Geoffrey Chaucer's "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Though J. R. R. Tolkien translated portions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he did not live to complete the project. Fortunately another Inkling, Nevill Coghill, succeeded where Tolkien could not, and produced the modernized verse-rendering that today’s selection comes from. Happy reading!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, April 30th, 2025. And today's poem comes from the father of all English literature, Jeffrey Chaucer. And it is the prolog, a selection from the prologue anyway, to the Canterbury Tales.
0:24.2	And I've chosen to read from the 1952 translation from Middle into Modern English by Neville Coghill,
0:31.8	Coghill, among his other accomplishments, which are many, was a member of that Oxford literary group,
0:38.0	The Inklings, which included the likes of J.R. R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. And though he is probably
0:43.9	rightly overshadowed by the accomplishments of those two men in particular, nevertheless, he
0:50.2	managed to have his own very successful career in English letters,
0:54.7	and his translation of the Canterbury Tales is so fine,
0:59.6	and in many ways I think is still unrivaled even by more contemporary translations.
1:05.7	The prologue opens with a line about the month of April.
1:13.6	In fact, it's very possible that it was an influence upon another famous opening line about the month of April, the opening of T.S.
1:20.6	It's the Wasteland. We'll have to talk some other time about the thematic inversion that might be going on in the wasteland.
1:28.5	But here for Chaucer, April is a very auspicious month. Chaucer lived at the tail end of the
1:37.0	1300s. In fact, he died in the year 1400. And for much of the later part of his life,
1:43.8	England was annually plagued with, well, 1400. And for much of the later part of his life, England was annually plagued with,
1:46.5	well, plague. And we know from certain historical evidences, particularly the concentration of
1:55.1	deathbed wills made out during certain months, that January, February, and March were the worst plague months,
2:03.9	and that April was the time when the plague was subsiding in the cities where it was always
2:11.6	worse, but also in the countryside.
2:14.7	And so for Chaucer and for these characters in the Canterbury Tales,
2:19.5	April represents some feeling or sensation that we contemporary readers probably know pretty well
2:27.3	after living through the COVID pandemic, that absolute cabin fever and that need to get out and to associate again with
2:39.2	your fellow human being. Even strangers, even weird and colorful or off-colorful strangers,
	...

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