"Awake!" to me he said,
In voice and tone the very same
THAT USETH ONE WHO I COULD NAME;
And with that voice, sooth to say(n)
My mind returned to me again;
For it was goodly said to me;
So was it never wont to be.

In other words, the kindness of the voice reassured him that it was NOT
the same as that which he was wont to hear close to his pillow! Again,
the entire tone of the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" is not that
of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough, considering that
the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of celebrating GOOD women is
Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to interpret the poem as not only
an amende honorable to the female sex in general, but a token of
reconciliation to the poet's wife in particular. Even in the joyous
"Assembly of Fowls," a marriage-poem, the same discord already makes
itself heard; for it cannot be without meaning that in his dream the poet
is told by "African,"--

--thou of love hast lost thy taste, I guess,
As sick men have of sweet and bitterness;

and that he confesses for himself that, though he has read much of love,
he knows not of it by experience. While, however, we reluctantly accept
the conclusion that Chaucer was unhappy as a husband, we must at the same
time decline, because the husband was a poet, and one of the most genial
of poets, to cast all the blame upon the wife, and to write her down a
shrew. It is unfortunate, no doubt, but it is likewise inevitable, that
at so great a distance of time the rights and wrongs of a conjugal