Troilus and Criseyde
Chaucer takes a story from Boccaccio and turns it into a philosophical poem about love, time and free will. Troilus falls in love with Criseyde, she is exchanged for a prisoner of war, and the poem follows what happens to a promise when the circumstances that made it are removed.
It is written in rhyme royal, a stanza Chaucer introduced to English, and the verse is more formal than the Tales. The narrator keeps apologising for his sources, which is both a joke and a way of asking whether any story can be told honestly. Read it after the Tales, not before.
Public-domain status
First published in 1385. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, so this work has been free to republish there since 1471.
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Keep reading
- Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855
- The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812
- Gitanjali — Rabindranath Tagore, 1912
- Canterbury — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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