【分析解答题】

71. It was not until modern scholarship uncovered the secret of reading MiddleEnglish that we could understand thatChaucer, far from being a rude versifier, was a perfectly accomplished technician, and that his verse is rich in music and elegant to the highest degree. 72. Chaucer’s own urbane personality is a delight to encounter in his books. He is avowedly a bookworm, yet few poets observe nature with more freshness and delight. He is a master of genial satire but can sympathize with true piety and goodness with as much pleasure as he attacks the hypocritical.

73. It is not an uncommon estimate ofChaucer that he must be counted among the few greatest ofEnglish poets. In range of interest he is surpassed only by Shakespeare. He was recognized already in the Renaissance, when it came toEngland, as the Father ofEnglish Poetry. He was a man of wide learning and wrote with ease on religion, philosophy, ethics, science, rhetoriC、
No man has more completely summed up an age thanChaucer has his, yet the people of his great poems are revealed as men and women are in all times.
Master of verse, asChaucer was, he introduced intoEnglish poetry many verse forms: the heroic couplet (in which form most of TheCanterbury Tales is written), verse written in iambic pentameter, rhyming aa, bb, cc, etC、--a form that was to be very important in the eighteenth century. The rime royal, a seven-line stanza in iambic pentameters, rhyming ababbcc (Troilus andCriseyde). The terza rima, three-line stanzas, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, etC、(which he imitated fromDante, in some of his minor poems).And the eight-line iambic pentameter stanza, rhyming ababbcbc(The Monk’s Tale).