Despite his earlier mockery of lovers, Troylus falls deeply in love with the young Trojan widow Criseyde, and wins her affection with the help of Pandarus, her uncle and his own friend. But after a time of supreme mutual happiness events in the Trojan War bring about their separation, Criseyde's infidelity, and Troylus's despair and death.
Chaucer's longest complete poem displays his tragic sense of the working of Fortune in human affairs, and complex understanding of love and its language, as well as his ability to express a range of human experience much wider than the nature of his story might suggest.
