certainly written towards the end of the year
1369, Chaucer makes use of certain expressions, both very pathetic and
very definite. The most obvious interpretation of the lines in
question seems to be that they contain the confession of a hopeless
passion, which has lasted for eight years--a confession which certainly
seems to come more appropriately and more naturally from an unmarried
than from a married man. "For eight years," he says, or seems to say,
"I have loved, and loved in vain--and yet my cure is never the nearer.
There is but one physician that can heal me--but all that is ended and
done with. Let us pass on into fresh fields; what cannot be obtained
must needs be left." It seems impossible to interpret this passage (too
long to cite in extenso) as a complaint of married life. Many other
poets have indeed complained of their married lives, and Chaucer (if
the view to be advanced below be correct) as emphatically as any. But
though such occasional exclamations of impatience or regret--more
especially when in a comic vein--may receive pardon, or even provoke
amusement, yet a serious and sustained poetic version of Sterne's "sum
multum fatigatus de uxore mea" would be unbearable in any writer of
self-respect, and wholly out of character in Chaucer. Even Byron only
indited elegies about his married life after his wife HAD LEFT HIM.

Now, among Chaucer's minor poems is preserved one called the "Complaint
of the Death of Pity," which purports to set forth "how pity is dead
and buried in a gentle heart," and, after testifying to a hopeless
passion, ends with the following declaration, addressed to Pity, as in
a "bill" or letter:--

This is to say: I will be yours for ever,
Though ye me slay by Cruelty, your foe;
Yet shall my spirit nevermore dissever
From your service, for any pain or woe,
Pity, whom I have sought so long ago!
Thus for your death I may well weep and plain,
With heart all sore, and full of busy pain.

If this poem be autobiographical, it would indisputably correspond well
enough to a period in Chaucer's life, and to a mood of mind preceding
those to which the introduction to the "Book of the Duchess" belongs.
If it be not autobiographical--and in truth there is nothing to prove
it such, so that an attempt has been actually made to suggest its
having been intended to apply to the experiences of another man--then
the "Complaint of Pity" has no special value for students of Chau