dr. christopher

@eatthatbee.bsky.social

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Assistant Professor of medieval literature in Louisiana • University of California, Riverside, PhD • once described as “disgusting and unnerving” feelings, manuscripts, medievalism, queer studies, & haunting • he/him opinions expressed are my own

a poster featuring a pelican in front of a rainbow with the text, “y’all means all — Pride Northshore 2024”

First page of an article entitled “‘I thought I would be a Chaucerian’: Robert Glück, the Medievalism of New Narrative, and Margery Kempe”

calico cat with tongue out and crossed eyes

Text from the Middle English Pearl which reads:

I mourned, hands clenched, before that mound,
For the piercing cold of grief had caught
Me in the doleful dread and bound
My heart, though reason solace sought.
I longed for my pearl, locked in the ground,
While fierce contentions in me fought.
In Christ, though comfort could be found,
My wretched will was still distraught.
I fell upon that flowery plot.
Such odors eddied in my brain,
To sudden slumber I was brought
By that precious pearl without a stain.

The entirety of e. e. cumming's 1926 poem 'next to of course god america i' which reads:

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

The last stanza of Wilfred Owen's 1921 poem 'Dulce et decorum est' which reads:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

poster holding a calico cat with one hand

An image of folio 2 recto of Oxford, Christ Church manuscript 152 which feature the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales