Chaucer as a Poet

Chaucer has many great works to his credit, including the twin masterpieces – ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ and ‘The Canterbury Tales’. There is a sense of order in the poetry of Chaucer. This order is apparent not only in his reflections on nature and workings of cosmos but also in his belief of divine involvement in human affairs. For instance, the concluding address to the Holy Trinity, in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ according to Sanders, has been turned into a divine comedy from being a tragedy with the alchemy of Chaucer’s poetic genius.Another great work of Chaucer ‘The Parlement of Foulys’ is said to have been written to compliment the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. In it he has presented a vision of birds gathered to choose their proper mates. The nobler the bird the more formal are the rituals of courtship accorded to it.

Similarly, the social conditions of division of society according to ranks, is presented by Chaucer in his ‘The Canterbury Tales’. There are twenty-nine persons (and the narrator) who are on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. It is the Knight who is the first one to be described by Chaucer in ‘The Prologue’. Even in the complete work, in which all the pilgrims have to tell tales by turn – it is the Knight who is again the first one to start the process of tale-telling. Not only about the contemporary society but Chaucer’s works throw ample light on his own character too. Chaucer has portrayed himself as a modest person, by placing himself at the end of all the pilgrims in ‘The Canterbury Tales’. In it he has played the role of an incompetent story-teller, among such accomplished story tellers as his fellow pilgrims. Chaucer’s trait of diminishing himself is an effective device, which implies that he is posing as the servant to the servants of Christ.