That it is joye to see my busynesse.
This manner of saying of things that they are joyous, or, very often, heavenly, is typical of Chaucer. He looks out on the world with a delight that never grows old or weary. The sights and sounds of daily life, all the lavish beauty of the earth fill him with a pleasure which he can only express by calling it a “joy” or a “heaven.” It “joye was to see” Cressida and her maidens playing together; and
So aungellyke was her native beauté
That like a thing immortal seemede she,
As doth an heavenish parfit creature.
The peacock has angel’s feathers; a girl’s voice is heavenly to hear:
Antigone the shene
Gan on a Trojan song to singen clear,
That it an heaven was her voice to hear.
One could go on indefinitely multiplying quotations that testify to Chaucer’s exquisite sensibility to sensuous beauty and his immediate, almost exclamatory response to it. Above all, he is moved by the beauty of “young, fresh folkes, he and she”; by the grace and swiftness of living things, birds and animals; by flowers and placid, luminous, park-like landscapes.