Although whether Gower was or was not a trained and practicing lawyer remains to be resolved, nevertheless he was beyond doubt someone intimately familiar with current legal trends and practices, and apparently often at Westminster. In a sense, the same could be said for his choice of language. Since for the MO Gower adopted Hélinand’s twelve-line stanza, a form which by the latter half of the fourteenth century must have struck readers as palpably antique, one must wonder somewhat as to his motives. 7 See The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, online edition.ĥFor present purposes here, such questions about the single survival of the MO have relevance, perhaps more than tangentially.Was it merely bad luck, of the kind that overtook so many medieval manuscripts, that time has done away with copies once more numerous? The singularity of the MO manuscript is rendered the more curious by the evident care, and cost, involved with the making of Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 3035 and also by the esteem in which Gower himself so obviously held the poem, esteem evinced not only in his comments on his own oeuvre, but also, and more materially, by his choice of the MO (albeit under its Latin title, Speculum Meditantis) as one of the three books on which to rest the head of his effigy, on his tomb 6. One would like to know why, for instance, there is just this single copy of the poem left to us, when of all other of Gower’s works (excepting only the balade sequence, Cinkante Balades) multiple examples have survived. Apparently he designed his own effigy, and placed his t (.)ĤGower’s MO has always inspired questions. 6 Gower’s tomb rests in Southwark Cathedral.It exists today in a single fourteenth-century manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 3035, described by its editor, G. Most studies place the composition of the MO between 13, although there is no hard evidence to confirm either date. When considering the influence of Hélinand on Gower, then, the Mirour (hereafter MO) must occupy our focus.ĢIt is generally accepted to be Gower’s earliest poem. 1340-1408) bears three distinctions: he is, as far as we know, the only poet of his nation to write original poetry using it he is also among the very latest to do so (if not indeed the latest, depending on how one dates his voluminous Mirour de l’Omme) and in that poem, of 2495 extant stanzas hélinandien (29,945 lines), he has far exceeded any other example, on either side of the Channel, in length 1. Macaulay, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1 (.)ġRegarding the strophe d’Hélinand, the poet John Gower (ca.

Poemes a 4 strophes exemple