Poetry: The Miller's Tale

Overview
Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" is a brisk, ribald fabliau embedded in The Canterbury Tales. Delivered by a boisterous, drunken Miller who insists on giving the company a tale to match his own coarse humor, it turns on lust, deception, and bodily comedy. The poem mocks pretension and exposes human gullibility through a tightly plotted comic romp that trades on medieval stock characters and sly verbal wit.

Plot
A much-married carpenter named John lives with his beautiful young wife, Alisoun, whose youth and attractiveness draw the attention of two rivals. Nicholas, a clever but licentious student lodging in John's house, manages to seduce Alisoun through flattery and cunning. A second suitor, Absolon, a vain parish clerk who fancies himself a lover, attempts to woo Alisoun with songs and pompous courtliness but wins only ridicule.
To secure a night with Alisoun, Nicholas concocts an elaborate deception: he convinces the gullible John that a great flood, like Noah's, is imminent and that they must suspend themselves in tubs from the rafters to survive. While John sleeps below, Nicolas and Alisoun sneak into a hidden tryst. Absolon, returning for a clandestine midnight kiss, is tricked by Alisoun into kissing her naked posterior when she thrusts it out the window; he retaliates by branding Nicholas with a hot poker when Absolon returns with a desperate flame. Nicholas cries out for water, awakening John, who cuts his ropes and crashes to the floor, earning the ridicule of the neighbors. The tale ends with the tricksters and the gullible each exposed, the carpenter shamed, and laughter at human folly.

Characters
John the carpenter is portrayed as jealous, credulous, and absurdly protective, a figure of domestic authority undone by his own vanity. Alisoun, his young wife, appears spirited and sexually autonomous, complicating simple moral judgments. Nicholas embodies the deceptive, lust-driven scholar: witty, manipulative, and worldly. Absolon plays the comic foil, a pretender to courtly love whose affectation collapses into humiliation. The Miller's own coarse persona frames the tale, shaping its tone and inviting an audience complicit in the joke.

Themes and tone
The tale delights in overturning social and moral expectations: the supposed authority of the husband is punctured, learned clerical status is lampooned, and the rituals of courtly love are parodied. Chaucer uses bawdy humor and physical comedy as instruments of satire, targeting vanity, gullibility, and the gap between appearance and reality. The tone is exuberantly scurrilous, combining streetwise bravado with verbal dexterity; laughter often masks a sharper criticism of social pretensions.

Language and legacy
Composed in Middle English late in the fourteenth century, the tale showcases Chaucer's ear for speech and his ability to adapt continental comic material into English verse. Its vivid episodes and memorable set pieces, the flood ruse, the butt-kiss, the branded buttocks, have secured a lasting place in the Western comic tradition. The Miller's version of events also illuminates Chaucer's larger project in The Canterbury Tales: a pluralistic, often unsparing depiction of medieval life in which humor serves both to entertain and to expose human foibles.