Welcome, 'sweet', 'cruel' April! Plus: Melville's April Fool's Day novel
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
A motley group of pilgrims travelling to Canterbury passes the time by telling stories, each competing to tell the best tale. Springtime, by energising all life to growth and adventure, has inspired them on their journey, as these famous first lines describe.
Now read on:
When April with his showers sweet
The drought of March has pierced to the root
And bathed every vein in such liquid
By which power engendered is the flower;
When Zephyrus also with his sweet breath
Inspired has in every holt and heath
The tender shoots, and the young sun
Has in the Ram his half course run,
And small fowls make melody,
That sleep all the night with open eye
(So nature pricks them in their spirits),
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seek strange shores,
To distant shrines, known in various lands;
And especially from every shire’s end
Of England to Canterbury they go,
The holy blissful martyr for to seek,
That has helped them when they were sick.
(translation by Alexandra Paddock)
What we love about this passage...
These lines capture the essence of springtime and its feelings of renewal, hope, recovery, youth, and joy. They also describe how nature shapes people's desires and actions.
About the author
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342-1400) lived a varied and cosmopolitan life. The son of a wine merchant, he spent time as a page, soldier, civil servant, courtier, and member of Parliament, writing poetry throughout these other careers. Whilst serving as diplomat in Milan, he encountered the writings of superstars of the Italian renaissance, Dante and Boccaccio, the latter of whose poem The Decameron inspired the tale-telling contest at the heart of The Canterbury Tales.
To read alongside...
The opening lines of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) echo Chaucer's, but with a brutal twist:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
The American writer Herman Melville modelled his last novel, The Confidence-Man, on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Passengers on a steamboat on the Mississippi River take turns telling stories, each one linking to the next. The novel was published on April 1, 1857 and the presence of April Fool's Day runs through it, as the stories seem to be asking: should we take this narrative seriously? Or is all a big joke being played on the reader by the mysterious central character to whom all these stories are being told? Where do we place our trust, or our 'confidence'?
The Nigerian-British poet Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales adapted The Canterbury Tales for modern times. To read her haunting work 'Emily' paired with Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale,' go to our Ten Minute Book Club:
https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/ten-minute-book-club/chaucer-knights-tale-agbabi-emily
Boccaccio’s Decameron has ten young women and men telling each other a hundred stories for entertainment while shielding in a secluded villa from the devastating 1348 plague outbreak in Florence. Chiming with many recent pandemic experiences, we could see Boccaccio’s text as an early example of ‘lockdown literature’!
Curator's Corner
Dr Alexandra Paddock chose and translated today's featured text by Chaucer. She is a core member of LitHits and an expert in early and late medieval literature, with a special interest in texts about the natural world.
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