...
Show More
3.75
Ease Reading-Find Your Next Favorite Book
Love Visions
...
Show More
Spanning Chaucer's working life, these four poems build on the medieval convention of love visions' - poems inspired by dreams, woven into rich allegories about the rituals and emotions of courtly love. In "The Book of the Duchess", the most traditional of the four, the dreamer meets a widower who has loved and lost the perfect lady, and "The House of Fame" describes a dream journey in which the poet meets with classical divinities. Witty, lively and playful, "The Parliament of Birds" details an encounter with the birds of the world in the Garden of Nature as they seek to meet their mates, while "The Legend of Good Women" sees Chaucer being censured by the God of Love, and seeking to make amends, for writing poems that depict unfaithful women. Together, the four create a marvellously witty, lively and humane self-portrait of the poet.
272 pages, Paperback
First published August 25,1983
This edition
- Format
-
272 pages, Paperback
- Published
-
August 25, 1983 by Penguin Classics
- ISBN
-
9780140444087
- ASIN
-
0140444084
- Language
-
English
About the author
...
Show More
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage" (i.e., the first one capable of finding poetic matter in English). Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts. As scholar Bruce Holsinger has argued, charting Chaucer's life and work comes with many challenges related to the "difficult disjunction between the written record of his public and private life and the literary corpus he left behind". His recorded works and his life show many personas that are "ironic, mysterious, elusive [or] cagey" in nature, ever-changing with new discoveries.
Readers also enjoyed
Community Reviews
Rating(3.8 / 5.0, 8 votes)
5 stars
2(25%)
4 stars
2(25%)
3 stars
4(50%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
8 reviews All reviews
...
Show More
I mean, Chaucer himself tells you you should really just go read Virgil and Dante instead.
...
Show More
Though I mainly focused on the parts featuring Medea, I enjoyed this collection and found it insightful to my studies.
read for a university year one, semester two narratives of witchcraft class.
read for a university year one, semester two narratives of witchcraft class.
...
Show More
* not in Middle English
...
Show More
Bonus points for the Meda comments. Love you Geoff!
...
Show More
Good grief, that was some hard work! Phenomenal in places and boring in others Chaucer's Love Visions is poetic, romantic and damn confusing. Now I just need to find the courage to move onto The Canterbury Tales.
...
Show More
Call me ignorant, but I thought this was going to be lyrically romantic. Instead it was full of women who are raped and then have their tongues cut out or who have sex with bulls while in wooden cow outfits. What did I expect from a medieval take on Greek mythology? The frequently flippantly gruesome tone was unnerving. I annoyed my family while reading it by going around speaking in rhyming couplets. The notes at the end were interesting but I have to say I'm glad its over.
...
Show More
The Book of the Duchess is the first major work of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
Composed c. 1370 CE in honor of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster (l. 1342-1368 CE), wife of John of Gaunt (l. 1340-1399 CE), Duke of Lancaster and Chaucer's best friend. Blanche died in 1368 CE, probably from the plague, at the age of 26, and John of Gaunt mourned her for the rest of his life even though he would remarry. The Book of the Duchess is thought to have been composed on the second anniversary of her death. It may have been commissioned by John of Gaunt and was read at Blanche's memorial service on the two-year anniversary of her death. The poem was clearly appreciated by John of Gaunt as, afterwards, he rewarded Chaucer with a grant of ten pounds a year for life, at that time equal to almost a year's salary.
The poem is written in Middle English and belongs to the literary genre known as the high medieval dream vision in which a narrator opens by relating some problem he is experiencing and then falls asleep, has a dream which suggests or clearly reveals a solution to the problem, and wakes feeling at peace or resigned to his situation. Chaucer's piece deviates from this form in that the narrator never claims to have resolved his problem through the dream; the poem ends simply with him saying he woke and wrote the dream down.
The poem relies on an audience's acquaintance with the romantic vision of courtly love, a poetic genre of medieval literature developed in Southern France in the 12th century CE which frequently featured a knight hopelessly in love and devoted to a lady.
Since he cannot sleep, the narrator reads a book (Ovid's Metamorphosis, though the title is never given) containing the story of the lovers Seys (usually given as Ceyx) and Alcyone. Seys goes on a sea voyage and, when he fails to return on the given day, Alcyone begins to worry. She prays to the goddess Juno for a sign of whether Seys still lives and her prayer is answered in the form of Morpheus, god of sleep, appearing as Seys to tell her he is dead. Alcyone dies of grief three days later (lines 62-214). The narrator then marvels at the story and how Alcyone received an answer to her prayer when he has not and so he prays to Juno, almost instantly falls asleep, and begins to dream (lines 215-291).
The Parliament of Fowls
The idea that Valentine’s Day is a day for lovers is thought to originate with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, a poem written in the late 14th century. It describes a group of birds which gather together in the early spring – on ‘seynt valentynes day’ – to choose their mates for the year.
The Parliament of Fowls is a dream-vision. In its opening section, it describes how the narrator falls asleep while reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis [The Dream of Scipio], and then dreams of the parliament of birds which follows. The dream-vision was a common motif in the literature of the Middle Ages. It was used in multiple different ways by poets of the period.
Legend of Good Women
A dream-vision, it imagines a narrator, who encounters the God of Love and his queen, Alceste. The narrator (whose identity is never revealed) is reprimanded by the God of Love and Alceste for the presentation of women in his previous works. This frame-story proceeds into a sequence of stories about famous women from history and mythology. In the Legend, Chaucer uses narratives which he alludes to elsewhere in his work: the stories of Medea, Phyllis, Ariadne and Dido.
