Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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"The Complaint of Venus" is a short Middle English lyric poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, part of his collection of shorter works, belonging to the medieval *complainte* tradition — a genre in which a speaker laments the sufferings of love. The poem unfolds in three ballade stanzas with refrains: the first celebrates the speaker's beloved's knighthood, nobility, and virtue; the second catalogs love's painful costs — sleeplessness, weeping, jealousy, and constant uncertainty; and the third resolves that despite these torments, the speaker refuses to leave love's service and will never repent loving him. A distinctive feature is the personification of Jealousy as a destructive, ever-suspicious force that poisons love's rare pleasures. The closing envoi is particularly notable: Chaucer steps forward to address a patron, attributing any weaknesses to his advancing age and candidly acknowledging that the poem adapts the French poet Oton de Granson, whom he calls "flour of hem that make in Fraunce" — a rare direct acknowledgment of a source and a self-deprecating comment on the difficulty of rhyming in English. The poem is of interest both as a specimen of courtly love convention and as a window into Chaucer's late-career self-presentation as a translator working across linguistic traditions.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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