Today’s Poem: Canterbury Tales

The opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue and the joys of an English April

Canterbury Pilgrims, engraving by William Blake (Wikimedia Commons)

We begin the end of April (famous in some quarters as the cruellest month) with that other immortal first line: the opening of the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. With a dependent clause, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,” Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) sweeps us up into that April with its rains and its sunshine, its birds and tender growing things. He catapults us into a world vivid with life, even though it comes to to us from the fourteenth century, in a language that is almost, but not quite, our own. 

Chaucer’s Middle English is the bridge between Old English, the language imported into Britain by invading Germanic tribes in the fifth century, and the early-modern English of the Tudor era and Shakespeare. His English is the language of an England in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. It represents the closing of the gap between French, the language of courtier and diplomat, and the various Old English dialects that were the language of everybody else. And in an era when French and Latin were the languages officially inscribed for poetic expression, the English of the Canterbury Tales is the English of an emerging vernacular literature. Chaucer is, indeed, as he is so often described, the father of English literature.

Manuscript detail depicting Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, circa 1412 (Wikimedia Commons)

When we read Chaucer, or hear his Prologue recited, a little vocabulary comes in handy. It helps, for example, to know that soote means sweet — a usage that endured into the 16th century, to occur in the first line of yet another spring poem,  an early English sonnet by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (1517–1547). It’s useful as well to know that a holt is a grove, and that couthe means known. It’s even more useful to understand that however confusing our pronoun situation today might be, in the fourteenth century his might mean either his or its, while hir is their. With a few basic aids to comprehension, the world that this prologue sketches, in eighteen lines of mostly iambic-pentameter couplets, also known as heroic couplets, glimmers into focus and becomes comprehensible to us.

It’s April. The month is far from cruel. Even the rain is sweet. The young sun runs its course with joy, and the birds sing all night long. And now — now is the time when people develop the travel itch. The ambitious might want to set sail for the Holy Land. But others join the throngs on the muddy roads to Canterbury, seeking the shrine of their own saint, Thomas Becket (1118–1170), whose intercession has brought them through a winter of sickness into this beautiful blithe springtime.  

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The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue 

by Geoffrey Chaucer 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, 
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur 
Of which vertú engendred is the flour; 
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, 
And smale foweles maken melodye, 
That slepen al the nyght with open ye, 
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, 
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, 
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; 
And specially, from every shires ende 
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, 
The hooly blisful martir for to seke, 
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

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