Chaucer
Chaucer - meaning Summary
Old Poet, Morning and Memory
Longfellow's "Chaucer" presents an elderly poet in a park-side lodge who listens to a lark and writes like a clerk. The poem links the poet’s old age with creative vitality, portraying song and pastoral images—larks, linnets, ploughed fields—that pour from his pages. It celebrates how memory, nature, and poetic craft beautify later life, evoking the Canterbury Tales as proof of enduring artistic voice.
Read Complete AnalysesAn old man in a lodge within a park; The chamber walls depicted all around With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, and his old age Made beautiful with song; and as I read I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note Of lark and linnet, and from every page Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.
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