Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.

Yet though I must lose my life, fear shall never make me change colour.

Now take care, Sir Gawain, Not to shrink from danger. This is quite an ordeal That you have taken on.

Why should I not defy Destinies strong and dear; What can man do but try? (Kirtlan translation)

My God . . . that grinding is a greeting. My arrival is honored with the honing of an axe

So the year passes into many yesterdays, and winter comes again, as it needs no sage to tell us.

And [Gawain] constantly enquires of those he encounters / if they know, or not, in this neck of the woods, / of a great green man or a green chapel. / No, they say, never. Never in their lives. / They know of neither a chap nor a chapel / so strange.

Then red fur rips--Reynard out of his pelt is prised.

Beside the refined, almost Greek, simplicity of Chaucer's poetry, the ornamented verse of the contemporary north-western poet rears like A Hindu temple, exotic and densely fashioned.

The Gawain-poet can do an incredible number of things in brilliant style. His sensibility is both delicate and powerful, as is his language; he can sing like a choirboy or like an angry blacksmith; he can draw characters so vividly that they breathe, he can paint pictures so vitally that one sees them, almost feels them. He can weave a compelling and tightly organized plot out of disparate and sometimes fragile elements; he can be passionaltely moral; he can be wickedly comic.

In rede rudede vpon rak rises þe sunne, And ful clere costez þe clowdes of þe welkyn.