A land whose children toil and rot like beasts,
Robbers and robb’d by turns, the dreamer sees:—
Land of poor-grinding lords and faithless priests,
Where wisdom starves and folly thrones at ease
’Mid lavishness and lusts and knaveries;
Times out of joint, a universe of lies,
Till Love divine appear in Ploughman’s guise
To burn the gilded tares and save the land,
Risen from the grave and walking earth again:—
—And as he dream’d and kiss’d the nail-pierced hand,
A hundred towers their Easter voices rain
In silver showers o’er hill and vale and plain,
And the air throbb’d with sweetness, and he woke
And all the dream in light and music broke.
—He look’d around, and saw the world he left
When to that visionary realm of song
His spirit fled from bonds of flesh bereft;
And on the vision he lay musing long,
As o’er his soul rude minstrel-echoes throng,
Old measures half-disused; and grasp’d his pen,
And drew his cottage-Christ for homely men.
Thus Langland also took his pilgrimage;
Rough lone knight-errant on uncourtly ways,
And wrong and woe were charter’d on his page,
With some horizon-glimpse of sweeter days.
And on the land the message of his lays
Smote like the strong North-wind, and cleansed the sky
With wholesome blast and bitter clarion-cry,
Summoning the people in the Ploughman’s name.
—So fought his fight, and pass’d unknown away;
Seeking no other praise, no sculptured fame
Nor laureate honours for his artless lay,
Nor in the Minster laid with high array;—
But where the May-thorn gleams, the grasses wave,
And the wind sighs o’er a forgotten grave.
Langland, whom I have put here in contrast with Chaucer, is said to have lived between 1332 and 1400. His Vision of Piers the Plowman (who is partially identified with our blessed Saviour), with some added poems, forms an allegory on life in England, in Church and State, as it appeared to him during the dislocated and corrupt age which followed the superficial glories of Edward the Third’s earlier years.
Took the toll; Amongst other official employments, Chaucer was Comptroller of the Customs in the Port of London. See his House of Fame; and the beautiful picture of his walks at dawning in the daisy-meadows: Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.
His of Certaldo, . . . in Scythia; Boccaccio:—and Ovid, who died in exile at Tomi:—to both of whom Chaucer is greatly indebted for the substance of his tales.
Picture-like; ‘It is chiefly as a comic poet, and a minute observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse, but he springs like Antaeus from the earth when his subject changes to coarse satire or merry narrative’ (Hallam, Mid. Ages: Ch. IX: Pt. iii).
The Tabard; Inn in Southwark whence the pilgrims to Canterbury start.