Sean Tarjoto
Humanities II
Prof. Hildebrandt
2 May 2000

	Chaucer’s Prioress’s Prologue and Hafiz’s poetry contain similiar notions for ideas of love, and specifically, spiritual love.  The tale of the Prioress is a story of total forgiveness, which is perhaps the Catholic ideal of love taken to its extreme. The murdered boy responds to a transgression against him which, in any other circumstance, could never be exercised by virtue of the nature of the crime.  Murder is a form of sin which obliterates the chance of forgiveness. But it is even the nature of the crime there is a symbolic gesture by Chaucer; the Jewish boys mutilate the innocent boy’s body, but his soul is by no means harmed because it cannot be touched by any form of violence whose nature is physical. Therefore, why should it not be possible for there to be forgiveness?  In the case of the resurrected boy, a second chance is given, and given by divine aid.
	 The beauty of this specific act of forgiveness is in that there is no need for a Hammurabian sense justice; the mob would rather kill his Jewish murderers, but this is not even necessary, for the boy is now alive, and would rather see no more loss of life. Indeed, if one were to even quantify (and equalize) the value of a life, the death of the murderer here seems equal to the life of the victim, since they are both boys.
	The circumstance is beyond unique.  The boy, whose entire existence is devoted toward the spiritual inclinations of Catholicism, is perhaps the only person who could be capable of forgiving such a transgression, and it is the Virgin Mary who understands this.  Her power does not allow her to bring the boy back to life, but it does allow a lesser miracle; the ability to make the boy sing even in death.  This allows the mother, the archbishop, and the town to hear him, and eventually leads toward the Jewish boy’s confession - an act of vulnerability; a state prognostic to love. To pun, vulnerability must be prior to love.  The boy is worthy of ressurrection but it is necessary for there to be an act of love from the soul of the murderer to complete the sequence of events which lead to the boy being delivered to the church and rise back to life by the power of the Catholic god. The similiarities between the Prioress’s Prologue and the Crucifixion are numerous.
	Love, in the eyes and ears of Hafiz, is so much centered on vulnerability.  On being able to let the hard exterior, the physicality, the pain of emotion not be an impedence toward unification (or a comedy) but rather an integral part of the process.  “Look what happens when the tongue / Cannot say to kindness, / ‘I will be your slave.’” (281) There is an act of submission here that is like the submission of confession by the Jewish boy. Hafiz also wrote, “Love has / Befriended Hafiz so completely / It has turned to ash / And freed / Me” (32).  The idea here is that achieving pure love is an experience so transcendent it creates in the person no need for a Hammurabian sense of justice, that is frees one from the illogical compulsion to destroy eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life. 
	The fact that it is a boy, a man, or even a sage who is capable of committing such selfless acts of forgiveness delivers an idea that age is not necessary to achieve this kind of spirit. It is not necessary for love to be the result of a lifetime of learning, it can exist in early age for it transcends age.  It can, and should be a part of every day of our lives, no matter how long or short. “For we have not come here to take prisoners / Or to confine our wondrous spirits, / But to experience ever and ever more deeply / Our divine courage, freedom, and / Light!” (28).