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A summary of Prologue to The Wife of Bath’s Tale: Part 1 in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of The Canterbury Tales and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
- Test Your Knowledge Take The Wife of Bath's Prologue Quick Quiz
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- Test Your Knowledge Take The Wife of Bath's Prologue Quick Quiz
The Wife of Bath uses the prologue to explain the basis of her theories about experience versus authority and to introduce the point that she illustrates in her tale: The thing women most desire is complete control ("sovereignty") over their husbands.
The Wife of Bath’s tale of the loathly lady who turns into a beautiful maid is a very common plot. However, the Wife of Bath’s twist is that at the end of the day, women must have sovereignty over their husbands, and that a woman's faithfulness in fact depends on being given freedom. Active Themes.
A summary of The Wife of Bath’s Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of The Canterbury Tales and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
- Summary
- Detailed Analysis
- Structure and Form
- Literary Devices
- Similar Poetry
‘the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls’ by E. E. Cummings speaks about the lives of women who lived around the poet and whom he could not help but critique. In the poem’s first lines, the speakerbegins by describing the Cambridge women. These women are not beautiful, live comfortable lives, and are happy in their ignorance. They do not h...
Lines 1-4
In the first lines of the poem, the speaker begins by using the line that later came to be used as the title. As noted above, when this poem was first published, it was untitled. The speaker notes that ladies living in Cambridge are “unbeautiful” and they have “comfortable minds.” This suggests that these women are ignorant and have some fundamental disinterest in life around them. This is backed up by the speaker’s description of their daughters in the fourth line of the poem. In the third l...
Lines 5-8
The second stanza begins with the speaker stating that the same uninteresting women believe in “Christ and Longfellow.” Both of these men, who are suggestive of the women’s understanding of the world, are “dead.” This suggests that they are uninterested in and unattached to modernity. Their modern world is moving around them in a way that does not inspire them as past ideas do. The speaker suggests that it’s important for these women to be out and about. They are “invariably interested in so...
Lines 9-14
The next three lines suggest something that readers probably already predicted. These women are always concerned with scandals. Their ears are always turned to which scandal is next. The social masks they wear ensure that they fit in and are always prepared for gossip. The poem concludes with a wonderful example of imagery. The Cambridge ladies do not care if, above Cambridge, the “moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.” These women, whose understanding of the world is so limited, parti...
‘the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls’ by E. E. Cummings is a fourteen-line poem. The number of lines suggests that Cummings was interested in writing a sonnet. But, as readers of his poetry might expect, the piece does not follow traditional poetic convention. While there are some examples of end rhymes throughout the poem, the poet do...
Throughout this poem, the poet makes use of several literary devices. These include but are not limited to: 1. Imagery: can be seen when the poet uses particularly interesting descriptions that appeal to the readers senses. These lines should allow the reader to easily visualize the subject matterthe poet is describing. For example: “sky lavender a...
Readers who enjoyed this piece should also consider reading some other E. E. Cummings poems. For example: 1. ‘All in green went my love riding’ – speaks on a dangerous relationship through an elaborate hunting metaphor. 2. ‘[I carry your heart with me(i carry it in]’– is a love poem in which the speaker is telling his beloved that wherever he goes,...
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
In this poem, a mysterious woman lives alone on the island of Shalott. Just down the river from her is King Arthur's court at Camelot, but the Lady of Shalott is not allowed even to look in that direction, much less travel there: a mysterious curse forbids it.
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Where did the name of the lady come from?
The Lady of Shalott. The title character of the poem, the Lady of Shalott is a dynamic character in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem. Over the course of the poem, she grows as a person. When the poem opens, the Lady is living a routine life isolated in a tower on the island of Shalott.
