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“The Merchant’s Tale” is the second of two poems in what is most commonly identified as fragment 4 of The Canterbury Tales. Each story-poem in the Tales is told by a different character in a group of pilgrims traveling to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The tales range from high romance to low comedy. “The Merchant’s Tale” is primarily among the latter, though it contains elements of poetry in the genres of courtly romance and homily as well.

Thr3e opens with a conversation between seminary student Kevin Parson and Dr. John Francis, his philosophy professor and mentor, on the relationship between human nature and evil, the subject of a paper Kevin is writing. They discuss the possibility that all people have an equivalent, inherent capacity to do evil as part of their human nature. Driving home after leaving the seminary, Kevin receives a cell phone call from a stranger identifying himself as Richard Slater, who claims to know what Kevin is hiding and says it is time to expose him. Slater gives him three minutes to confess his sin to the newspapers before Slater blows up the car. He also leaves Kevin with a riddle.

On the day of his wedding, the poem’s speaker calls upon the muses. They have often inspired him with verse, he says, so he now asks them to assist him in singing the praises of his love and preparing for the wedding. It is not yet dawn when he asks the muses to wake his bride after gathering lilies, roses, and flowers of all kinds to prepare her bower and her path for the moment when she awakes. The poet then calls directly upon the nymphs who care for various facets of nature’s beauty to come to help prepare his bride and to sing to her.

In Black, the first volume of Ted Dekker’s Circle Trilogy, Thomas Hunter, a twenty-five-year-old in twenty-first century America, finds himself in another reality whenever he falls asleep or loses consciousness. He is told that this alternate world is Earth, far in the future following an event called the Great Deception in 2010, in which most of the world’s population was destroyed by the Raison strain, a deadly virus mutated from a vaccine of the same name.