knights tale Flashcards
style
high stylistic and rhetorical elevation. but its varied with colloquial and sometimes even bathetic language, that reflects its concern with the whole range of human experience.
juxtaposition of different stylistic registers can be sharp and unsettling: ‘the temple of Mars armypotente’ is a formal description of a palace, a topographia seething with personifications, technical astrological and mythographic references, classical allusions elevated vocab, but what is actually being said is anything but ordered or ornamental: ‘the sowe freten the child right in the cradel’
physiological ugliness of the wound of acrite: ‘he lay as any cole or crowe’. the image is dehumanizing, without any of the nobility that characterizes many of the other animal images of the poem. (animal imagery illustrates the style)
animal imagery
commonplaceness of the animals reinforces the brusque colloquial tone of th elines; but cuckoos and hares also had sexual connotations, so the choice of imagery underlines how far the lovers are from achieving, or even envisaging, a practical end.
