The cloth was laid, the board was set—
contrasted with less strongly marked pauses, and especially a device whereby a full stop comes at the first line of two couplets separated by another, so that a sort of In Memoriam quatrain effect, with first and last lines blank, is obtained, as thus:
Hew down this tree and let it fall,
The leavès let defoul in haste,
And do the fruit destroy and waste,
And let offshredden every branch.
To this the present writer would add distinct trisyllabic feet where others see slur, as in—
The weath|er was mer|ry and fair | enough.
The result, especially with syncopation of these trisyllables, is what some call "pre-eminent smoothness" of metre, others dominant monotony. The metre had proved itself of old well suited for actual narrative, and, as Gower can tell a story, when he has a good one to tell, the effect, as in the passages about Nebuchadnezzar, Medea, Ceyx and Alcyone, Rosiphelè, the "Trump of Death," and other persons and things, is quite excellent. But in the didactic and conversational parts it is often terribly tedious and lamentably limp.
Chaucer.
Thus Langland, from yet another point of view, represents the rejection of the new English prosody altogether or as far as possible, and Gower, the timid imitation of French. Chaucer, on the other hand, despite his undoubted attention to French and Italian models, is in the direct line which we have been tracing, and represents, if not completely, yet to a very large extent, at once the development and the perfecting of the processes which we have described. It has indeed been urged by some that Chaucer probably knew nothing, or very little, of English poetry before his own day. But while, on the one hand, this is quite unproven, and not a little improbable, those who urge it do not seem to see that, even if it were so, it is comparatively irrelevant. It is not in the least necessary to suppose that Chaucer must have borrowed the Vernon MS. or another like it, carried it home to the rooms above Aldgate, "stirred the fire and taken a drink" as Henryson did later with his own Troilus, and then, after discussing to himself principles of versification, have decided that this was to be followed, that to be avoided, that again to be perfected and carried further. The main and undoubted facts remain that Chaucer was an Englishman of 1340(?)-1400; that he was the greatest Englishman of letters of his time; that he spoke and wrote the English language, and that thus, by what he would himself have called "the law of kind," he entered into the inheritance of all that had been done in this English matter by Englishmen for generations beforehand. As a matter of fact, there is plenty of evidence destructive of the contention referred to. He had read the Romances, or he could not have written Sir Thopas; he knew the alliterative poems, or he could not have made the famous reference to rum ram ruf in the Prologue to the Parson's Tale, which Gascoigne caught up. It is odd if he had not heard (even if he had not read) the plays that folk like his own Absolon played "upon a scaffold high." But, as has been said, it does not matter.
His perfecting of M.E. verse.