A thousand times have I heard men tell
That there is joy in heaven and pain in hell
And I accord well that it is so;
But, nonetheless, yet I know well also
That there is no one dwelling in this country
That either has in heaven or hell been
Nor may of it no other ways know
But because he has heard it said or found it written
The opening lines of the poem introduce the value of writing as a source of knowledge. Everyone agrees that heaven is good and hell is bad, and Chaucer doesn’t dispute this claim, but he points out that no one talking about it has actually visited either place and come back to tell the tale. Instead, they rely on what they have heard said or seen written. He uses this example to frame a broader claim about the value of writing. If you agree that heaven is good and hell is bad, then you also agree that secondary knowledge derived from reading can be valuable. If you concede that, then you recognize the value of Chaucer’s historical writing as a source of truth.
Allas, that I never had English, rhyme or prose
Sufficient to praise this flower aright!
But help, you that have cunning and might
You lovers that can write about sentiment
In this case you ought to be diligent
To help me somewhat in my labor
Whether you be with the leaf or with the flower.
For I know well that you have been here before
Making rope and laying away the corn,
And I come after, gleaning here and there,
And am full glad if I may find an ear
Of any goodly word that you have left
In the prologue, Chaucer presents himself as a reader at heart, who usually prefers his books to games or the outdoors. Even when the spring lures him outside, he sees the flowers in literary terms. He associates poetry about springtime with lovers who write sentimental poetry. He struggles to find sufficient “rhyme or prose” to praise the flower not because he lacks the words, but because everything has already been said. He compares the situation to a field of corn that has already been harvested. He is like someone who comes late and picks through the field, trying to find whatever is left. The scene suggests that Chaucer has no interest in translating his authentic, immediate emotional responses to the world into poetry. Instead, he is always in his head, thinking about his writing in relationship to literary history, and seeking to show off his wit with original language.
He made the book called the House of Fame,
And also the Death of Blanche the Duchesse,
And the Parliament of Fowls, as I guess,
And all the love of Palamon and Arcite
Of Thebes, though the story is little known;
And many a hymn for your holidays,
That are called ballads, roundels, virelais,
And, for to speak of other holiness,
He has in prose translated Boethius,
And made the life also of Saint Cecilia.
He made also, a long time ago,
Origins upon the Madeleine.
Him ought now to have the less pain;
He has made many a lay and many a thing
In order to defend Chaucer from Cupid, Alceste lists his poetic accomplishments. Her speech groups his work into categories, asserting the breadth of his work. She begins with several long poems that remain well-known today—The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchess, and The Parliament of Fowls, as well as “Palamon and Arcite,” which would become the Knight’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales. Then she notes his playful work, fit for holidays: his short poems and songs. Chaucer juxtaposes these least serious works against his “holiness,” or his religious works. Of these, the most famous today is his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy into Middle English. The organization of Alceste's list thus encourages the reader to think about Chaucer’s work as fulfilling several purposes: poetic accomplishment, playful entertainment, and serious religious thought. These mirror the broader significance Chaucer assigns writing earlier in the prologue, where he describes reading as both a valuable source of knowledge and a way to entertain oneself.
That all the world he set at no value.
Him thought there was nothing to him so due
As Cleopatra for to love and serve
Antony and Cleopatra are the first lovers depicted in the Legend, and their devotion sets the tone for Chaucer’s depiction of love throughout the book. Both are willing to give up everything for one another. Cleopatra abandons Egypt to go with Antony to his doom, while Antony betrays his country and his honor to “love and serve” Cleopatra. Although Chaucer is supposed to be praising love, this is not exactly a flattering picture. For Antony especially, love is almost a form of madness, a force that makes him give up the whole world for a single woman. The narrator’s condemnations of less faithful men like Aeneas and Theseus ring slightly hollow when we remember how irrational and destructive true love is.
Of true men I find but few more
In all my books, save this Pyramus,
And therefore have I spoken of him thus.
For it is pleasing to us men to find
A man that can in love be true and kind
Chaucer often employs hyperbole to suggest the absurdity of the project Alceste has assigned him. Here, he suggests that while any woman would have taken her own life for her lover as Thisbe did, Pyramus is almost unique in his own faithfulness. His suggestion that in all his books he has found few other faithful men is belied by the fact that we have just read a story where Antony sacrifices everything for Cleopatra. Furthermore, his suggestion that Pyramus makes a “pleasing” example disregards not only his grisly death, but the fact that it was both needless and absurd. We almost suspect that the male audience would take pleasure in Pyramus’s pleasing example precisely because it testifies to the value of avoiding true romantic devotion.
This fresh lady, of the city queen,
Stood in the temple in her royal estate
So richly and also so fair in everything
So young, so lusty, with her eyes glad,
That, if that God, that heaven and earth made,
Would have a love, for beauty and goodness,
And womanhood, and truth, and seemliness,
Whom should he love but this lady sweet?
