Chaucer and His Times

by Grace E. Hadow

True to the city-bred instinct, Chaucer sees winter rather as the king of intimate delights and fire-side pleasures, than as having an especial beauty of his own. The Frankeleyns Tale contains a picture of December which brings the comfort of ingle-nook and steaming cup vividly before us:—

The bittre frostes, with the sleet and reyn,
Destroyed hath the grene in every yerd.
Janus sit by the fyr, with double berd,
And drinketh of his bugle-horn the wyn.
Before him stant braun of the tusked swyn,
And “Nowel” cryeth every lusty man.

We almost feel the pleasant glow of the fire, and hear the great logs hiss and crackle.

It is impossible to read Chaucer’s descriptions of nature without being struck by his love of birds and animals, and especially of the smaller and more helpless kinds. Birds occupy a large place in his affections. He is perpetually pausing to call attention to them and spring is to him pre-eminently the time when “smale fowles maken melodye.” Here again he shows little minute observation or discrimination, it is birds in general, rather than any bird in particular, that he loves. To praise the song of a nightingale can hardly be reckoned any proof of special bird-lore, and except in the Parlement of Foules, Chaucer scarcely mentions any other bird by name. The crow, who is the real hero of the Maunciples Tale, and who distinguishes himself by singing, “cukkow! cukkow! cukkow!” can no more be regarded as an ordinary, unsophisticated bird than can the eagle who acts as Jove’s messenger in the Hous of Fame, or the princess disguised as a falcon who seeks Canace’s aid. The Parlement of Foules, it is true, shows that Chaucer knew the names of a considerable number of birds, but the epithets that he applies to each show no more real knowledge of their habits than the epithets which he (or rather, Boccaccio) applies to the various trees, in an earlier stanza, show any love of forestry. The oak is useful for building purposes, and the elm makes good coffins. In like manner, the owl forebodes death, and the swallow eats flies, or rather, if we are to believe Chaucer, bees. Regarded as individuals, the birds are delightfully convincing: regarded as birds they are dismissed rather carelessly, though, since it is Chaucer who dismisses them, an occasional happy phrase redeems the passage from dullness and monotony.

But it is not only in a love of birds, which, after all, is common to most poets, that Chaucer shows this side of his nature. Reference has already been made to the whelp and the squirrels which he introduces into the Book of the Duchesse. The little coneys who hasten to their play in the garden of the Parlement of Foules are due in the first place to Boccaccio, but the Italian merely tells us that they “go hither and thither.” His picture is dainty and pretty, but it lacks the half-amused tenderness of Chaucer’s. Chaucer, it is evident, loves them all, bird and beast, sportive coney and timid roe, not forgetting the

Squerels, and bestes smale of gentil kinde.

The following stanza affords illustration of another point in Chaucer’s descriptions. Master of melody as he is, he has not learned the subtle art of suiting sound to sense, and producing a definite sensuous impression by sheer music. It is impossible to read of these

—instruments of strenges in acord

which make so ravishing a sweetness, without finding one’s thoughts involuntarily carried on to Spenser’s enchanted garden in which

Th’ Angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th’ instruments divine respondence meet....