A “COMPLEX WORD” for William Empson was often key to the meaning of a whole poem, and it acquired that centrality as its complexity was “gradually built up” by the other words, an “enriching” of its meanings that occurred as the poem unfolded. A poet would have understood this richness from the start, but a poem was also a process for drawing out a word's possible meanings through the variety of contexts in which that word was placed, as the sequence of those contexts layered those meanings atop one another. A key word of this kind for Chaucer was “free” as he used it in the Franklin's Tale. It is first introduced there in a legalistic sense, as Arveragus vows that he will never try to dominate Dorigen, and, in order to insist that his oath is valid, says he makes this vow “of hys fre wyl” (5.645). In this case the adjective modifies a term for a human faculty (the will) and means “an absence of constraint.” The word occurs for a second time in the tale as part of a definition of “love”:

“Free” also means “unconstrained” here but it now refers to a more absolute sense of freedom: the Franklin's point is not so much that “love” is an unconstrained emotion but, rather, that it is the diametric opposite of compulsion; it is not the condition of a feeling or act but a fundamental property (love is not love if it is compelled). “Free” occurs only one more time in the poem when readers are asked to judge which of its main characters was the “mooste fre” (5.1622): was it Arveragus, when he allowed Dorigen to keep her promise to Aurelius, or Aurelius, when he released Dorigen from that promise, or the philosopher, who released Aurelius from his obligation to pay the debt of a thousand pounds Aurelius had incurred when trying to ensnare Dorigen?