he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode decked in
silver and minivere along the Cheap or to exchange a "God save you" with
the law sergeants as he passed their new house in the Temple. His world is
the world of the poor; he dwells on the poor man's life, on his hunger and
toil, his rough revelry and his despair, with the narrow intensity of a man
who has no outlook beyond it. The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of
the life he paints reflect themselves in his verse. It is only here and
there that a love of nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quickens his
rime into poetry; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of
Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring of
the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest
contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous
allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rimed texts from Scripture which form
the staple of Langland's work, are only broken here and there by phrases of
a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of a broad
Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its deep undertone of
sadness: the world is out of joint, and the gaunt rimer who stalks silently
along the Strand has no faith in his power to put it right.

[Sidenote: Piers Ploughman]

Londoner as he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the
great city to a May-morning in the Malvern Hills. "I was weary forwandered
and went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and
leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved
(sounded) so merry." Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of the
world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a wide
field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, of
minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen that "in
setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims "with their
wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and
scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners "parting the
silver" with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but
to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the
Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it is who bids the
knight no more wrest gifts from his tenant nor misdo with the poor. "Though
he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven th