ABSTRACT
It was observed earlier that, as Chaucer matured as a poet, he seems to have become progressively more responsive to the nominalist position that the mind could know only particulars. As a result, he takes more and more care as time goes on to provide a concrete situation for the lyric utterance. This process of individualizing the speaker of the lyric, and also of exploring the ironic contrasts between courtly love and divine love that could be seen in the movement from poems like Truth to poems like the Envoy to Scogan, can also be observed in Chaucer’s love poems. Those generally considered earlier lyrics (A Complaint to His Lady, Womanly Noblesse, and the Complaynt D’Amours) are conventional courtly love lyrics. Any irony in these poems is present only dimly, if at all. And the speaker in each of these poems is the conventional courtly lover, praising his lady, bemoaning her cruelty, swearing to serve her faithfully and eternally. The poems show the early Chaucer writing conservatively within the courtly love tradition.
