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NAME : SUBHROJIT BHATTACHARYA

COURSE : ENGLISH (HONOURS)

PAPER: ... : CC4....(British poetry &Draam).

Roll no : 367.....
 Critical appreciation of The Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales And Its Various literary
Aspects

Abstract
The Canterbury Tales is the major work by Geoffrey Chaucer, who was the medieval
England’s leading poet. The poet talks of 30 pilgrims, comprising a cross‐section of
English society, people of different strata, who agree to travel together from theTabard
Inn in Southwark to Canterbury and tell stories in competition with each other along the
way. Each character represents their typical lifestyle in the society. The paper sheds light
on the comparison of Chaucer’s society, and that of contemporary England- the changes
that have occurred in all sectors, including the political, social, economic and and
cultural background, using the different characters of the poem.

INTRODUCTION
The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales gives a mesmerizing commentary of the English
life in the middle Ages. Chaucer has taken into the account of his Canterbury Tales the
very manners and humours present in English nation in his era. Not a single character of
the pilgrims has escaped his satire: there is a whole group of pastoral figures,
representing the diversity of the medieval church, a crowd of other figures of different
social strata and occupations, who were making up the society then. The Prologue also
enlightens on clothing and food. Manypilgrims are armed, others carrying purse or a
musical instrument. Chaucer has used these details to describe the pilgrim’s appearance,
and also to throw further insight in his/ her character and role played in the society.

Prologue to the Canterbury tales

Lines (1-42) In Simple Words

When the soft sweet showers of April reach the roots of all things, refreshing the parched earth,
nourishing every sapling and every seedling, then humankind rises up in joy and expectation.
The west wind blows away the stench of the city, and the crops flourish in the fields beyond the
walls. After the waste of winter it is delightful to hear birdsong once more in the streets. The
trees themselves are bathed in song. It is a time of renewal, of general restoration. The sun has
passed midway through the sign of the Ram, a good time for the sinews and the heart. This is the
best season of the year for travellers. That is why good folk then long to go on pilgrimage. They
journey to strange shores and cities, seeking solace among the shrines of the saints. Here in
England many make their way to Canterbury, and to the tomb of the holy blissful martyr
Thomas. They come from every shire to find a cure for infirmity and care.
It so happened that in April I was lodging at Southwark. I was staying at the Tabard Inn, ready
to take the way to Canterbury and to venerate the saint. There arrived one evening at the inn
twenty-nine other travellers and, much to my delight, I discovered that they were all Canterbury
pilgrims. They came from various places, and from various walks of life, but they all had the
same destination. The inn was spacious and comfortable enough to accommodate us all, and we
were soon at ease one with another. We shared some ale and wine, and agreed among ourselves
that we would ride together. It would be a diversion, a merry journey made in good fellowship.
Before the sun had gone down, we had determined to meet at dawn on the following day to make
our way along the pilgrims’ road.
Before we begin our travels, however, I want to introduce you to the men and women who made
up our company. If I describe their rank, and their appearance, you may also acquire some
inkling of their character. Dress, and degree, can be tokens of inward worth. I will begin with
the Knight.

CRITICAL APPRECIATION &ANALYSIS

The General Prologue opens with a description of April showers and the return of
spring. “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath
perced to the roote,” he begins, and writes about the burgeoning flowers and
singing birds. The sun has gone through the second half of the zodiacal sign
Aires, the “Ram.” Budding, lust-filled springtime is also the time when people
desire to go on pilgrimage, and travelers from all corners of England make the
journey to Canterbury Cathedral to seek the help of the blessed martyr.

Analysis :- Following the use of rhyme in The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, it is
interesting to see how easily Chaucer’s rhyme patterns accommodate the spoken sentence
pattern that runs right through the eighteen lines. You will see and then hear a marvellous
tension between the rhythms of a speaking voice and the stress requirements and sound patterns
of rhymed verse. The effect throughout The General Prologue is of a naturalness, an ease of
style which is at the same time shaped and given pattern and purpose by the rhymes. Medieval
man was much closer to nature than we are. We tend not to notice with such passionate
enthusiasm and uplifting of the spirit the return of spring. For him, the coming of spring
represented possible survival for another year. Spring was a triumph over ‘the sword of winter’.
In the text, nature is compassionate and restorative, the showers are sweet and the wind
breathes benevolently. You might compare a more modern approach to spring in T. S. Eliot’s
opening to The Waste Land (1922), which deliberately draws in pointed echoes from Chaucer’s
Invocation. In The Waste Land April is the cruellest month, stirring memories that cannot now
be achieved. There is for the poet a sense of lost potencies and a dissonance with the rhythms of
nature. In Chaucer’s case, the upsurge of the spirit is naturally and harmoniously linked to a
religious purpose, to go on pilgrimages and give thanks.

