The Nun’s Priest’s Tale as a Mock Heroic Poem

A heroic poem is one that tells the story of a hero whose adventures and exploits have a great, recognized significance. It is a long narrative poem written in an elevated style. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are the best-known examples of heroic poems. The hero in such a poem is often a great national figure. A mock-heroic poem is one in which the subject is mean or trivial while the style of treating the subject is elevated. The author of such a poem makes the subject look ridiculous by placing it in a framework entirely inappropriate to its nature.

Some of the famous English mock-heroic poems are Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Gray’s Ode on the Death of a Favourite Car and Fielding’s Tom Thumb also belong to the class of mock heroic writings. As Pope put it,

“The use of the grand style on little subjects is not only ludicrous, but a sort of transgression against the rules of proportion and mechanics. It is using a vast force to lift a feather.”

The subject in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is the carrying off by a fox of a cock and the cock’s escape from the fox’s clutches. Evidently it is a trivial subject because a cock and a fox can under no circumstances be regarded as having much importance or significance. But the style which Chaucer employs to deal with this subject has a certain dignity, and it is the application of this elevated style to a trivial subject which makes The Nun’s Priest’s Tale a mock-heroic poem.

What Chaucer does is to treat the story of the cock and the fox as if it were the tale of some mighty hero facing a disaster, and the means of achieving this is a grand, elegant style, such as a genuinely heroic poem would employ. The language used, the descriptions and dialogue, the similes and lofty exclamations, are sustained at this exalted level throughout the poem. But we never lose sight of the joke, for at intervals the narrator reminds us of the farmyard and the triviality of the subject, so that we recognize the grand style as having a mock-serious motive. Originally published https://www.eng-literature.com/2022/03/the-nuns-priests-tale-as-a-mock-heroic-poem.html