The poem by Hoccleve asks a lot of rhetorical questions about how social responsibility comes about and how someone creates an identity that is socially acceptable. It is the closest attempt at Chaucer’s Realism. Unlike Chaucer, Hoccleve focuses on the relationship of an individual to the group while Chaucer focuses on how these groups compose themselves. This is because the individual’s need to be socially accepted mostly leads to incorporation in troublesome groups.
Hoccleve’s uses bureaucratic and literary forms while exploring the issue of social identity. The poem’s speaker is guilty of breaking social rules in order to satisfy his appetites. His attempts to erase his social mistakes are never successful no matter how much he tries. He can only reconfigure them but they are very much visible. He realizes how much social identity has affected his health. He starts to beg God to restore his health and into his grace. When he fully awakens he realizes that youth does not follow the rule of reason but rather is filled with rebellion to reason. He regrets how he would not listen because his heart was rooted in the needs of pleasure and the fact he willfully withdrew from reason. His friends would warn him that his behavior would not end up well but they failed to dissuade him. Indeed when one is well and prosperous they tend to be blind to some things including reason.
The poem gives one the clearest explorations of Hoccleve regarding how people negotiate their positions within groups repenting some associations while seeking other associations. Hoccleve uses his own experiences to reflect on this speaker’s ‘misdeeds’. He analyses what this speaker has become because of their own mistakes and shows him that friendship or identity relies on love and not on the satisfaction of appetites.
