Best Chaucer Poems

Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart...

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Robin Hood, man in tights
Julius Caesar, might makes right
Alexander, called "the Great"
Sitting Bull, righteous hate
Robert the Bruce, Attila the Hun
Charlemagne, Napoleon

Hear the call of the...

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Homer, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Goethe, and Crane;
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Whitman, and Twain;
Whose imagination and toil helped to unfold
Stories, philosophies, and lessons to be told.

The...

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Icy shards reflect what is seen  
but not what is meant to be  
I will wait not on tomorrow  
as the temples...

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Harvard, Princeton or Yale?
   I'll take some courses by mail
Engineering or Mathematics?
   I'm majoring in Acrobatics

Piano, Violin, Flute or Clarinet?
 ...

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He didn’t care for Wilde,
And Chaucer was ‘alright,’
But quoted from The Bard
At morning, noon and night.

He loved the characters,
The funny and bizarre -
And fat old...

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I wrote this 50 years ago, yup, been dipping the brain in ink for a few years now.

What do you do on a rainy day...

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Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar (c. 1460-1530)
loose translation/modernization/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

after William Dunbar

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest...

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My father died prematurely while away on 
a business trip from a rogue blood clot to the heart  
I never doubted he loved me,...

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If two heads are better than one
How much better is three.
For the time has come 
When Translators cannot agree.

Nigel wrote the words in Latin script
And...

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I went to Miami to find the beach
The beach was sandy and warm
It tasted like rye whiskey
Smooth and hard to forget

I went to New York...

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it feels good to escape
with authors and poets
and dream up new places
with tales that are spun.

but sometimes what's real
and sometimes what isn't
encroach on each other
and...

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 Warning, this poem is dark. It is inspired by the  Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Gather around and hear of the strange day,
When three...

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Morning

She would chat and then nod as she washed
And laugh as she dried and then curled
But behind all the smiles that were wide, fixed and...

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Morning

Impaired by his tremors
And a troublesome cough,
He turned fur into felt
Before cooling things off.

He drooled once or twice
And grew cold in his bones,
But he shaped...

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