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Chaucer, Geoffrey

‘The Knight’s Tale’, [73] 42

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20220301110225 Chris Saunders on Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, SF Issue 73

Not So Verray Parfit

Sue Gaisford on Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’

I once taught English at a girls’ school in which the head of depart­ment didn’t like poetry. It’s an odd aversion but it worked well for me. The poetry room was right at the top of a very tall building, and thither wended her way every pupil in the place, to be rewarded by peaceful sessions chewing over every kind of poem, from epic to lyric to limerick. But some of these girls also had to pass public exams. The A-level syllabus was dictated by a higher authority and this term the poetry module featured Chaucer. No problem in that. To me, he is the tops. He understood the complicated, subtle, self-deluded and some­times glorious nature of human beings better than any writer, before or since, and he displayed enough humour, generosity and lightly worn erudition to keep a whole pilgrimage entertained from here to eternity.

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