus, Helen being the usual source of all deception in the story of Troy (197). Barry Windeatt, in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 60, briefly discusses Chaucer's creative departures in this eeisode from Boccaccio's material. John M. Fyler, "The Fabrications of Pandarus," MLQ41 (1980), describes the atmosphere of the episode in this way: "Priam's household is careful to maintain the courtesies of a happy family, but with a slightly suspect heartiness" (120-21, note 11). Fyler offers this note while pointing out the way in which Pandarus promotes the brother-sister relationship as the best disguise for the secret love affair (120).
23 McKay Sundwall, "Deiphobus and Helen: A Tantalizing Hint," MP 73 (1975): 151-6; John M. Fyler, "The Fabrications," 120, n. 10; Fleming, "Deiphoebus Betrayed," 197; Kiser, Truth and Textuality, 91. Mark Lambert, Troilus Books I-III: A Criseydan Reading," in Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), while observing the lack of parental authority in Troy and by implication calling attention to its emphasis on sibling relationships (110), takes issue with Sundwall's idea that Chaucer put Deiphebus and Helen together in this episode as an allusion to their later marriage after Paris' death (116, note 10). In fact, Lambert argues that Chaucer does all he can to eliminate from the portrait of Helen any sense of her notorious character. Lambert, by the way, parenthetically observes: "Helen is fond of the words 'brother' and 'sister'" (116).
24 Ralph Miller, in "Pandarus and Procne," Studies in Medieval Culture 7.2 (1964): 65-66, dismisses Chaucer's use of this background myth as static and without relevance to Chaucer's work. Miller writes, "Procne thus has a sort of proverbial status; she has become a fixed metaphor. Chaucer's echoing of Dante is somewhat misleading to the reader, and slightly too to Chaucer, perhaps, since it may have called the nightingale to his mind. He didn't need the nightingale in her guise as Philomela, though he needed her as a sweet singer. The tragic tale is forced upon the scene, but it has no real relevance to Chaucer nor to the reader."
25 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 6. 515-30.
26 R. A. Shoaf, in Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word (Norman, OK Pilgrim, 1983), 119, also focuses on this extended allusion to the Tereus-Philomela-Procne story, emphasizing Pandarus' function as shaper, coiner. He sees Pandarus as the Tereus figure: "It is hard not to imagine Pandarus as another Tereus about to 'take' another Philomela in Criseyde. Indeed, the metaphors of violence which he freely uses of her strengthen our tendency to imagine just that." Ralph Miller, "Pandarus and Procne," 65-68, provides an extremely cautious reading of this extended episode enveloped by allusions to the Procne-Philomela story. He deemphasizes the Ovidian source of the story, and focuses more on the bestiaries. The result is puzzlement over the apparent suggestions of violence in the allusions and the absence of those suggestions in the episode itself. I think this caution with the surface of Chaucer's narrative is a bit extreme: Pandarus does introduce violence into Criseyde's life, violence that goes beyond that in the romance she reads. Moreover, the theme of the ambiguity and danger in the brotherly relationship is clearly present in Chaucer's narrative and therefore is appropriately underscored by allusions to the rape of Philomela.
27 Fleming's response, in "Deiphoebus Betrayed," to some of these and other events is even stronger: "The whiff of incest is everywhere in the poem--in Troilus' elaborate comparisons of his own situation with that of Oedipus, in the song of the nightingale that wakens Pandarus to his pimp's errand, in the insistent evocation of the story of Ammon's rape of his half-sister" (188). Charles Muscatine, in "The Feigned Illness of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde," MLN63 (1948): 372-77, identifies the parallels between the deceit at Deiphebus' house and that in David's kingdom. See also Robert Cook, "Chaucer's Pandarus"; he discusses the Biblical allusion in this episode as it relates to Chaucer's ironic treatment of friendship in the Troilus (420-22).
28 See John Mirk, John Myrc: Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. E. Peacock, EETS o.s. 31. London, 1868, 173 and 187, for an example of the relationship of cousin being compared to that of brother and sister.
29 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), 63, line 76.
30 Her claim here could refer to the actual writing of the letter as opposed to dictation, its subject after all requiring a secrecy that other routine correspondences would not have needed. For a fuller discussion of letter writing as a formal element in the Troilus, see John McKinnell, "Letters as a Type of the Formal Level in Troilus and Criseyde," Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, 73-89.
31 R. K. Gordon, ed. and trans., The Story of Troilus, 56.
32 Ibid.
33 John Hill, "Aristocratic Friendship," 165-82.
34 Aers, Chaucer 132-35.
35 Michaela Paasche Grudin, in Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (U. of South Carolina Press, 1996), 78, characterizes Diomedes' gambit as a "quasi-familial bond" that bides him time and disguises his intentions.
36 Shoaf, Dante, 7-16.
37 Mary Francis Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (U. of Pennsylvannia Press, 1990), 41, for instance.
38 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 151, observes that Troilus' idealized love and scornful rejection of the world are on the same continuum of human emotion.
39 For Kiser, the narrator's betrayal of his audience and his source mirror Criseyde's treason. In adopting the Christian perspective at the end, she argues, the narrator has gone in search of a new audience and thus continues his pattern of betrayal. According to MurrayJ. Evans in "'Making strange': the Narrator (?), the ending (?) and Chaucer's Troilus," NM87 (1986): 218-28 (esp. 17-73), one thing remains constant at the end of the poem: a structural adherence to apostrophe, direct address as a way of involving the