El-Sayed’s Radical Half-Sister Creates Headaches for Democrat’s Senate Campaign
By LUKE FUNK
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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, as he is so often described, the father of English literature.
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For a week of English poetry about the month of April, it’s impossible not to begin with “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”: When that April with his showers sweet. The poetic voice of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) has somehow survived down to us, even though it speaks to us from the fourteenth century. His 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.
Chaucer’s 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 Anglo-Saxon, 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.
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, that a holt is a grove, and that couthe means known. It’s useful to understand that however confusing our pronoun situation today might be, in the fourteenth century his might mean either his or its. Hir is their. But with a few basic aids to comprehension, the world which this prologue sketches, in eighteen lines of mostly iambic-pentameter couplets, glimmers into focus and becomes comprehensible to us.
It’s April. 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 the beautiful blithe springtime.
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|For a week of English poetry about the month of April, it’s impossible not to begin with “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”: When that April with his showers sweet. The poetic voice of Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) has somehow survived down to us, even though it speaks to us from the fourteenth century. His 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.
Chaucer’s 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 Anglo-Saxon, 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.
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, that a holt is a grove, and that couthe means known. It’s useful to understand that however confusing our pronoun situation today might be, in the fourteenth century his might mean either his or its. Hir is their. But with a few basic aids to comprehension, the world which this prologue sketches, in eighteen lines of mostly iambic-pentameter couplets, glimmers into focus and becomes comprehensible to us.
It’s April. 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 the beautiful blithe springtime.
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