THE MONK

"The Monk" is a poem that belongs to "The Canterbury Tales",  Chaucer's masterpiece.

In those tales the reader can understand that
there are some main topics like love, everyday life situations and
humorist tales.

It starts like a fable to keep the curiosity alert.

Right from the title the reader can understand that the main character is a
monk, so the reader's expectations are to read about the clergy.

This poem is written in Old English and there are rhymes and figures of
speech.

The first line conveys the idea of a fairytale start (a monk there was).
Then it starts the description of the monk, but he was not silent,
devoted, honest and not interested in material things. This
particular monk loved enjoy his time doing funny activities and spent
money for his duties. Now the reader comes at the conclusion that
this tale is an humanistic one.

In the second line there is the use of the tenses "rode" and
"hunting" as a sport. So the intelligent reader may suppose that
the character belonged to aristocracy and this theory is confirmed by
the fourth line in which the writer said "dainty horse"
(expensive horse). He did not mind about what were the rules of an
ideal monk, but that he tended to ignore finding them unless.

All the other lines follow this kind of description and at the end of the
10^th line, the reader is sure that this monk was a corrupted one (my lord
monk was a prior of the cell).