Chaucer, "The Knight's Tale," Parts III and IV

Bathetic Knights to Battle! 

For Friday's class, there are no questions, but we'll have an in-class response when you arrive in class. The subject of the writing will be identifying bathos in poetry, and in the poetry of the Knight in particular. Bathos is "Greek for depth, and it has been an indispensable term to critics since Alexander Pope’s essay On Bathos: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry…the word ever since has been used for an unintentional descent in literature when, straining to be pathetic or passionate or elevated, the writer overshoots his mark and drops into the trivial or the ridiculous. Among his examples Pope records, “the modest request of two absent lowers” in a contemporary poem:

Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time,

And make two lovers happy." (Abrahms, Glossary of Literary Terms)

As you read Parts III and IV, look for passages where something that should have pathos (or be pathetic, meaning evoking deep emotion) misses the mark and becomes bathetic, or full of bathos. It's when a poet misfires and makes us laugh instead of cry, though he/she wants us to cry. When does the Knight do this, or, when does the Knight consciously make his characters bathetic (to make a point to his son)?