House of Fame
An unfinished dream‐poem. After the prologue on dreams and the invocation to the god of sleep, the poet falls asleep
has a dream in which he is inside a temple made of glass, filled with beautiful art and shows of wealth. After seeing an image of Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid, he deduces that it is a temple to Venus. The poet explores the temple until he finds a brass tablet recounting the Aeneid.
He goes into much further detail during the story of Aeneas’s betrayal of Dido, after which he lists other women in Greek mythology who were betrayed by their lovers, which led to their deaths. He gives examples of the stories of Demophon of Athens and Phyllis, Achilles and Breseyda, Paris and Aenone, Jason and Hypsipyle and later Medea, Hercules and Dyanira, and finally Theseus and Ariadne.
Chaucer finishes recounting the Aeneid from the brass tablet, and then decides to go outside to see if he can find anyone who can tell him where he is. He finds that outside the temple is a featureless field, and he prays to Christ to save him from hallucination and illusion. He looks up to the sky and sees a golden eagle that begins to descend towards him, marking the end of the first book.
When the second book begins, Chaucer has attempted to flee the swooping eagle but is caught and lifted up into the sky. Chaucer faints, and the eagle rouses him by calling his name. The eagle explains that he is a servant of Jove, who seeks to reward Chaucer for his unrewarded devotion to Venus and Cupid by sending him to the titular House of the goddess Fame, who hears all that happens in the world.
Composed c. 1370 CE in honor of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster (l. 1342-1368 CE), wife of John of Gaunt (l. 1340-1399 CE), Duke of Lancaster and Chaucer's best friend. Blanche died in 1368 CE, probably from the plague, at the age of 26, and John of Gaunt mourned her for the rest of his life even though he would remarry. The Book of the Duchess is thought to have been composed on the second anniversary of her death. It may have been commissioned by John of Gaunt and was read at Blanche's memorial service on the two-year anniversary of her death. The poem was clearly appreciated by John of Gaunt as, afterwards, he rewarded Chaucer with a grant of ten pounds a year for life, at that time equal to almost a year's salary.
The poem is written in Middle English and belongs to the literary genre known as the high medieval dream vision in which a narrator opens by relating some problem he is experiencing and then falls asleep, has a dream which suggests or clearly reveals a solution to the problem, and wakes feeling at peace or resigned to his situation. Chaucer's piece deviates from this form in that the narrator never claims to have resolved his problem through the dream; the poem ends simply with him saying he woke and wrote the dream down.
The poem relies on an audience's acquaintance with the romantic vision of courtly love, a poetic genre of medieval literature developed in Southern France in the 12th century CE which frequently featured a knight hopelessly in love and devoted to a lady.
Since he cannot sleep, the narrator reads a book (Ovid's Metamorphosis, though the title is never given) containing the story of the lovers Seys (usually given as Ceyx) and Alcyone. Seys goes on a sea voyage and, when he fails to return on the given day, Alcyone begins to worry. She prays to the goddess Juno for a sign of whether Seys still lives and her prayer is answered in the form of Morpheus, god of sleep, appearing as Seys to tell her he is dead. Alcyone dies of grief three days later (lines 62-214). The narrator then marvels at the story and how Alcyone received an answer to her prayer when he has not and so he prays to Juno, almost instantly falls asleep, and begins to dream (lines 215-291).
The Parliament of Fowls
The idea that Valentine’s Day is a day for lovers is thought to originate with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, a poem written in the late 14th century. It describes a group of birds which gather together in the early spring – on ‘seynt valentynes day’ – to choose their mates for the year.
The Parliament of Fowls is a dream-vision. In its opening section, it describes how the narrator falls asleep while reading Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis [The Dream of Scipio], and then dreams of the parliament of birds which follows. The dream-vision was a common motif in the literature of the Middle Ages. It was used in multiple different ways by poets of the period.
Legend of Good Women
A dream-vision, it imagines a narrator, who encounters the God of Love and his queen, Alceste. The narrator (whose identity is never revealed) is reprimanded by the God of Love and Alceste for the presentation of women in his previous works. This frame-story proceeds into a sequence of stories about famous women from history and mythology. In the Legend, Chaucer uses narratives which he alludes to elsewhere in his work: the stories of Medea, Phyllis, Ariadne and Dido.
House of Fame
An unfinished dream‐poem. After the prologue on dreams and the invocation to the god of sleep, the poet falls asleep
has a dream in which he is inside a temple made of glass, filled with beautiful art and shows of wealth. After seeing an image of Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid, he deduces that it is a temple to Venus. The poet explores the temple until he finds a brass tablet recounting the Aeneid.
He goes into much further detail during the story of Aeneas’s betrayal of Dido, after which he lists other women in Greek mythology who were betrayed by their lovers, which led to their deaths. He gives examples of the stories of Demophon of Athens and Phyllis, Achilles and Breseyda, Paris and Aenone, Jason and Hypsipyle and later Medea, Hercules and Dyanira, and finally Theseus and Ariadne.
Chaucer finishes recounting the Aeneid from the brass tablet, and then decides to go outside to see if he can find anyone who can tell him where he is. He finds that outside the temple is a featureless field, and he prays to Christ to save him from hallucination and illusion. He looks up to the sky and sees a golden eagle that begins to descend towards him, marking the end of the first book.
When the second book begins, Chaucer has attempted to flee the swooping eagle but is caught and lifted up into the sky. Chaucer faints, and the eagle rouses him by calling his name. The eagle explains that he is a servant of Jove, who seeks to reward Chaucer for his unrewarded devotion to Venus and Cupid by sending him to the titular House of the goddess Fame, who hears all that happens in the world.
Leave a Review