The first part of the Invocation is dedicated to the natural manifestations of spring. April with its
sustaining and sweet showers has triumphed over the droughts of March, which are as much
metaphorically spiritual as physical. The whole landscape is emerging into life. The soft breezes
gently nuzzle life into the plants, and the young sun, with all its promise of maturity to come,
shines benevolently. The birds sing, and, so urgent are their procreative instincts, they even
sleep with their eyes open. Nature is on the move, and people too. Whereas birds respond to
spring in sexual terms, humans respond with an impulse of religious observance, a wish to go on
a pilgrimage. The primary emotion of the Invocation is of an uplifting of the soul, a rebirth of the
spirit as nature pours its regenerative sap into the world and man sets off on a spiritual journey.
This invocation is the most ‘poetic’ part of The General Prologue. By the time of its writing,
Chaucer had moved from the more formal rhetorical devices that can be found in some of his
early work to a style that approached much more the patterns and vocabulary of speech.
Perhaps the most obvious device seen in the Invocation is personification. This is more a
medieval habit of mind than a literary device as there is a natural tendency in medieval art to
embody abstract principles, to allegorise.

Chaucer envisages ‘Zephirus’, the warm west wind, breathing invigorating life into the young
plants.
The sun is described as young and April is seen in a very strong physical relationship with ‘the
droghte of March’ through the word ‘perced’. Notice Chaucer’s extremely skilful organisation
of words here: “Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired bath in every holt and
heeth The tendre croppes.

Through the word arrangement and the sound patterns there is an almost physical equivalent of
the wind gently seeking out the little nooks and crannies of the copses and heath. Another
medieval habit of mind was astrology. For us the Ram is a quaint, if not lost, reference. For
Chaucer it was a significant sign of the zodiac. Astrology was a serious science and the zodiac
was part of an enmeshing system that materially affected the lives of individuals and the
community.

Particular signs of the zodiac had specific influences on worldly affairs and exercised control
over parts of the body and particular times of the day. The Ram was a symbol of sexual energy
and reinforces the atmosphere of regeneration to be found in the passage. Chaucer’s audience
would bring whole complexity of responses to this line as well as a simple understanding that the
sun is halfway through the space in the sky allotted to Aries, and the date therefore about April
17th. One of the problems for a reader is to determine the exact tone of the line: ‘Thanne longen
folk to goon on pilgrimages’. Some commentators see it as a witty comment on the fashion for
pilgrimages.
James Winny, for example, says, ‘The long opening sentence reaches its deliberately withheld
climax - a satirical suggestion that religious pilgrimages are one of the rites of spring? An
opposing view is that the ‘Whan. . .; Whan.. .;Whan….’ construction heightens, in a way that is
not at all satirical, the difference between the regenerative activities in the natural world and the
religious impulses in the human. Those who had already travelled to the Holy Land and who
wore a palm sprig in their hats to denote this, might seek distant shrines abroad, while
Canterbury and the shrine of St Thomas was the particular goal for many pilgrims in England.
We soon discover that Chaucer’s pilgrims do not all have the idealised piety of purpose that we
might expect from the Invocation. However, they are setting out on a journey that on one level
leads them to Canterbury, and on another level lead them, through a series of tales that
illustrate the vanities, follies and possibilities of the world, to arrive eventually at the Parson’s
tale and Penitence.

Chaucer, the narrator, who is preparing to go on pilgrimage, is staying at the

Tabard Inn, a tavern in Southwark. A diverse company of twenty-nine other
pilgrims enter the inn, and the narrator joins their group.

