spirited enough to rest content. At the opening of his "Book of the
Duchess," a poem certainly written towards the end of the year 1369,
Chaucer makes use of certain expressions, both very pathetic and very
definite. The most obvious interpretation of the lines in question seems
to be that they contain the confession of a hopeless passion, which has
lasted for eight years--a confession which certainly seems to come more
appropriately and more naturally from an unmarried than from a married
man. "For eight years," he says, or seems to say, "I have loved, and
loved in vain--and yet my cure is never the nearer. There is but one
physician that can heal me--but all that is ended and done with. Let us
pass on into fresh fields; what cannot be obtained must needs be left."
It seems impossible to interpret this passage (too long to cite in
extenso) as a complaint of married life. Many other poets have indeed
complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if the view to be advanced
below be correct) as emphatically as any. But though such occasional
exclamations of impatience or regret--more especially when in a comic
vein--may receive pardon, or even provoke amusement, yet a serious and
sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum multum fatigatus de uxore mea"
would be unbearable in any writer of self-respect, and wholly out of
character in Chaucer. Even Byron only indited elegies about his married
life after his wife HAD LEFT HIM.

Now, among Chaucer's minor poems is preserved one called the "Complaint of
the Death of Pity," which purports to set forth "how pity is dead and
buried in a gentle heart," and, after testifying to a hopeless passion,
ends with the following declaration, addressed to Pity, as in a "bill" or
letter:--

This is to say: I will be yours for ever,
Though ye me slay by Cruelty, your foe;