I can detect no irony in Chaucer's portrayal of Alceste as the apotheosis of true love, and loyal, self-sacrificing, law-abiding, married love at that, her slight imperiousness being no more than expected from a queen-like lady. The poetry devoted to the praise of the daisy was also a faithful reproduction, in English, of French marguerite poetry. This, for all its hyperbole, was a totally non-ironic genre, whether composed in praise of an important lady or of a Froissartian poetic ideal. While Chaucer could have changed the orientation of marguerite poetry if he had wished, the daisy passages in the Legend give no indication that he did so. The other motif which is used in the Legend to praise an ideal of womanhood, the balade Hyd Absolon, is also a straightforward example of graceful encomium and technical facility. Taken together, the three motifs operate at one pole of the traditional debate about the nature of woman.

Nevertheless, as the Prologue draws to a close with these motifs resolved in the figure of Alceste, and with the project of the palinodal praise of ladies about to be confirmed, the notion of the Good Woman shows sign of strain. The paradoxical aspects of the concept of the God of Love become evident, the poet begins to choose words whose import is ambivalent.