Poetry: Complaint to His Purse (Chaucer's Complaint to His Purse)

Overview

"Complaint to His Purse" is a short, satirical lyric in which Geoffrey Chaucer personifies his empty purse and addresses it directly, lamenting the poet's poverty and the strains of living by letters in a world driven by money. The piece reads as a wry conversation between speaker and object, where the purse functions both as a comic antagonist and as a plain sign of social dependence. The tone mixes mock indignation and rueful self-awareness, producing humor without entirely disguising genuine anxiety.
The poem compresses social commentary and personal grievance into brisk, plain-spoken lines. Its directness makes the speaker's plight immediate: want undermines dignity, and the poet's calling struggles to be sustained when the purse is bare. That concentrated lament yields a small but sharp portrait of the costs of literary life in Chaucer's milieu.

Content and Structure

The poem opens with a frank accusation: the speaker reproaches the purse for its emptiness and complains about the practical consequences of lacking funds. The purse is imagined as if wilfully withholding resources, and the speaker enumerates the troubles that follow, missed meals, social embarrassment, inability to keep appointments or maintain appearances. The voice is personal and conversational, moving quickly between complaint, irony, and self-mocking as the speaker admits both dependence and folly.
Rather than developing a long narrative, the poem remains a tight, episodic series of grievances and wry asides. Repetition and direct address give the lines momentum and rhetorical punch. The short form lets Chaucer sharpen the contrast between ideals of literary life, honor, renown, courtly leisure, and the grubby realities of surviving as a man of letters who must beg, borrow, or petition for recompense.

Themes and Tone

Economic precarity and the tension between vocation and subsistence stand at the center. The poem treats money as an indispensable, if begrudged, condition for sustaining poetic work: without the purse, social exchange and artistic practice both falter. That pragmatic insight is allied to a broader social satire. By turning on the purse, the speaker pokes at a system where cultural production depends on patronage, favors, or payment that is often late or insufficient.
Tone oscillates between playful mock-anger and candid self-pity. Chaucer's irony undercuts grandiosity; the speaker knows he is pleading and at times laughs at his own reduced state. The humor lightens the complaint while also sharpening its critique: the joke reveals dignity compromised and highlights the poet's refusal to romanticize poverty. Self-reflection enters as the speaker acknowledges both the necessary compromises of life and the stubborn pride that makes pleading painful.

Historical Context and Significance

Placed in the 1370s, the poem reflects Chaucer's early career and the social structures that governed literary production in late medieval England. Authors depended on the goodwill of patrons, on court appointments, or on small rewards, and economic instability could shape the content and tone of their writing. This little complaint anticipates larger engagements with social classes, economics, and human foibles that Chaucer would later elaborate in more extended works.
Its enduring value lies in the candid, humane voice that combines comic self-exposure with social insight. The poem offers a vivid snapshot of a medieval poet's material realities while displaying the rhetorical agility and ironic spirit that would mark Chaucer's major writings. As both personal lament and social commentary, it illuminates how financial need could sharpen literary identity and how humor could serve as both mask and mode of critique.