His own last poems invite us to pause here a moment; for they smack of old age, infirmities, and disillusions. When he writes now of love, it is in the tone of Wamba the Witless: “Wait till you come to forty year!” There is the half-ironical ballad to Rosamond, a young beauty whom he must be content to admire now from afar, yet upon whom he dotes even so—
| Was never pike wallowed in galantine As I in love am wallowed and y-bound. |
Or again the triple roundel to Merciless Beauty, most uncomplimentary in the outspoken triumph-note of its close—
| Since I from Love escapèd am so fat, | |
| I never think to be in his prison lean; | |
| Since I am free, I count him not a bean. | |
| He may answèr, and sayë this or that; | |
| I do no force, I speak right as I mean | [I care no whit |
| Since I from Love escapèd am so fat, | |
| I never think to be in his prison lean. | |
| Love hath my name y-struck out of his slate, | |
| And he is struck out my bookës clean | |
| For evermore; there is none other mean. | |
| Since I from Love escapèd am so fat, | |
| I never think to be in his prison lean; | |
| Since I am free, I count him not a bean! |
Then we have “The Former Age”—a sigh for the Golden Past, and a tear for the ungrateful Present—
| Alas, alas! now may men weep and cry! For in our days is nought but covetise And doubleness, and treason, and envỳ, Prison, manslaughter, and murder in sundry wise.[74] |
Then again a series of four ballads on Fortune, beginning “This wretched worldës transmutacioun”; a “Complaint of Venus”; the two begging epistles to Scogan and Henry IV.; a satire against marriage addressed to his friend Bukton; a piteous complaint entitled “Lack of Steadfastness,” and two moral poems on Gentilesse (true Gentility) and on Truth. The last of these is not only the most truly poetical of them all, but also the bravest and most resigned—
| Flee from the press, and dwell with Soothfastness ... | |
| That thee is sent, receive in buxomness | [obedience |
| The wrestling for this world asketh a fall | [requires, implies |
| Here is no home, here is but wilderness: | |
| Forth, Pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall! | |
| Know thy countree, look up, thank God of all; | |
| Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead, | |
| And Truth shall thee deliver, it is no dread. |
The bitter complaints against his own times which occur in these later poems are of the ordinary medieval type; the courage and resignation are Chaucer’s own, and give a strangely modern ring to his words. He had indeed reached a point of experience at which all centuries are drawn again into closer kinship, just as early childhood is much the same in all countries and all ages of the world. There is something in Chaucer’s later writings that reminds us of Renan’s “pauvre âme déveloutée de soixante ans.” All through life this shy, dreamy-eyed, full-bodied poet showed remarkable detachment from the history of his own times. Professor Raleigh has pointed out that his avoidance of all but the slightest allusions to even the greatest of contemporary events may well seem deliberate, however much allowance we may make for the fact that the landmarks of history are, in their own day, half overgrown by the common weeds of daily life. But, for all his detachment and his shyness of autobiographical allusions, there is one unmistakable contrast between his earliest and latest poems: and we may clearly trace the progress from youthful enthusiasms to the old man’s disillusions. Yet there is no bitterness in Chaucer’s old age; we see in him what Ruskin calls “a Tory of the old school—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s”; loyal to monarchy and deeply distrustful of democracy, yet never doubting the King’s ultimate responsibility to his people. We see his resignation to the transitory nature of earthly happiness, even though he cannot quite forgive life for its disappointments. His later ironies on the subject of love tell their own tale. No man can mistake them for the jests of him that never felt a wound; rather, we may see how the old scars had once bled and sometimes burned still, though there was no reason why a man should die of them. He anticipates in effect Heine’s tragi-comic appeal, “Hate me, Ladies, laugh at me, jilt me, but let me live!” For all that we have lost or missed, the world is no mere vale of tears—
| But, lord Christ! when that it remembreth me Upon my youth, and on my jollity, It tickleth me about mine heartë-root. Unto this day it doth mine heartë boot That I have had my world as in my time! But Age, alas!—— |