The Poetic Form of Voice in Chaucer's House of Fame

The House of Fame has long frustrated efforts to make sense of its apparent incompleteness. This article redirects attention from the end of the poem to the relatively overlooked middle, exploring how the vision of the primal scene offered in the second book of the poem is significantly complicated by the formal feature of recurring, inverted rhyme pairs, or "circle rhymes," which recapitulate the revolutionary theory of poetic form and voice articulated in the vision.