L’Envoy of Chaucer.
O moral Gower! <94> this book I direct.
To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, <95>
To vouchesafe, where need is, to correct,
Of your benignities and zeales good.
And to that soothfast Christ that *starf on rood* *died on the cross*
With all my heart, of mercy ever I pray,
And to the Lord right thus I speak and say:
“Thou One, and Two, and Three, *etern on live,* *eternally living*
That reignest ay in Three, and Two, and One,
Uncircumscrib’d, and all may’st circumscrive,* *comprehend
From visible and invisible fone* *foes
Defend us in thy mercy ev’ry one;
So make us, Jesus, *for thy mercy dign,* *worthy of thy mercy*
For love of Maid and Mother thine benign!”
Explicit Liber Troili et Cresseidis. <96>
Notes to Troilus and Cressida
1. The double sorrow: First his suffering before his love was successful; and then his grief after his lady had been separated from him, and had proved unfaithful.
2. Tisiphone: one of the Eumenides, or Furies, who avenged on men in the next world the crimes committed on earth. Chaucer makes this grim invocation most fitly, since the Trojans were under the curse of the Eumenides, for their part in the offence of Paris in carrying off Helen, the wife of his host Menelaus, and thus impiously sinning against the laws of hospitality.
3. See Chaucer’s description of himself in “The House Of Fame,” and note 11 to that poem.
4. The Palladium, or image of Pallas (daughter of Triton and foster-sister of Athena), was said to have fallen from heaven at Troy, where Ilus was just beginning to found the city; and Ilus erected a sanctuary, in which it was preserved with great honour and care, since on its safety was supposed to depend the safety of the city. In later times a Palladium was any statue of the goddess Athena kept for the safeguard of the city that possessed it.