TEXTUAL ANALISYS

When in April – Geoffrey Chaucer

“When in April” is the title an  extract from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

The narrative poem The Canterbury Tales belongs to genre known as “estates satire”, indeed Chaucer’s purpose in writing the tales is to make a portrait of the three social classes in order to bring to the surface vices and virtues of each social class. The Canterbury Tales deals with the story of thirty pilgrims, included the narrator, who want to take a long road toward the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury.

The present extract is the introduction of Chaucer’s masterpiece: it belongs to the General Prologue in  which the narrator gives the reader a portrait of each of the travelers.

The narration starts with a description of the setting: “When in April”. April, a spring month, symbolizes the rebirth of nature, after winter of darkness and dead.

How is spring communicated? The narrator describes April as if it were a person, exploiting the rhetorical figure of personification. The narrator animates nature using elements that generally refer to human beings (‘shower’ ‘bathed’ ‘brings about’). The wind is personified too, since it is represented by Zephyrus, and ‘sun’ is associated with the adjective ‘young’. The narrator gives a lot of details in order to make the description of nature animated. In addition he uses a language that appeals to sense impression in order to involve the reader in the environment. 

Besides, the reader can notice that the end of every periods seems to never come: it makes the reading fluent and sweet as the setting but, in addition, it creates a sense of tension and expectation.  

Afterwards the narrator moves from inanimate nature to animate nature of animals (’the small fowl are making melody’) and at the same time, through the natural and animal elements, the narrator tells the environment in which the pilgrims start their travel.

Nature is not only a panorama; there is also nature inside of human beings: humans belong to animal kingdom.  Therefore, as nature is waking up, also people feel the desire to go on pilgrimage 8’then people long to go on pilgrimages and palmers long to seek the stranger strands’’). In particular, Canterbury as the main destination of pilgrimages, since it was the centre of religion and its Cathedral hosts the shrine of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury.    

After the description of the setting, the narrator enters the story, moving from the open space of nature into the close space of a hostelry (‘It happened in that season that one day in Southwark, at The Tabard’).

The piece of information about the location of The Tabard makes the reader conscious of the pilgrimage distance. The Tabard is the meeting place of the twenty nine pilgrims and the narrator.

The feature that the narrator gives the reader about the pilgrims are that they come from sundry folk, that is from different country and different customs. The narrator immediately communicates  the variety within the company of pilgrims. What units them is their faith, devotion and their desire to start for Canterbury (‘they were pilgrims all that towards Canterbury meant to ride’).

The narrator easily joins in the company, since they all have the same purpose, and they decide to start their travel on the following morning.

The narrator finally announces to the reader that, before the story takes further pace,  he wants to tell who are his companions, what are their conditions, according to their profession and degree.

In the introduction the pretext of The Canterbury Tales is told in order to introduce the characterization of each pilgrim and the story itself.