It's been a damn long time since I've read Chaucer. Too long. I remember as an undergrad how I preferred Chaucer to Shakespeare as the English Lit Superstar. Yet another reading project, ah me. Where's the time?
Chaucer's Pilgrims
On this day (or possibly the next) in 1394, Geoffrey Chaucer's twenty-nine pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to prepare for their departure to Canterbury. Chaucer's poem condenses the four to five day trip into one, and scholars have used various textual references and astrological calculations to establish that day as the day before Easter, thus allowing the pilgrims to arrive at Canterbury Easter morning, after a fifty-five-mile hike through a pleasant English springtime:
When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire with flower;
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clipped from www.todayinliterature.com
2 comments:
That brings back the memories. As a senior in high school, our English lit teacher taught us the middle/old English style of pronunciation for that. THEN, one by one, we sat at his desk and read it to him. I treated it as a question of pronunciation, and read it well, but he gave me only a B or B-plus. Did I make a mistake with a word? Nope. To borrow from the Dustin Hoffman line in Wag The Dog, he gave me only a B because I didn't sell it. Still, more than three decades later, I could still give it a good reading, even if I can't spell it.
1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour
4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
5: Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
6: Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
7: Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
8: Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
9: And smale foweles maken melodye
Sounds like you got a good education! The Middle English is lyrical, beautiful, when recited by someone who knows what they're doing.
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