Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne…’ This, the opening line of Geoffrey Chaucer's poem the Parliament of Fowls , refers to the difficulty of learning to love, with all that that entails – the difficulty of learning the conventions and behaviours of love, but also of the pursuit and winning of the beloved, as well as of the complex negotiation between individual, chance and destiny in loving, and between secular and sacred love. All these aspects of love recur as subjects right across Chaucer's writings, treated in a startling range of perspectives and voices – human, animal and divine, tragic and comic, male and female. Chaucer's sense of the complexity of love is clear in the Parliament of Fowls , in which we are offered the contrasting perspectives of Nature and Venus, as well as of courtly and uncourtly birds, and in which the choice between suitors is deferred at the end of the poem, while the narrator is himself an unsuccessful lover. Yet the ‘craft’ he finds it painful to learn is not just love, but writing itself, and this too is a recurrent theme across Chaucer's oeuvre, often interwoven with that great subject of love. Chaucer is peculiarly aware of the craft of writing – the delicate relation of sophisticated art and artifice to inspiration and imagination, the varied possibilities of form and genre, the creative potential of narrative voice, and the different ... log in or subscribe to read full text