Analysis:- The Diversity of the company traveling to Canterbury Emphasizes that people
from all levels take the same journey. This approach gives the opening lines a dreamy,tireless
unfocused quality and it is therefore surprising when the narrator reveals that he's going to

describe a pilgrimage that he himself took rather than telling a love story. A pilgrimage is a
religious journey undertaken for penance and grace. As pilgrimages went, Canterbury was not a
very difficult destination for an English person to reach. It was, therefore, very popular in
fourteenth-century England, as the narrator mentions. Pilgrims travelled to visit the remains of
Saint Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in 1170 by knights of King
Henry II. Soon after his death, he became the most popular saint in England. The pilgrimage
in The Canterbury Tales should not be thought of as an entirely solemn occasion, because it also
offered the pilgrims an opportunity to abandon work and take a vacation.
In line 20, the narrator abandons his unfocused, all-knowing point of view, identifying himself as
an actual person for the first time by inserting the first person—“I”—as he relates how he met
the group of pilgrims while staying at the Tabard Inn. He emphasizes that this group, which he
encountered by accident, was itself formed quite by chance (25–26). He then shifts into the first-
person plural, referring to the pilgrims as “we” beginning in line 29, asserting his status as a
member of the group.

The narrator ends the introductory portion of his prologue by noting that he has “tyme and
space” to tell his narrative. His comments underscore the fact that he is writing some time after
the events of his story, and that he is describing the characters from memory. He has spoken and
met with these people, but he has waited a certain length of time before sitting down and
describing them. His intention to describe each pilgrim as he or she seemed to him is also
important, for it emphasizes that his descriptions are not only subject to his memory but are also
shaped by his individual perceptions and opinions regarding each of the characters. He positions
himself as a mediator between two groups: the group of pilgrims, of which he was a member,
and us, the audience, whom the narrator explicitly addresses as “you” in lines 34 and 38.
On the other hand, the narrator’s declaration that he will tell us about the “condicioun,” “degree,”
and “array” (dress) of each of the pilgrims suggests that his portraits will be based on objective
facts as well as his own opinions. He spends considerable time characterizing the group members
according to their social positions. The narrator begins by describing the Knight, a noble
man who loves chivalry and fights for truth and honour.The narrator is sincere in his
description

Of knight as a noble, chivalrous man determined to fight for the glory of God and always
Victorious.

Concept of Pilgrimage as shown in the poem :-

A pilgrimage is a religious journey undertaken for penance and grace.

As pilgrimages went .Canterbury was not a very difficult destination for an English

person to reach. It was therefore, vey popular to in fourteenth-century England, as

the narrator mentions. Pilgrimage in those days of antiquity was au event of pleasure

Holy feelings were definitely associated with a pilgrimage. But more than that, it

gave the pilgrims ae occasion to celebrate their time vibrantly. In congregation, people

used to enjoy their time. Besides, journey in those days were fraught with dangers.

So people wanted to travel in a group. The holy purpose of the journey was another

motivation for group of diverse people.

Pilgrims travelled to visit the remains of Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop

o Canterbury, who was murdered in ll70 by knights of King Henry 11. Soot after

his death, he became the most popular saint in England. The pilgrimage in the

Canterbury tales should not be thought of as an entirely solemn occasion, because it

also offered the pilgrims an opportunity to abandon work and take a vacation.

The pilgrims’ represent a diverse cross section of fourteenth- century English

society. Medieval social theory divided society into three broad classes, called

"estates the military, the Clergy. and the laity. There are the Knight and the

Squire, the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Parson, the Franklin, the Plowman

the Clerk, the man of Lau, the Guildsmen, the Physician, the Shipman, the Cook,

the miller. the maniple and Reeve. Chaucer o descriptions of the various characters

and their social roles reveal the influence o the medieval genre of estates satire.

Personal Comments :-

I would recommend it for many, many reasons. Be warned, this is a long post—as I have
strong opinions on this matter!

First, there is a great pleasure in mastering difficult things like an older form of English. As
we learn to read it, we find ourself recognizing analogues and thinking, “Aha! That’s where
our modern term comes from!” That is enormously satisfying, but it’s only an argument for
learning Middle English, not necessarily reading Chaucer.

Second, The Canterbury Tales has something in it to appeal to every reader because it is a

collection of short stories, and Chaucer has a very wide range of interests. You will find
everything from philosophy to fart jokes, from sex to spirituality. Part of the original
ambition of Chaucer’s incomplete work is the scale and variety—thirty pilgrims times four
story entries in the contest equals 120 total stories.
So, if you grow bored by the length of the Knight’s Tale and would prefer the bed-swap
humor of the Reeve’s Tale, you can skip one and pick the other. “Turn the leef and chese
another tale. Blameth nat me if ye chese awry,” as Chaucer would phrase it.

