Chaucer's Legende of Goode Women

It is the prolongable sub-tonic r, that fills out the dissyllabic quantity. It would be difficult to make the word out do service as a dissyllable, by reason of the abrupt atonic which follows; but owl is more accommodating, by reason of the prolongable l.

An emphatic monosyllable at the beginning of a verse, or at the cæsura, is often made to do service as a dissyllable, and this, too, even when no prolongable sub-tonic follows the vowel of the word upon which the voice may tarry; e. g: "Now is me schape eternally to dwelle

Nought in purgatorie, but in helle."-C. T., 1228.

By giving Nought a strong emphasis, as the sense demands, and making a short pause after it, not only is the measure sufficiently filled out, but the verse is thus rendered highly effective.*

*Tyrwhitt's text reads, "Not only in purgatorie, but in helle," which is not, I believe, the reading of any existing MS., only having been supplied by the editor. It is hardly necessary to say that the verse is not only thus enfeebled, but that the intended sense is destroyed. Arcite, who is the speaker, means to say, that he is destined to dwell, not in purgatory, where there might be some hope, but eternally in hell, where there is none. Urry's text reads "right in hell," which is absurd.

Mr. De Quincey, in an essay entitled "Milton versus Southey and Landor," contained in his "Note Book of an English OpiumEater, ," makes an interesting and ingenious defence of the following verse from the Paradise Regained, Book II., v. 428, which is applicable to many verses in Chaucer's poetry:

our ears.

"Not difficult, if thou listen to me"

which, he says, Mr. Landor thinks "no authority will reconcile to I think otherwise. The cæsura is meant to fall not with the comma after difficult, but after thou; and there is a most effective and grand suspension intended. It is Satan who speaksSatan in the wilderness; and he marks, as he wishes to mark, the tremendous opposition of attitude between the two parties to the temptation.

'Not difficult if thou

there let the reader pause, as if pulling up suddenly four horses in

In some acephalous verses, a metrical completeness is attained (even when the initial monosyllable has no emphasis), by means of the pause which follows and which is required by the construction of the language; as in the second verse of the following passage from The Legende of Goode Women :

"Now have I thanne suche a condicion,

That, of all the floures in the mede,

Thanne love I most these floures white and rede,

Suche as men callen daysyes in our toune.”—v. 40-43.

Būt, nā | thēlēs, | yet wōt | I wēl | ǎlsō,

Ně may

But as

Bernarde, the mōnke, | ně saugh | năt al | părdē!

harness, and throwing them on their haunches-not difficult if thou (in some mysterious sense the Son of God); and then, as with a burst of thunder, again giving the reins to your quadriga,

hearken to me:'

that is, to me, that am the Prince of the Air, and able to perform all my promises for those that hearken to my temptations."

Thăn một | ě wẽ
(Thurgh which
And to the doc
20. Yēvě crědēnce, | în ēve |

The final e in "thousande," v. 1, it will be observed, is silent before a consonant. This must not be regarded as an exception to the general rule, as it is not the remains of an inflectional ending, and does not strictly belong there. It was, perhaps, incorrectly added by the scribe. In the thirty-eight places in which “thousand" occurs in Wright's improved text of the Canterbury Tales, it is spelled without an e. So the final e in "monke," v. 16, is probably a mere clerical addition. In the twenty-seven places in which the word occurs in Wright's text, the word is spelled monk.

Observe the happy effect imparted by the anapæsts in v. 36 and 37. They serve to express the lively emotion sud

denly awakened in the poet by a recurrence to the gay and merry month of May, his favourite month, more subtly than words could have done. And what an exquisite close is given to the passage by the last verse!

Enough has now been set forth of the peculiarities of Chaucer's language and verse to meet the immediate wants of the student just entering upon the reading of his poetry. The subtler niceties of his versification, which do not admit of a definite exposition, will gradually reveal themselves in the course of a careful and sympathetic reading. That Chaucer possessed a most keen and delicate metrical sensibility, the habitual and appreciative reader of his poetry cannot long fail to discover. No English poet has exhibited a nicer feeling of the suggestiveness of words, or understood better the secrets of melody as depending upon the succession of vowel sound. Thousands are the verses in his poetry whose mysterious beauty, in this respect, causes the reader to linger upon them with a secret and undefinable pleasure.

Warton, in his History of English Poetry, pronounces Dryden's version of Chaucer's Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite, to be "the most animated and harmonious piece of versification in the English language." But the reader who will take the pains to make a careful comparison of the version with the original, will not be long in deciding in favour of the latter in respect to all the subtler elements of poetic form.

There is scarcely a passage in the whole poem within the compass of ten verses that Dryden has not emasculated and vulgarized. Pope, in his versions, falls still further below his original. He gives us even less of Chaucer's spirit than, in his translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, he does of Homer's. It is not to these "mechanically perfect" versifiers that we must go for pure draughts of the fountainhead of English poetry. Neither was close enough to the heart of nature, or free enough from the artificial

and the conventional, to respond to, and reproduce, what had had its genesis in a soul of such exquisite sensibility and simplicity as was Chaucer's.

Quicquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis.

It remains to add a few words to this Introduction, on the poem here presented.

In regard to the date of its composition, the Prologue contains abundant evidence that it was one of the author's latest productions, though it preceded his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales,* at least in the connected form in which we now have them. It is probable that certain of the Tales had been composed as distinct poems when he entered upon the composition of the Legende of Goode Women, and that their attribution to the Canterbury pil

* In a foot-note to his Introductory Discourse, Tyrwhitt remarks, in regard to the date of the composition of the Canterbury Tales: "It is most probable, I think, that Chaucer did not begin his Canterbury Tales before 1382 at the earliest. My reason is this: The queen, who is mentioned in The Legende of Good Women, v. 496, was certainly Anne of Bohemia, the first queen of Richard II.; she was not married to Richard till the beginning of 1382, so that The Legende cannot possibly be supposed of an earlier date than that year. In The Legende [ver. 329–332, ver. 417-430,] Chaucer has enumerated, I believe, all the considerable works which he had then composed. It was to his purpose not to omit any. He not only does not mention The Canterbury Tales, but he expressly names the story of Palamon and Arcite, and the Life of Saint Cecilia, both which now make part of them, as separate compositions. I am persuaded, therefore, that in 1382 the work of The Canterbury Tales was not begun; and if we look further, and consider the troubles in which Chaucer was involved for the five or six following years by his connections with John of Northampton, we can hardly suppose that it was much advanced before 1389, the sixty-first year of the author's age."

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