HIS WORKS

As the pioneer of English Poetry, his first long poem was the "Book of the Duchess" written to commemorate the death in 1369 of John of Gaunt's first wife. The plot is needlessly complicated and the form is allegorical. But these are passages of sober beauty and an occasional touch of humor or realism anticipates the later Chaucer. This is in fact the poem's main interest to-day: The spectacle it efforts of a poet who is to be a master struggling with a form he has inherited but not yet made his own and giving, as he does so, early glimpses of the qualities which his work in time will show developed and perfected. 

In the "Parliament of Fowls", a poem written to celebrate some princely betrothal, Chaucer again uses allegory. It opens with the usual dream, and the poet finds himself in a garden where he first encounters Delight, Jealousy, Venus, Bacchus, and various other stock allegorical figures. When he leaves them and finds all the birds of the world- birds of prey, water-fowl, worm-fowl, seed-fowl- assembled before the goddess Nature to choose their mates the allegory takes a more lively and humorous turn. In the debates between the birds each is given a character appropriate to the reputation of his kind: The eagle speak in the lofty language of chivalry, the goose is a goose, and the cuckoo displays a typical impatient egotism. Thus already we can see Chaucer's equal command of romance and realism, and his power to convey character in dramatically appropriate dialogue. And his manner of delighting in the contests of life from a coign of sympathetic detachment is suggested in such lines as these from the poem:

"For many a man that may not stonde a pulle,

Yit lyketh him at the wrastling for to be,

And demeth yit wher he do bet or he.

The "House of Fame", which describes the caprices of fames and the activities of rumour, is a more ambitious allegory. It is incomplete, perhaps because he found the stiff framework too artificial, although that could not prevent his humour from vitalizing the passages of dialogue or his narrative flight from hovering at times in pauses of intimate reflection.

In the "Legend of Good Women" Chaucer confines allegory to the prologue, where he explains how the God of love laid upon him the task of expiating past poetic slights on women as lovers by writing now the stories of women who had loved too well. But such a task imposed too much partisanship on a genius which saw men and women as human rather than heroic and preferred to treat their virtues and their faults with the artist's equal truth. And so, the poem was never finished.

The Canterbury Tales consists of 10 Fragments and a General Narrative Fragment and all these fragments have totally 24 stories told by different people during a Pilgrimage journey. Normally, the whole text was not completed.

When he was nearing his 50s, in the "Canterbury Tales" he hit upon a subject which was to allow him full and free expression. He had probably already written certain stories in verse when the idea came to him of a pilgrimage during which each pilgrim might tell a story, and he decided to use this as a framework to link the stories together. In the end the framework with its opportunity for drawing character came to be as important as the stories themselves.

To begin with he chose some thirty pilgrims and drew a portrait of each one before giving him occasion to speak. They range from the 'verray parfit, gentil knight' to the rude miller and the ill-tempered reeve. For women, there was the nun, who, delicate of manner, ' jeet no morsel from her lippes falle', and beside her the ' wife of Bath' who had married and buried five husbands. Chaucer himself is there, lightly sketched in, but he does not scruple to show us the other travellers roughly criticizing and interrupting teh romance of Sir Thopas with which he tried to entertain them. Harry Bailey, innkeeper of the Tabard Inn at Southwark, was master of ceremonies to the party as they rode along their way and with rough good-fellowship encouraged each one to tell his story.

These portraits are written in entire simplicity: Yet each member of the group stands out distinctly, so that he remains for all time not only an individual but a type. Chaucer shows us the party as they rode along together, talking, arguing, criticizing each other's stories, unconsciously revealing themselves. 

