Quote of the Day (Geoffrey Chaucer, on April)

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
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 ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.”—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

I finally got around to reading critic Joan Acocella’s reconsideration of Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, in the December 21-28, 2009 issue of The New Yorker (sorry, full text isn’t available, though you’ll find an abstract here.)

It brought me back to one of my most vivid memories at Columbia University nearly three decades ago, when Professor Robert Hanning recited the above passage vigorously in his medieval literature course, dwelling on each phrase in a way that made Chaucer’s Middle English come alive—seem understandable, really—even without the interlinear translations that we would have found indispensable without this reading.

Acocella’s fine essay mixes the best of what so many of us learned in our English classes then with some details about Chaucer’s life that either make you shake your head in wonder (he managed to serve, as an important government official, under both King Richard II and the man who deposed him, Henry IV—not an easy accomplishment) or grin (King Edward III granted him, in 1374, a gallon of wine per day--something, I'm sure, that must have made the poet and king's servant very popular with friends).

With April 15—and the terror the IRS strikes into the hearts of so many—so close, it’s nice to think of at least one tax official—the creator of The Canterbury Tales—who had a brain and a heart.

Whenever I associate something in literature with April, I think immediately of two poems: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Canterbury Tales. Eliot has his virtues, but when you think of the extraordinary amount of homely imagery conveyed even in the above passage—not to mention the ironies of “The Summoner’s Tale” and the bawdy humor of “The Miller’s Tale”—well, it really is no contest, is it?