The Prosodic Stylistics of John Gower’s “Tale of Jason and Medea”

Abstract

Against the perspective that Gower’s Confessio Amantis is monotonous due to its regular meters and plain diction, this paper views the Confessio’s apparently regular meters as the main foundation of a prosodic structure that imitates the flow and development of the narrative’s plot. The paper reads several excerpts from “the Tale of Jason and Medea”, a representative piece of the Confessio, highlighting the use of certain metrical devices, such as the iamb, trochee, end-stop, caesura, enjambment, metrical stanza or paragraph, anaphora, and onomatopoeia. These devices, I believe, are used by Gower to control the tempo of meters as well as plot development of the narrative, which showcases how the poet espouses elocutio (form) to inventio (content) in a way that reflects the rhetorical value of harmonizing the two main components of the narrative instead of sacrificing one in favor of the other. The paper concludes that the Confessio’s apparent regularity is creatively deceptive, as it prioritizes neither form nor content at the cost of each other, but uses the former to highlight the central theme or concern of the latter.