English Literature

Humour is an essential ingredient of Chaucer's poetry and the back-bone of "The Prologue and The Canterbury Tales". All the characters in The Prologue have been humorously described. Humour, infact, makes Chaucer's characterization distinct. A humorist is one who is quick to perceive the funny side of the things and who has the capacity to laugh and makes other laugh at what is absurd or ridiculous or incongruous. Chaucer is called the first humorist of English literature. No English literary work before him reveals humour in the modern sense. And Chaucer is a greater humorist than Boccaccio. Chaucer's humour is consistent all pervasive and intense as we find in Shakespeare's plays. He paints all the characters in "The Prologue" in a humorous manner. The Knight is as gentle as a maid; the Squire is too sentimental in his love to sleep at night; the Friar has relations with the bar-maids instead of the poor; the Parson is too innocent and Clerk i...

In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Chaucer frequently uses the device of contrast as a major means of characterization. One of the most striking of these contrasts is that between the prominent women among the pilgrims � the prioress and wife of Bath . However, in spite of the fact that these two ladies belong to two different social spheres, they surprisingly share some common characteristics. The personality of the Prioress cannot be easily summed up. As Phyllis Hodgson says in his edition of the Prologue , �By silent omission, banter and the tactful veiling of ambivalence, Chaucer himself seems to remain detached and finely poised between affection and exposure�. The Prioress belongs to the withdrawn cloistered life of prayer and administration, vowed to poverty and chastity and indifferent to the vanities of the world. Strictly speaking, she should not have been on this pilgrimage at all, for there was an ecclesiastical edict forbidding nun from going on pilgrimage. In violat...

In introducing the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales in the General Prologue , Chaucer draws upon the traditional themes of �estates satire�. The �estates satires�, common through out the medieval Europe, aimed at giving an analysis of society in terms of hierarchy, social profession and morality. The Prologue differs from the standard patterns of �estates satire� in a number of significant ways, but the model remains none-the-less crucial. The most fundamental difference occurs in Chaucer�s presentation of a na�ve and gullible narrator, Chaucer the pilgrim. This projection of a fictional narrator poses some problems of perspective regarding the presence of absolute moral judgement in the poem. But at the same time, it allows Chaucer to remain a member and an observer as well in the pilgrimage so that he can exploit the gaps for irony and humour without pronouncing absolute moral judgements. However, Chaucer is a secular writer whose attitude to life is based on the principle of a br...

In the poem The Retreate Henry Vaughan deals with the loss of the heavenly glory experienced during the childhood and expresses a fanciful desire to get back that original stage. The theme, on the surface level, appears very simple; but going into the deeper the reader will find that the poem is founded on the diverse European idealistic, psychological, religious/mystical and philosophical doctrines in the western culture. On the socio-cultural level, the poem can be interpreted as a reflection of the urge for liberating the human psyche from the torments and tyrannies of civilization, an urge which, it must be said, has been expressed by Vaughan in the purest, distilled and highly cultivated form of thought. On the psychological level, the desire to go back to a happy childhood can be interpreted, Freud said, as an escape from the hard realities of life in the defence mechanism of regression, as a daydrea...