1. Poetic Conventions in the Earlier Poems

1. Poetic Conventions in the Earlier Poems

The first part of the _Roman de la Rose_, Chaucer’s literary point of departure, represents the conventions and the mood of the fashionable fiction of courtly love. Its allegory is simple personification carried out by costume and attitude, less by speech and action, appropriate to type. It is less narrative than descriptive. Relying mainly on style, it has so little vigor of composition that in spite of its great medieval vogue it has been long dead. Chaucer’s translation shows no small command of diction and of verse. Though the French octosyllabic and the English line of four stresses differed less then than later, translation had much to teach a bilingual poet not only reading, but constantly hearing and speaking two rhythms. It made him early aware both of the difference between the two and of the directions of development for the English of his choice. He has already found variations to evade the tendency of this short couplet toward jingling monotony; and still more verse control is evident in his catching one of the chief charms of the original, its easy fluency.

His own _Book of the Duchesse_ uses the same magazine of courtly love: rehearsal of a tale of Ovid, May-morning dream-vision, “love’s servant” in “complaint,” praise of the lady, tapestry description, couplet of facile fluency. How much poetry could still be conveyed through these symbols he showed later in the pageant prologue to the _Legend of Good Women_. Kittredge[25] finds the conventional dream manipulated in the _Book of the Duchesse_ to give some sense of actual dreaming. Every attentive reader has been relieved by the realism of the half-grown, unbroken dog,

A whelp that fauned me as I stood, That hadde y-folowed, and coude no good. Hit com and creep to me as lowe, Right as hit hadde me y-knowe, Hild doun his heed and joyned his eres, And leyde al smothe doun his heres.

389-394.[26]

The touch of individualizing stands out, indeed, because most of the description is conventionally generalized and decorative; but it may be significant as forecasting Chaucer’s later use of gesture, and as a means of transition. There is an attempt at variety in the punctuation of the long praise of the lady by dialogue; and the closing dialogue is really rapid. An expert metrist in conventional modes, with originality enough for pleasing variations—we can hardly read more of Chaucer into the _Book of the Duchesse_. The Ovidian thin lucidity of narrative, the usual aggregation, the involution, above all the stalling for description, show that he was not yet giving his mind to narrative composition.

He was spurred to explore narrative by the timely stimulus of Italy. First of English artists to learn there, he was among the most responsive. The _Parlement of Foules_ shows immediate artistic development and promises more. The verse is enriched. The five-stress line, so near the beginning of its long English history, is realized not only for variety, but for flexibility to the mood of speech. Most of its typical variations, shift of cæsura, syncope, doubling of the unstress as in anapest or dactyl, close on stress or on unstress, are here. Though there is not yet that narrative fluency which makes the verse constantly further the story, there is narrative stanza. Stanza, of course, was no innovation. Such set lyric forms as _balade_ and _rondel_, which were to hold their popularity into the sixteenth century, were exploring the technic of refrain. Linking refrain, used simply in verse narrative,[27] was carried in _Pearl_ to intricate harmonies. In French and in English, stanza was an assured technic. But its narrative development owes much to Chaucer. His adaptation of the Italian stanza in the _Parlement of Foules_ opened the way toward that technical mastery which is one of the characteristic achievements of his narrative.

The _Parlement of Foules_ shows development thus in detail. The total composition, the movement of the whole, is still to seek. Here again are conventional allegory, this time mainly from Alain de Lille,[28] rehearsal from the medieval treasury, dream-vision, decorative description, without any narrative progress. But the allegory is vivified as in _Piers Plowman_. The classes are differentiated by the lively speech of their representatives. The interaction, though elementary, is more than mere _débat_. There is even approach to individual character in distinguishing the second tercel from the first. In these modifications there is promise[29] of a still more characteristic achievement, the interludes of the _Canterbury Tales_.