Poetry: Anelida and Arcite

Overview
"Anelida and Arcite" is a short, early narrative poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, dating from around 1370. It recounts the relationship and quarrel between the Trojan woman Anelida and her lover Arcite, and is striking for the sustained lyrical voice it gives to a female speaker. The poem survives as an unfinished fragment, but what remains reveals Chaucer experimenting with complaint poetry, dramatic monologue, and a hybrid of lyric and romance modes.
The action centers on Anelida's passionate attachment and the swift turn to betrayal. Rather than offering a fully worked-out narrative arc, the poem devotes much of its space to Anelida's anguished speech, which shapes the work's emotional intensity and demonstrates Chaucer's early interest in psychological portraiture.

Plot and Structure
The poem opens with a brief frame that introduces Anelida's situation and sets the scene of love gone wrong. Arcite appears as the object of her devotion, and his desertion prompts Anelida to deliver a long formal complaint. The complaint is articulated as a direct address to Arcite and reads like an extended lyric lament: it catalogs injuries, contrasts past promises with present perfidy, and moves between sorrow, anger, and bitter reproach.
Structureally, the poem alternates between narrative summary and concentrated lyric passages. The narrative portions sketch circumstances and transitions, while the complaint occupies the heart of the poem, pushing language toward tropes of classical lament and courtly love inversion. The fragmentary ending leaves the narrative unresolved; the complaint dominates and ultimately eclipses any conventional dénouement.

Language and Style
Chaucer employs vivid imagery, rhetorical questions, and tightly wrought similes to give Anelida's voice a strongly lyrical quality. The complaint borrows conventions from the medieval "complaint" tradition, cataloguing wrongs, invoking witnesses, and addressing the beloved directly, but also experiments with syntax and voice in ways that feel anticipatory of Chaucer's later dramatic work.
The poem mixes elevated classical allusion with earthy emotion, and shifts in tone underline the poet's control of register. Meter and stanzaing vary to match the mood, producing stanzas that read like short lyrical episodes embedded in a romance framework. The language foregrounds feeling and rhetoric over linear plot, making the piece as much a study of lamentation as a tale of betrayal.

Themes and Legacy
Central themes include the instability of love, the dynamics of power and fidelity, and the gendered performance of complaint. Anelida's vocal dominance reverses the typical courtly model by placing a woman's articulate outrage at the poem's center. The work interrogates the ethics of love and the damage inflicted when vows are broken, while also giving voice to resilient, if wounded, subjectivity.
Although fragmentary, the poem is important for Chaucer's development. It shows early experiments with viewpoint and the blending of lyric intensity with narrative form, techniques that reappear in later, longer works. The name Arcite will surface again in Chaucer's corpus, but here the interplay of romance material and personal lament marks a distinctive moment in his poetic exploration of voice and emotion.