Geoffrey Chaucer
About the text: The Canterbury Tales is the best known of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works. As the prologue indicates, it tells the tale of several pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket, the famed Archbishop of Canterbury who stood firm against Henry II on the rights of the Church over and against the State, thereby provoking his own martyrdom at the hands of the king’s men. As the pilgrims make their way to the martyr’s shrine, they tell tales to entertain each other. The opening lines of the work introduces the theme of pilgrimage not only to Canterbury, but in the change of seasons from the cold death of winter to the new life of spring.
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Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu 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 fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open yë,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
(And palmers for to seken straunge strondes)
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
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*Taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer’s Works, Volume 4 — The Canterbury Tales, edited by Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1900). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22120/pg22120-images.html#prologue.
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