A Worthy Woman From Beside Bath

This is a description of the Wife of Bath, one of the pilgrims to Canterbury Cathedral, as described by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Taking the title into consideration, I expect the poem to be about a woman from the city of Bath.

The layout of the poem is organized in lines of ten beats, which gives to the poem a regular rhythm.

From the first lines, I deduce that this woman is "worthy" because she is good at making cloth and it is a pity that she is deaf. When I go on reading the poem, I understand that Chaucer uses irony when he describes her. As the description goes on it is evident that this woman is not really "worthy" because the poet, from here on, underlines only negative aspects of her character. In fact, he talks about the way she behaves in church and the clothes she wears are rather strange and not appropriate for the occasion. Then the poet adds that she has been married five times in church and that before she has had various lovers. Then he gives the impression that she is also a hypocrite when he says she has visited a lot of Sanctuaries in pilgrimage. Finally, he gives a caricatural physical description of her.

At a connotative level, the word "woman" in the first line is written in italics which gives an importance to the word itself. There is a lot of alliteration all through the poem which helps remember better the words, like "worthy woman" and "she showed so" and to give them importance, too. Almost the sentences end with a run-on line which speeds up the rhythm and makes the poem more pleasurable to read. Finally, I notice that the poem is organized in couplets because the rhyme is AA, BB, CC, DD, ... and this helps also to give musicality to the poem.