Chaucer's Poetry Literary Elements

Chaucer was one of the first English authors to create a distinction between a work's author and its narrator. Though the narrator is often a version of Chaucer, his perspective is often cast as flawed or insufficient by the work's content. For example, in the Legend of Good Women, the narrator repeatedly professes the beauty of women's love, but the content of the work suggests that women's love can be destructive or irrational. As members of the audience, we see the difference between the author's perspective (love often leads to disaster) and the narrator's naivety (love is noble).

Chaucer was the first English poet to employ iambic pentameter. He is also known for rhyme royal, a stanza of seven ten-syllable lines, rhyming ABABBCC.

Chaucer uses figurative language frequently. This fits with his style, which rarely feels like he is dashing something off in a heated moment—his poetry is carefully honed and obtrusively literary. One of his most interesting similes occurs in the poem "To Rosamond," where he compares a man in love to a fish boiled in sauce—the comparison reveals the poem's satirical attitude towards love.

Alliteration was a much more important literary device in medieval poetry than it is today. Rather than an occasional embellishment, it was often used as part of the structure of writing, in a meter called "alliterative verse." Alliterative verse divided the line into two halves. One or two accented syllables in the first half began with the same letter, as did the first accented syllable in the second half. This structure was the default in Old English. By the fourteenth century, the introduction of rhyme made alliterative verse less popular, but it was still used by many poets: for example, Piers Plowman, the most famous Middle English poem not written by Chaucer, uses alliterative verse. Chaucer, who was very inspired by continental poetry, does not use alliterative verse, but his poetry still features a lot of alliteration compared to modern poetry. We can think of it as part of the "texture" of Middle English—people just associated poetic speech with alliteration.

Chaucer's poetry is often satirical, and he employs irony all the time. One notable example is the pardoner's tale in The Canterbury Tales. The pardoner tells people that he will guarantee that their sins are forgiven in exchange for a fee. In the prologue to his tale, he admits to being a liar and a drunk. Yet in his tale, he admonishes the audience for these same sins.

Four of Chaucer's long works are dream vision poems. The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women are anthologies of stories. He also authored numerous short poems, as well as several important translations into Middle English.

Many of Chaucer's dream vision poems are set in fantastical spaces. The House of Fame, for example, features an enormous estate where words take on human bodies. On the other end of the spectrum, The Canterbury Tales is set in the real world, on the road to Canterbury.

Chaucer's tone is often ironic or satirical.

The complex structures of Chaucer's poems make it difficult to identify a protagonist and antagonist. In the dream vision poems, the protagonist is often the narrator, usually a version of Chaucer himself. In The Canterbury Tales, each story features a different protagonist and antagonist. Characters often have ulterior motives in who they cast as a protagonist and antagonist; if there is someone in the company they dislike, the antagonist might resemble that person, while the protagonist resembles themself.

There is no one major conflict in Chaucer's poetry, but he has a presiding interest in pursuing knowledge and understanding of the world. That desire is often in conflict with a confusing dream-vision world or the unreliability of the narrator.

The Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women don't really have a single climax, because they are structured as many shorter stories. Some of the dream-vision poems have a moment where the narrator finally encounters an authoritative figure.

Chaucer frequently employs foreshadowing, sometimes to playful effect. For example, in The Legend of Good Women, he recounts the story of Philomela. In Greek mythology, Philomela's brother-in-law rapes her and cuts out her tongue. In response, one of the gods transforms her into a bird to free her from her mutilated body. Chaucer's audience would have been familiar with the ending, and he foreshadows it by including multiple bird puns in the story. Yet in his version of the story, the narrative actually ends when Philomela reunites with her sister, before she is transformed. Foreshadowing allows Chaucer to play with the reader's expectations.

In The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer frequently uses understatement, describing objectively self-destructive or irrational behaviors as merely expressions of ordinary love. The understatement enhances the satirical edge of the poem, by casting the narrator as naive and out of touch with reality.

Chaucer constantly alludes to a wide range of literature. His most frequent reference points are Greek writers, especially Ovid and Virgil, the early Christian philosopher Boethius, who pioneered the dream vision poem, and contemporary French and Italian writing, especially the Roman de la Rose and the writings of Dante and Machaut.

See individual guides for examples of metonymy and synecdoche in Chaucer's writing.

Personification was a conventional aspect of Middle English poetry, with many works featuring characters like Truth or Vice whose personhood embodied a particular trait. Chaucer is a less frequent user of the trope, but his poetry still features figures like Nature or Fame.

Hyperbole is another literary device Chaucer employs to distance himself from the narrator. For individual examples, see specific guides.

Chaucer does not usually employ onomatopoeia.