But, lord Christ! When that it remembreth me Up-on my yowthe, and on my Iolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote. Unto this day it doth myn herte bote That I have had my world as in my tyme. The sound of that old woman’s voice is still. But there is another and more important reason for the surprising brightness, the still effective merriment of the _Canterbury Tales_. Chaucer was a poet; but he never flinched from the life that was being lived at the moment before his eyes. A farmyard, with its straw, its dung, its cocks and its hens is not (we have come to think) a poetic subject; poets seem either to rule out the farmyard entirely or to require that it shall be a farmyard in Thessaly and its pigs of mythological origin. But Chaucer says outright: Three large sowes hadde she, and namo, Three kyn, and eek a sheep that highte Malle; or again, A yard she hadde, enclosed al aboute With stikkes, and a drye ditch with-oute. He is unabashed and unafraid. He will always get close up to his object—an old man’s chin— With thikke bristles of his berde unsofte, Lyk to the skin of houndfish, sharp as brere; or an old man’s neck— The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh Whyl that he sang; and he will tell you what his characters wore, how they looked, what they ate and drank, as if poetry could handle the common facts of this very moment of Tuesday, the sixteenth day of April, 1387, without dirtying her hands. If he withdraws to the time of the Greeks or the Romans, it is only that his story leads him there. He has no desire to wrap himself round in antiquity, to take refuge in age, or to shirk the associations of common grocer’s English. Therefore when we say that we know the end of the journey, it is hard to quote the particular lines from which we take our knowledge. He fixed his eyes upon the road before him, not upon the world to come. He was little given to abstract contemplation. He deprecated, with peculiar archness, any competition with the scholars and divines: The answere of this I lete to divynis, But wel I woot, that in this world grey pyne is. What is this world? What asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in the colde grave Allone, withouten any companye, he asks, or ponders O cruel goddes, that governe This world with binding of your worde eterne, And wryten in the table of athamaunt Your parlement, and your eterne graunt, What is mankinde more un-to yow holde Than is the sheepe, that rouketh in the folde?