Poem of the Day: ‘Canterbury Tales’

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. 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. With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Canterbury Tales’

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