Green geese

Green geese is the absurd name Filippo gives his son for a group of young women they meet in Florence. The phrase turns the father’s attempt to guard his son against desire into a comic failure: the youth has never seen women before, yet at once wants one of these supposed geese for himself.

The Encounter in Florence

Filippo has raised his son in solitude, in a small cell on a wild mountain, and believes the young man’s devotion to God has made him unlikely to be drawn toward worldly things. When the son reaches eighteen, he asks to accompany his aging father to Florence so that he can meet the people who help them there and take over the journey on future occasions. Filippo agrees, and the son marvels at the city’s palaces, houses, and churches, asking what each thing is called.

Their conversation changes when they meet several pretty, well-dressed young women coming from a wedding. Asked what they are, the women whom Filippo does not wish to name directly, he calls them green geese. The expression is an improvised euphemism, designed to hide the category of womanhood from a young man whom his father hopes to keep from carnal appetite.

The Euphemism Backfires

The son’s response overturns Filippo’s purpose. Unlike the buildings and other sights in Florence, the women immediately captivate him. He asks his father to obtain one of them, promising to feed her. When Filippo warns that they are an ill thing and that the youth does not know what they eat, the son questions why anything so beautiful could be bad. He even finds the women fairer than the painted angels Filippo has shown him.

The joke depends on the mismatch between the father’s language and the son’s experience. Filippo’s false label cannot make the women seem like an abstract danger; the youth sees their beauty directly and responds with an uncomplicated, bodily wish. His request to take one home and feed her carries the father’s animal metaphor to a literal-minded extreme. Filippo then understands that nature is stronger than his wit and regrets bringing the young man to Florence.

The Expression in the Narrator’s Argument

The episode is not only a comic story about failed protection. The narrator uses it to answer critics who accuse him of trying too hard to please women. He openly acknowledges that women please him and says the young hermit’s immediate desire illustrates the power of natural affection: even a youth raised apart from society, with no experience of women, is captivated as soon as he sees them.

That framing gives the phrase a second function. Green geese begins as a father’s verbal screen, but the story makes the screen itself evidence against his claim that desire can be controlled by renaming its object. The narrator turns the father’s defeat into a defense of his own attention to women, presenting attraction as a natural force that neither isolation nor evasive language can simply undo.