The Evils of the Crowd
Throughout “Truth,” Chaucer is pointedly critical of Philip’s desire to impress and control those around him. The first line of the poem casts the crowd and truthfulness as opposites. The implication is that the mass of people only value shallow, worldly attributes, and the righteous man would do well to avoid them. The rest of the first stanza emphasizes the multiple ways other people can be damaging. On one hand, Chaucer advises Philip that social climbing will require him to become a fickle, or unreliable and inconsistent, person. At the same time, he stresses that the envies and judgments of other people also make selfish pursuits like hoarding and praise unsatisfying. The penultimate line, “rule well yourself, who others advise here,” thus advises Philip, who now seeks to advise others, to instead seek only to mold himself into a better person.
This advice might seem rather unappealing. The poet seems to be preaching a life of self-isolation and powerlessness, at odds with Philip’s position as a wealthy nobleman. However, the nobleman’s temporary expulsion from the court suggests a different reading. If he was already feeling frustrated with the court, the message of “Truth” would be comforting, because it emphasizes that the courtly success he lost was never really valuable.
Human Impotence
Many of the strongest images in “Truth” concern man’s impotence. In the second stanza, Chaucer compares the person who seeks to morally recuperate the wicked to someone who kicks at an awl or throws their crockery against the wall. The two images follow directly, one after the other, and are further linked by the end-rhyme of “awl” and “wall.” Both are images of powerlessness; the boot cannot bend the sharp awl, nor can the china plates injure a strong wall. Furthermore, they both suggest that the act of trying to change the world actually backfires and injures the one attempting to make the change. The plates break, and the foot that kicks the awl retreats, pierced by the sharp point. This self-destructive dimension of the two metaphors implies that Philip might be ethically compromised by his desire to make the world a better place. Line 13, “control yourself, who would control your peer,” which parallels line 6 in the previous stanza, suggests why that might be. The syntax casts self-control and the desire to control others as mutually exclusive. In attempting to make others better, Chaucer implies, Philip not only takes on an impossible task, but distracts himself from his own moral betterment, hence injuring his chances of salvation.
Truth
“Truth” is the title of the poem, and the concept’s importance to the work is emphasized by the line that repeats at the end of each stanza, “And truth shall deliver you, have no fear.” Yet it’s a little hard to identify exactly what truth means here, or why it is so important. After all, none of the poet’s advice to Philip directly concerns dishonesty, but is instead much more focused on self-sufficiency and humility. In some sense, these are both forms of truth, according to the poem's speaker. To attempt to rule or change others is to be dishonest with oneself about the stubbornness of the world, while to seek wealth, fame, and power is to fail to accept the facts of one’s own life as they are. Still, truth here seems like more than a trait the righteous man might embody. Instead, it is an external force, one that repeatedly “delivers” Philip from the difficulties of his life, as long as he focuses on heaven and seeks to rule himself. So what, or who, is truth?
In medieval poetry, God often appears as the embodiment of various abstract concepts. For example, in religious plays, Jesus sometimes appears on stage as “Wisdom.” In the theological poem Piers Plowman, God is also sometimes called “Nature,” “Charity,” and, indeed, Truth. Chaucer seems to be doing something similar. Although God appears as an individual in the third and fourth stanza, he also acts in this world as “truth.” This is not truth in the sense of a correct statement about a particular matter, but rather something more all-encompassing—the ultimate truth of the world. On a short human time scale, money, power, and fame appear important. But the truth, governed by God, is that only virtue matters in the long run. Thus, he who seeks to be virtuous will eventually be delivered by this truth.
