yesterday at the departmental welcome reception faculty gave readings on the theme of innocence and experience. nick watson began by a reading of chaucer's the former age (read it here and hear it aloud too!) he read so well, and looked so unlike a professor - with his long curls and earrings and head-to-toe black, that afterwards shari said that they should give him a television channel all to himself to recite chaucer. he'll have a cult following. the former age was a poem i didn't know, and that, now known, is a pleasure. i don't usually like golden age oh ubi sunt type poems but this one struck a particular chord. i think it is the lack of a particularly cosmic tone of disapproval, and also the line "everich of hem his feith to other kepte." dan donoghue does quite a bit on this subject - on the vow, beot, oral contracts, troth, the breaking of vows, the betrayal of oral agreements - and so i have become particularly sensitive to these concepts - the last stanza of the oe rune poem, for instance

Ear byþ egle / eorla gehwylcun,
ðonn fæstlice / flæsc onginneþ,
hraw colian, / hrusan ceosan
blac to gebeddan; / bleda gedreosaþ,
wynna gewitaþ, / wera geswicaþ

the last three half-lines: fruits fail, joys fade and covenants are broken, terse and stark as they are, chill me each time i read them, more than any fire-and-brimstone apocalyptic vision ever could. i remember donoghue noting this line, and drawing a parallel to the sermon of wolf to the english: many are forsworn and greatly perjured, and pledges are broken again and again. mænige synd forsworene & swyþe forlogene & wed synd to brocene. somehow it is not the falling of fruit (is there no change of death in paradise? does ripe fruit never fall?) but the dissolution of the world as constructed through words.