Chaucer and the Poetics of Gold

In a well-known comment, poet John Lydgate celebrates the beauty that his contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer brought to the ‘Rude speche’ of the English language of the time. He was the first, says Lydgate, to distil ‘[t]he golde dewe dropes of speche and eloquence/ Into our tunge thurgh his excellence’.1 Poet William Dunbar similarly speaks of Chaucer’s ‘fresch anamalit termes celicall’ that ‘coud illumynit haue full brycht’ the poem that Dunbar was writing.2 From this and similar contemporary accolades, Chaucer is credited with developing a literary English that enshrines the rhetorical riches of his classical predecessors. Performing such poetic adornment himself with the term ‘aureat’ (from Latin aureatus, ‘decorated with gold’), Lydgate gives us a critical terminology for a distinctive style of late medieval English poetry that was highly descriptive and used (or coined) words deriving from Latin (or Romance) languages. ‘Aureate’, ‘enamelled’, ‘golden’ and ‘illumined’ became for these fifteenth-century poets key terms to describe this vernacular poetic that was seen to begin with Chaucer.3