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Chaucer

    An old man in a lodge within a park;
    The chamber walls depicted all around
    With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
    And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
  Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
    Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
    He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
    Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
  He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
    The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
    Made beautiful with song; and as I read
  I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
    Of lark and linnet, and from every page
    Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.

Notes

Composition Date:
1873.The lyrical form of this poem is abbaabbacdecde.

8. clerk: cleric.

10. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400), whose
Canterbury Tales occupied the last two decades of his life and was unfinished at his death.


13. linnet: finch.

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