The Cuckoo and the Nightingale

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 Cuckoo and the Nightingale includes a table of contents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles River Editors
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781531283391

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400) was an English poet and civil servant. Born in London to a family of wealthy vintners, Chaucer became a page to a noblewoman as a teenager, gaining access to the court of King Edward III. He served in the English army at the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, was captured during the siege of Rheims, and returned to England after a sizeable ransom was paid by the king. Afterward, he travelled throughout Europe, married Philippa de Roet—with whom he had four children—and eventually settled in London to study law. In 1367, Chaucer joined the royal court of Edward III, serving in a variety of roles while also writing his earliest known poem, The Book of the Duchess. In 1373, following a military expedition in Picardy, he visited Genoa and Florence where he is believed to have met both Petrarch and Boccaccio, who introduced him to the Italian poetry that would heavily influence the form and content of his own work. Chaucer was appointed to the role of comptroller of customs for the port of London in 1374, a position he would hold for the next twelve years. He is believed to have written The Canterbury Tales—his most important work and an early masterpiece of English literature—in the early 1380s, was appointed clerk of the king’s works in 1389, and, in the last decade of his life, lived on an annual pension granted him by King Richard II. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and is recognized today as the father of English literature.

Book preview

THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE

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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 Cuckoo and the Nightingale

Notes to the Cuckoo and the Nightingale

THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE

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[THE NOBLE VINDICATION OF TRUE love, as an exalting, purifying, and honour-conferring power, which Chaucer has made in The Court of Love, is repeated in The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. At the same time, the close of the poem leads up to "The Assembly of