And this, in turn, reminds me of that couplet in which Chaucer compares a girl to a flowering pear-tree:
She was well more blissful on to see
Than is the newe parjonette tree.
Chaucer is as much at home among the stars as he is among the birds and beasts and flowers of earth. There are some literary men of to-day who are not merely not ashamed to confess their total ignorance of all facts of a “scientific” order, but even make a boast of it. Chaucer would have regarded such persons with pity and contempt. His own knowledge of astronomy was wide and exact. Those whose education has been as horribly imperfect as my own will always find some difficulty in following him as he moves with easy assurance through the heavens. Still, it is possible without knowing any mathematics to appreciate Chaucer’s descriptions of the great pageant of the sun and stars as they march in triumph from mansion to mansion through the year. He does not always trouble to take out his astrolabe and measure the progress of “Phebus, with his rosy cart”; he can record the god’s movements in more general terms than may be understood even by the literary man of nineteen hundred and twenty-three. Here, for example, is a description of “the colde frosty seisoun of Decembre,” in which matters celestial and earthly are mingled to make a picture of extraordinary richness:
Phebus wox old and hewed like latoun,
That in his hoté declinacioun
Shone as the burned gold, with streames bright;
But now in Capricorn adown he light,
Where as he shone full pale; I dare well sayn
The bitter frostes with the sleet and rain