One of the many things I remember Jill Mann saying to me is: ‘If close reading is so easy, then why is so little of it any good?’ Her point was that intelligent literary criticism is not as simple as it seems. In the case of Middle English literature, it requires, above all, a sympathetic understanding of the values dear to medieval writers together with an appreciation of the possibilities of literary modes and genres that are no longer current. Jill Man's own criticism always achieves that inwardness with the things that mattered to poets, including their chosen forms. This essay in her honour is deeply indebted to the style and substance of her work, particularly to her discussion of pity in Geoffrey Chaucer and of personification allegory in William Langland. Drawing on both these discussions, I would like to attempt a close reading of one of Chaucer's shorter poems, The Complaint unto Pity. I hope to show that Chaucer used personification allegory perceptively in this poem, and said something that is both interesting and true about the virtue of pity.

Fortunately, The Complaint unto Pity has not produced a daunting tradition of critical commentary, so there is no received opinion to contend with – except perhaps the opinion (summarised in The Riverside Chaucer) that ‘it is artificial and therefore must have been written when Chaucer was still learning his craft; it is derivative, although no exact source has been found’.