The God of Love gives specific recommendations to the neophyte on the conduct becoming a lover. The personified likenesses of anti-courtly vices arrayed on the walls of the garden provide an instructive contrast to the figures of courtly virtue who dance within the confines of the enclosure. Guillaume’s work is a fairly comprehensive handbook on the art of romantic love. The sections of the Rose composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun have markedly different characters. Jean de Meun concludes the narrative with a bawdy account of the plucking of the Rose, achieved through deception, which is very unlike Guillaume’s idealized conception of the love quest. At the point where Guillaume de Lorris’ poem breaks off, the protagonist, confronted with this new obstacle to the realization of his love, is left lamenting his fate. A stolen kiss alerted the guardians of the Rose, who then enclosed it behind still stronger fortifications. His efforts to obtain the Rose met with little success. When he went to select his own special blossom, the God of Love shot him with several arrows, leaving him forever enamored of one particular flower. In his dream he journeyed to a walled garden in which he viewed rosebushes in the Fountain of Narcissus. The 25-year-old narrator recounts a dream he had approximately five years previously, which has since come to pass. The Roman de la Rose is an allegorical love poem which takes the form of a dream vision. The English poets John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch were astute readers of the work. Other national literatures felt the effect of the Rose as well. In the early 15th century, the Rose was still capable of sparking heated literary debate in France. In the centuries following its composition, major poets like Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, and Francois Villon continued to write in a tradition dominated by the work which, in some manuscripts, extends to 21,750 lines. Begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and continued by Jean de Meun approximately forty years later, the Rose is probably the most influential work written in the Old French vernacular. ![]() The Roman de la Rose is the work of two authors. History and Summary of the Text by Lori J.
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