The tales which they told are as diverse as themselves. Some of them are pious, others profane; some full of tenderness, others broadly humorous. The Knight told the ancient story of the deadly rivalry of Palamon and Arcite. The Miller and The Reeve told rude folk-tales in belittlement of each other. The Second Nun related a legend of early Christian virtue. Almost every story aimed at being not only excellent in itself but plausible and in harmony with the character of the narrator. The list of fragments  and the general  narrative frame and its analysis are given below:

Fragment I:

The General Prologue
The Knight's Tale
The Miller's Prologue and Tale
The Reeve's Prologue and Tale
The Cook's Prologue and Tale

Fragment II:

The Man of Law's Introduction, Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

Fragment III:

The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
The Friar's Prologue and Tale
The Summoner's Prologue and Tale

Fragment IV:

The Clerk's Prologue and Tale
The Merchant's Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

Fragment V:

The Squire's Introduction and Tale
The Franklin's Prologue and Tale

Fragment VI:

The Physician's Tale
The Pardoner's Introduction, Prologue, and Tale

Fragment VII:

The Shipman's Tale
The Prioress's Prologue and Tale
The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas
The Tale of Melibee
The Monk's Prologue and Tale
The Nun's Priest's Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue

Fragment VIII:

The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale
The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale

Fragment IX:

The Manciple's Prologue and Tale

Fragment X:

The Parson's Prologue and Tale
Chaucer's Retraction

The Frame Narrative

"This is the poynt, to speken short and pleyn,
 That ech of yow, to shorte with oure weye,
 In this viage shal telle tales tweye
 To Caunterbury-ward, I mene it so,
 And homward he shal tellen othere two,
 Of aventures that whilom han bifalle.
 And which of yow that bereth hym best of alle --
 That is to seyn, that telleth in this caas
 Tales of best sentence and moost solaas --
 Shal have a soper at oure aller cost
 Heere in this place, sittynge by this post, GP I.788-800"

Even more delightful than any of the tales told by Chaucer's pilgrims is the tale which he tells us about them all: the story of their journey to Canterbury. Nowhere within so brief a compass can we realize either the life of the fourteenth century on one hand, or on the other the dramatic power in which Chaucer stands second only to Shakespeare among English poets. Forget for a while the separate tales of the pilgrims - - many of which were patched up by fits and starts during such broken leisure as this man of the world could afford for indulging his poetical fancies; while many others (like the Monk's and the Parson's) are tedious to modern readers in strict proportion to their dramatic propriety at the moment -- forget for once all but the Prologue and the end-links, and read these through at one sitting, from the first stirrup-cup at Southwark Tabard to that final crest of Harbledown where the weary look down at last upon the sacred city of their pilgrimage. There is no such story as this in all medieval literature; no such gallery of finished portraits, nor any drama so true both to life and to perfect art. The dramatis personae of the Decameron are mere puppets in comparison; their occasional talk seems to us insipid to the last degree of old-world fashion.

Boccaccio wrote for a society that was in many ways over-refined already; it is fortunate for us that Chaucer's public was not yet at that point of literary development at which art is too often tempted into artifice. He took the living men day by day, each in his simplest and most striking characteristics; and from these motley figures, under the artist's hand, grew a mosaic in which each stands out with all the glow of his own native colour, and all the added glory of the jewelled hues around him. (G.G. Coulton, Chaucer and his England, 1908, p. 126.)

Nevertheless Coulton's advice is worth taking, especially today when -- perhaps because courses in Chaucer so often concentrate on a selection of Tales, or perhaps because so many critics today have completely rejected the old critical approaches to the "roadside drama" -- the framing narrative that delighted Coulton and his contemporaries is often left unread.

Chaucer amused and tolerant curiosity excluded no one: he is not easily repelled. He looks at himself without illusion. Standing on the level of the average man, Chaucer finds the multitude beside him: it is the sense of common failings that makes for fellowship. Of all writers of genius, Chaucer is the one in whom we most quickly find a friend. He is the leader of those observers who accept as a fact- without seeking to dye them all one uniform hue- the many- coloured strands which are woven into the web of human life. Some shades may seem to him lovelier than others, but it is in the contrasts of the whole that he founds at once his philosophy of life and the rules governing his art.