1. The double sorrow: First his suffering before his love was
successful; and then his grief after his lady had been separated
from him, and had proved unfaithful.
2. Tisiphone: one of the Eumenides, or Furies, who avenged on
men in the next world the crimes committed on earth. Chaucer
makes this grim invocation most fitly, since the Trojans were
under the curse of the Eumenides, for their part in the offence
of Paris in carrying off Helen, the wife of his host Menelaus,
and thus impiously sinning against the laws of hospitality.
3. See Chaucer’s description of himself in “The House Of
Fame,” and note 11 to that poem.
4. The Palladium, or image of Pallas (daughter of Triton and
foster-sister of Athena), was said to have fallen from heaven at
Troy, where Ilus was just beginning to found the city; and Ilus
erected a sanctuary, in which it was preserved with great
honour and care, since on its safety was supposed to depend the
safety of the city. In later times a Palladium was any statue of
the goddess Athena kept for the safeguard of the city that
possessed it.