Chaucer: Ackroyd's Brief Lives by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd [Ackroyd, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, FICTION
ISBN: 9780307423535
Google: OUpqUNCjMxoC
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

It is the medieval equivalent of an old apothegm. Those that can, do; those that cannot, write. Since these lines were probably composed a little after the time of Cecily Champain’s “raptus,” about which everyone would have known, they contain more than a trace of irony. It is also somewhat ironic that this is the first poem in the English language which celebrates “Seynt Valentynes day,” and there is some justification for the argument that Chaucer initiated this festival in England in imitation of the Italian (and, specifically Genoese) holy day. It is one of his greatest, if least known, benefactions to the English. It is also likely that the poem was read at some kind of festive court ceremonial in honour of love’s “maistrie”; that would account for its relative brevity, and its general tone of intimate comedy relating to the rituals of love-longing and love-lament.

Despite the relative familiarity of Chaucer’s theme, however, his means of expression have undergone a sea-change. The octosyllabic metre has given way to a more spacious decasyllabic, and the insistent beat of the couplet has been replaced by the more resplendent cadence of the rime royal based upon the Italian ottava rima which the English poet has appropriated from the works of Boccaccio. It provides a more plangent and commodious note:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,

Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conqueryng.

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