CHAUCER, if must be said, is not the most readable of English poets. I suppose he rhymed quite well to those who spoke the language in a medieval way, but to modern ears his verses come across as possessing more than just a hint of Afrikaans. Moreover, Chaucer lived in an era when the influence of stars and planets on our earthly lives was considered to be paramount, and his work abounds in astrological allusion that seems strange to us today.
In Troilus and Criseyde, for example, the distraught Criseyde is torn hopelessly between her love for Diomede and her former paramour, young Troilo. She invokes the help of a veritable litany of planets:
And if I hadde, O Venus full of mirth,
Aspects bad of Mars or of Saturne,
Or thou combust or let were, in my birth,
Thy fader prey all thilke harm disturn.
By this I think she asks, that if the said planets did not favour her nativity, being "quenched or hindered", as "combust or let" apparently means, then let the evil consequences be removed.
It was believed at that time that the planet "ascendant" at the time of birth of any individual impressed upon the child its own peculiar properties. Thus an open, gregarious laughter loving nature was perceived as jovial, a changeable active temperament mercurial, an energetic warlike spirit martial, and a dull and rather solemn deportment was saturnine. Moreover, disasters like the Black Death that decimated Europe in the 1340s, the subsequent lengthy wars between France and England, the always imminent arrival of the Antichrist, and even the upheavals in the Church that became the Reformation, were all blamed on "great conjunctions" or unusual alignments of the planets. Indeed even the very word "disaster was a "blow from an evil star".
But such ideas were not confined to Chaucer's time or even shortly afterwards. As recently as 1919, one Alberto Porta of Los Angeles noticed in December that year all the major bodies of the solar system were lined up in a "great conjunction", he widely predicted that this "League of Planets" would cause "hurricanes, lightning, colossal storms and great eruptions, to say nothing of unprecedented floods and fearful cold". As one might expect, nothing of the kind occurred, but the Oklahoma miners nonetheless refused to go down their mines in mid December, just in case they might be trapped by the eruptions.