The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowle maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open yë,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages....
Nothing could be simpler in the most literal sense than the wording of this passage. It is not the simplicity used by great genius to enforce some tragic or tender crisis, but the simplicity of a man who wants to make an entirely matter-of-fact statement, but to make it with dignity and authority. It is not likely that the people of Chaucer’s time talked exactly like that, but it is certain that almost any of them would understand what Chaucer was saying without the smallest difficulty. And we imagine that his clarity of statement was, in fact, the chief idiomatic characteristic of the common speech of the time, and that Chaucer was, in diction, definitely the poet of his age in realising this. To read this opening of The Canterbury Tales over three or four times is to be struck more and more by the remarkable purity of the diction, and it may be said of Chaucer’s work as a whole that the chief triumph of his dealing with language was that he took the simplicity which was common around him and transfigured it into that finer essence of simplicity which is purity. When two hundred years after Chaucer’s death the great Elizabethans were in full song, much in the meantime had happened to common English. It had become instructed, more flexible in its intellectual play, richer in association, and rather more conscious of its own capacities. At the same time it was now the instrument of a people fired with ardent enthusiasm, rich in enterprise, and glowing with the vitality of a young and prospering national spirit. It was the speech of witty, passionate, and powerful youth, and triumphant youth, delighting in problems both of body and mind, immensely fertile in its resources. But it had not yet become sophisticated, and that is the great bond between it and the speech of Chaucer’s time, and the great difference between it and the speech of later ages. And, again, these characteristics which we suppose with good reason to have been those of everyday speech are to be found completely explored and enriched in the age’s poetry. And one of Shakespeare’s sonnets may stand in witness of what was within the common practice of the poets of the age.
But wherefore do not you a mightier waie
Make warre vppon this bloudie tirant time?
And fortifie your selfe in your decay