The Flower and the Leaf

By Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer is widely considered to be the greatest poet of the Middle Ages and is often called The Father of English Literature.  Chaucer’s most famous work is the Canterbury Tales which helped popularize the dialect of the English language. This edition of The Flower and the Leaf includes a table of contents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781531283414

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) is considered to be the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages. He maintained a career in civil service for most of his life, working as a courtier, diplomat, and was even a member of Parliament, however, he is famed for his literary work. Best known for his book The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer normalized the use of Middle English in a time when the respected literary languages were French and Latin, causing a revolutionary impact on literature. Chaucer is regarded as the father of English Literature for his invaluable contributions and innovations to the art.

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THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF

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Geoffrey Chaucer

KYPROS PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Geoffrey Chaucer

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Flower and the Leaf

Notes to the Flower and the Leaf

THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF

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[THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF is pre-eminently one of those poems by which Chaucer may be triumphantly defended against the charge of licentious coarseness, that, founded upon his faithful representation of the manners, customs, and daily life and speech of his own time, in The Canterbury Tales, are sweepingly advanced against his works at large. In an allegory — rendered perhaps somewhat cumbrous by the detail of chivalric ceremonial, and the heraldic minuteness, which entered so liberally into poetry, as into the daily life of the classes for whom poetry was then written — Chaucer beautifully enforces the lasting advantages of purity, valour, and faithful love, and the fleeting and disappointing character of mere idle pleasure, of sloth and listless retirement from the battle of life. In the season sweet of spring, which the great singer of Middle Age England loved so well, a gentle woman is supposed to seek sleep in vain, to rise about the springing of the gladsome day, and, by an unfrequented path in a pleasant grove, to arrive at an arbour. Beside the arbour stands a medlar-tree, in which a Goldfinch sings passing sweetly; and the Nightingale answers from a green