['The Flower and the Leaf' is pre-eminently one of those poems by which Chaucer may be triumphantly defended against the charge of licentious coarseness, that, founded upon his faithful representation of the manners, customs, and daily life and speech of his own time, in 'The Canterbury Tales,' are sweepingly advanced against his works at large.
In an allegory — rendered perhaps somewhat cumbrous by the detail of chivalric ceremonial, and the heraldic minuteness, which entered so liberally into poetry, as into the daily life of the classes for whom poetry was then written — Chaucer beautifully enforces the lasting advantages of purity, valour, and faithful love, and the fleeting and disappointing character of mere idle pleasure, of sloth and listless retirement from the battle of life.
In the 'season sweet' of spring, which the great singer of Middle Age England loved so well, a gentle woman is supposed to seek sleep in vain, to rise 'about the springing of the gladsome day,' and, by an unfrequented path in a pleasant grove, to arrive at an arbour.
Beside the arbour stands a medlar-tree, in which a Goldfinch sings passing sweetly; and the Nightingale answers from a green laurel tree, with so merry and ravishing a note, that the lady resolves to proceed no farther, but sit down on the grass to listen.
Suddenly the sound of many voices singing surprises her; and she sees 'a world of ladies' emerge from a grove, clad in white, and wearing garlands of laurel, of agnus castus, and woodbind.
One, who wears a crown and bears a branch of agnus castus in her hand, begins a roundel, in honour of the Leaf, which all the others take up, dancing and singing in the meadow before the arbour. Soon, to the sound of thundering trumps, and