Chaucer’s description of Dido is one of the most beautiful in the Legend. He employs polysyndeton, or a list comprised of repeating conjunctions, to emphasize her beauty. Although the individual adjectives are somewhat generic, the list of them spools across the page in a way that speaks to the frenzy of love; it is as though we cannot stop looking at Dido and seeing new aspects of her beauty. For a moment, Chaucer thus gets inside Aeneas’s head, presenting Dido to the reader as Aeneas saw her when he fell in love with her.
“…this night my father’s ghost
Has in my sleep so sore tormented me
And also Mercury has presented his message,
That for the conquest of Italy
My destiny is to sail soon
For which, I feel, my heart is broken!”
Many of the characters in the Legend feel somewhat two-dimensional. They follow a script in which men betray and women are betrayed, meaning that their internal motivations and complicated desires are often unimportant to the story. Aeneas, however, is an exception. Although the narrator describes him as just another unfaithful man, Aeneas’s own dialogue paints a more complex picture. He does not leave Dido in secret, as Jason and Theseus do to their lovers, but instead tells her that he is faced with an impossible choice between his beloved and his father. His decision to tell Dido what he has decided suggests that he respects her, even as he decides to leave. His description of himself as “tormented” by his father emphasizes his pain at his departure, and depicts a psychologically realistic response to guilt at abandoning his destiny for love. This feeling of guilt comes with a conviction that to leave is his destiny; both classical and medieval mythology attested to the power of fate, and here Aeneas feels that he must sail, even though it will end in heartbreak. However, while a character like Demophon follows his destiny of betraying his lover without a second thought, Aeneas’s heart resists his fate, making him a genuinely tragic character. He may be trapped by fate, but he is more than the sum of his choices.
To Colcos come is this duke Jason
That is of love devourer and dragon
As matter eats form always,
And from form into form it may pass,
Or as a well that were bottomless,
Right so can false Jason have no peace
Ironically, Chaucer uses conventional misogynistic language to describe Jason’s fickleness in love. Medieval philosophy included a distinction between matter, what we might think of as “stuff” or “flesh,” and form, something like ordered, essential nature. Matter was feminine, while form was masculine. Thus, in medieval accounts of how birth worked, the woman was the source of the flesh, while the man shaped that flesh into a human form, creating the person from the thing.
Here, Chaucer compares Jason’s gluttony for love to the relationship between matter and form. Ultimately, form gives way to matter. The world is constantly changing as beings die and new ones are born, but the stuff persists. A man dies and rots into soil—the human form disappears, but the matter remains. The conventional association of form with masculinity and matter with femininity gives this simile a gendered edge, suggesting that though Jason is an archetypal unfaithful man, his gluttony is essentially female. The image of a “bottomless well” further emphasizes the gendered stakes here. As many scholars have illustrated, images of holes, caves, and emptiness often connote femininity, much as phallic objects like guns, swords, and towers connote masculinity. Especially in conjunction with the form/matter distinction, the well further suggests that there is something feminine about Jason’s unnatural hunger for love.
They forgave it her, for it was right;
It was no guilt, it lay not in her power;
And they said many examples to her.
But all for nothing; for thus she said:
“Be as it may,” said she, “of forgiving,
I will not have nothing forgiven for nothing.”
But privately she caught forth a knife,
And therewithal she took herself her life;
And as she fell down, she cast her look,
And of her clothes still she took heed.
For in her falling still she took care
Lest that her feet on such thing lay bare;
So well she loved cleanness and truth.
Lucrece’s suicide is one of the more troubling deaths in the Legend. From a feminist perspective, her death is obviously a travesty. Though she bears no responsibility for her rape, she nevertheless blames herself and ends her own life. To some extent, the text bears out this reading. Her companions stress that she has no guilt and deserves to live. However, the poem itself seems to implicitly sanction her decision to kill herself. Her death makes her a tragic figure who compels the people to oust the tyrant Tarquin and create the Roman republic. Furthermore, the manner of her death provides one more opportunity to prove her allegiance to “cleanness and truth,” as she carefully attends to her chastity even as she dies. Chaucer’s reference to “truth” is especially telling. There is no truth in Lucrece’s death, because she bears no guilt for her assault. Yet the poem presents her suicide not as a horrible error provoked by misplaced blame, but rather as a manifestation of perfect female chastity.
Be wary, you women, of your subtle foe,
Since you this day men’s example may see;
And trust, in love, no man but me
Chaucer never finished the final story in the Legend, so the conclusion of the Legend of Phyllis, the penultimate story, is the closest we get to an ending. In it, the narrator, for the first time, gestures to the irony of his own identity as a man given the topic of the story. We might see this self-referential moment as a breaking of the fourth wall, in which Chaucer deftly brings down the whole edifice of the story, pointing out that in order to believe the Legend’s thesis about male dishonesty, we must trust the male narrator to be honest. This contradiction suggests that truly seeing all men as unfaithful, and all male-female relationships as conflicts, would be ridiculous; after all, we’ve gone along with the narrator—and really, what makes him any more trustworthy than anyone else?
