Happy Whan That Aprille Day 2017

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote 1
The droghte 2 of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich 3 licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth	5
Inspired hath in every holt 4 and heeth
The tendre croppes, 5 and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, 6
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,	10
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages: 7
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

Read the rest of the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece here on Bartleby.com or in a million other places, but these first 12 lines of The Canterbury Tales need to be known by every English speaker as well as any other dozen lines of poetry ever written in our language.

Learn more about the annual celebration of dead languages known as  #WhanThatAprilleDay17 by checking in with @LeVostreGC on Twitter or reading this interview with Geoffrey that appeared on Pacific Standard yesterday.

And how can you fully appreciate the opening lines of the great long English poem of the early 20th century without familiarity with the great long poem written at the tail end of the 14th century?

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. 

Happy April.

Happy #WhanThatAprilleDay16 !

Right up there with literary holidays such as Bloomsday and PynchonInPublic day that have been celebrated here at TrueBlueLiberal.org in the past, this year we discovered that the grandparent of all English-language literary celebrations takes place on April 1st. WhanThatAprilleDay is a "tyme to take joye yn alle langages that are yclept ‘old,’ or ‘middel,’ or ‘auncient,’ or ‘archaic,’ or, alas, even ‘dead.’"

I'm not ready for a confident reading of The Canterbury Tales out loud in 2016, but I'm studying for 2017.



All together now:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.