Preview: Section 9
Reading boundary
Start: How great a sorrow suff’reth now Arcite!
Stop after: For I will tell you forth as I began.
Arcite has received the freedom Palamon lacks, yet exile means losing the sight of Emily. The cousins now suffer on opposite sides of the prison wall, and each imagines that the other possesses the better chance.
Their laments widen into arguments about Fortune, divine providence, human ignorance, and innocence under punishment. Chaucer lets each man reason passionately but from incomplete knowledge, then asks readers to compare bodily confinement with freedom that cannot reach what it desires.