Poetry: The Nun's Priest's Tale

Overview
Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Nun's Priest's Tale" is a lively beast fable embedded in The Canterbury Tales that blends broad comedy with learned mock-heroics. The narrative follows the proud rooster Chanticleer and his favorite hen Pertelote, and it balances slapstick action with sophisticated irony and moral reflection. The tale treats familiar fable material while delighting in rhetorical display and pointed social observation.

Plot
Chanticleer, a magnificent cock renowned for his voice and bearing, experiences an alarming dream that foretells his death. Pertelote dismisses the nightmare, offering practical and medical remedies while ridiculing superstition. Shortly afterward, Chanticleer stretches his neck and is seized by a sly fox, Reynard, who flatters the rooster into submitting. As the fox parades his prize, Chanticleer is persuaded to boast and then to crow, whereupon he cleverly snatches a moment to escape by flying up to a tree. The fox tries to cajole him down with further flattery, but Chanticleer, and the tale itself, leaves the reader with a memorable admonition about pride and the peril of flattering tongues.

Characters and Tone
Chanticleer is drawn as simultaneously comic and heroic: vain and susceptible, yet capable of quick intelligence. Pertelote serves as a foil, pragmatic and rational, providing domestic common sense to Chanticleer's theatricality. Reynard the fox embodies the classic trickster, eloquent and disingenuous. The narrator, speaking as the Nun's Priest, oscillates between mock-grandiose rhetoric and plain homely observation, producing a tone that is both playful and didactic.

Themes and Satire
The tale interrogates interpretation, especially the value of dreams versus reason, staging a debate between superstition and empirical counsel. Pride and flattery form central motifs: Chanticleer's admiration of his own beauty makes him vulnerable, while Reynard's persuasive language exposes how eloquence can be weaponized. Chaucer satirizes human follies, scholarly pomposity, domestic bickering, and courtly pretension, by placing them in animal bodies, making moral lessons entertaining rather than preachy.

Style and Language
The poem mixes high and low registers, adopting mock-heroic diction to treat a trivial event as if it were epic. Classical and medieval allusions are sprinkled amid homely detail, and witty rhetorical flourishes enliven dialogue and narration. The result is a highly performative narrative ideally suited to oral delivery, where the pleasure of language and the cleverness of the telling matter as much as the plot itself.

Legacy and Interpretation
The tale has attracted sustained attention for its layered irony: it is at once a simple fable warning against flattery and a sophisticated exercise in narrative voice and genre play. Critics read it as a commentary on storytelling itself, on the power of rhetoric, and on the social dynamics of persuasion. Its memorable images, the vain cock, the flattering fox, the sudden rescue, have secured a lasting place in the Western literary imagination, continuing to entertain and provoke reflection about pride, language, and human nature.