Chaucer's Love of Nature 
And I, that couth not yet, in no manere, 
Here the Nightingale of al the yeare, 
Ful busily herkned with herte and ere, 
If I her voice perceive coud any-where.! 
This simple delight in the voices of the 
birds, so prominent in the poems of the 
author of the Canterbury Tales, was main- 
tained among his successors in English 
poetry. By Elizabethan times, however, 
it had become enlarged and enriched by 
the growth of a more observant and con- 
templative habit. The spontaneous and 
irresistible joy of the human soul in the 
varied beauty of Nature, and not least in 
the bird-music of the fields and woods, is as 
marked in Shakespeare’s works as it was in 
those of Chaucer ; but it is now combined 
with more thought and reflection. The ap- 
preciation of life in all its divers forms has 
grown closer, more sympathetic and more 
intimately linked with human experience. 
1 The Flower and the Leaf, 34. Even if this poem be held 
not to have come from the pen of Chaucer, it shows that 
he was not alone at an early time in his enthusiasm for 
birds and their song. 
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