33. Trewely is here three syllables, which is the normal form; cf. Prologue, 761; Kn. Ta. A 1267. In l. 35, the second e is hardly sounded.
36. We must here read 'hold-e,' without elision of final e, which is preserved by the cæsura.
37. 'The most obvious interpretation of these lines seems to be that they contain the confession of a hopeless passion, which has lasted for eight years—a confession which certainly seems to come more appropriately and more naturally from an unmarried than a married man. 'For eight years,'—he says—'I have loved, and loved in vain—and yet my cure is never the nearer. There is but one physician that can heal me—but all that is ended and done with. Let us pass on into fresh fields; what cannot be obtained must needs be left'; Ward, Life of Chaucer, p. 53. Dr. Furnivall supposes that the relentless fair one was the one to whom his Complaint unto Pite was addressed; and chronology would require that Chaucer fell in love with her in 1361. There is no proof that Chaucer was married before 1374, though he may have been married not long after his first passion was 'done.'
43. 'It is good to regard our first subject'; and therefore to return to it. This first subject was his sleeplessness.
45. Til now late follows I sat upryght, as regards construction. The reading Now of late, in some printed editions, is no better.
48. This 'Romaunce' turns out to have been a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a book of which Chaucer was so fond that he calls it his 'own book'; Ho. of Fame, 712. Probably he really had a copy of his own, as he constantly quotes it. Private libraries were very small indeed.
49. Dryve away, pass away; the usual phrase. Cf. 'And dryuen forth the longe day'; P. Plowman, B. prol. 224.
56. 'As long as men should love the law of nature,' i. e. should continue to be swayed by the natural promptings of passion; in other words, for ever. Certainly, Ovid's book has lasted well. In l. 57, such thinges means 'such love-stories.'
62. 'Alcyone, or Halcyone: A daughter of Æolus and Enarete or Ægiale. She was married to Ceyx, and lived so happy with him, that they were presumptuous enough to call each other Zeus and Hera, for which Zeus metamorphosed them into birds, alkuōn (a king-fisher) and kēūks (a greedy sea-bird, Liddell and Scott; a kind of sea-gull; Apollod. i. 7. § 3, &c.; Hygin. Fab. 65). Hyginus relates that Ceyx perished in a shipwreck, that Alcyone for grief threw herself into the sea, and that the gods, out of compassion, changed the two into birds. It was fabled that, during the seven days before, and as many after the shortest day of the year, while the bird alkuōn was breeding, there always prevailed calms at sea. An embellished form of the story is given by Ovid, Met. xi. 410, &c.; compare Virgil, Georg. i. 399.'—Smith's Dictionary. Hence the expression 'halcyon days'; see Holland's Pliny, b. x. c. 32, quoted in my Etym. Dict. s. v. Halcyon.