Third, Chaucer can be hilarious in a self-deprecating way. Even when it’s his narrator
Geoffrey’s turn to tell his first tale, the characters Chaucer has created rebel against the
author! They interrupt the story of Sir Thopas and demand he start over with something
new! It’s like The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which the characters in the movie and the director
who created them come into conflict.
The thing many readers fail to see is that the narrator’s voice, “Geoffrey the Pilgrim,” isn’t
really the author Geoffrey Chaucer. Instead, the voice talking in the poem is a medieval
Forest Gump, who describes exactly what he sees, but he always fails to connect the dots.
If anybody asks Geoffrey something, he’s going to misinterpret it in some humorous way.

There are some exceptions to that unreliable narrator—the Plowman, the Parson, for
instance—are exactly as Geoffrey describes them—straightforward good guys. However, in
many other cases, the reader who “gets the joke” sees that Geoffrey is misinterpreting the
world around him. He’s an unreliable narrator in the best sense.

That’s why it’s hilarious to read how Geoffrey praises some figures who are villains and
expresses doubts about others who are pretty much archetypes of goodness.

See, for instance, the description of that “good fellow” the Shipman (who’s actually a pirate
from Dartmouth and Penzance, a hive of scum and villainy), or how impressed Geoffrey is
with the Squire (who’s really a girl-chasing “playah” in contrast with his gruff and
experienced father! This kid may curl his blond hair with curling irons and he is better at
singing, parade-riding, and dancing than real fighting). Or the way Geoffrey the narrator
criticizes the Oxford Clerk for his lack of financial success, (“ther was little gold in his
coffre”). However, Chaucer the author wants his audience to see the Clerk’s an idealistic
college kid in love with learning for its own sake, seeing through Geoffrey’s faulty narration.

Fourth, Chaucer is the master of intentional ambiguity. Part of the fun of closely reading his
works is discovering his characters are not who they appear to be, and the pilgrims
sometimes reveal new depths we would not expect from their description in the General
Prologue. As they tell stories, they reveal more and more about themselves, and those
revelations are often paradoxical or surprising.

The mercantile, bullying, and dominating Wife of Bath who’s slept her way through five
former husbands and seized their assets? In her tale, she reveals that in spite of her
independence, stubbornness, and strength—she’s really still a hopeless romantic. She’s still
looking for the love of her life in her late forties in spite of one husband who cheated on her
and another who beat her. She’s determined not to be a human doormat in the relationship,
but her hope outweighs her experience in an admirable way.

The Prioress? Geoffrey the pilgrim praises her French but drops the detail that she doesn’t
speak Parisian French, just French as spoken at Stratford-at-Bowe. To put that joke in
modern context, “She speaks French just the way they do in Dallas! With a Texas accent!”
Geoffrey the pilgrim lauds her dining habits and her gold bling and her kindness to animals,
while Chaucer the author wants the reader to see through the unreliable narration that she’s
gluttonous, she violates the rules of her order, and she has abandoned her vows of poverty
(and possibly chastity).

Later, when the Prioress tells her tale, she reveals another aspect to her personality that is
particularly disturbing for modern readers—she tells a story of blood-curdling “Let’s-kill-all-
those-evil-Jews” antisemitism that jars with our previous understanding of her as a dainty
gourmand who loves singing hymns.

The Pardoner, who is depicted initially as a eunuch, sexual deviant, or homosexual, is called
a “gelding or a mare,” as Geoffrey phrases it with some medieval gay-bashing. He is
characterized as a con-man and a crook selling fake relics. However, when it is his turn to
tell a tale, he embraces the role other pilgrims have assumed about him.

He challenges the reader, “a vicious man can yet tell a virtuous tale,” and he states that his
audience—including presumably the reader!—will still be willing to give him their money
after he confesses all the tricks he uses to extort money from them. Then, he launches into
a brilliant sermon on the theme radix et malorum est cupiditas, about how the love of money
is a spiritual cancer that can corrupt anyone who clings to it rather than God. He uses
himself and his own corruption as an example, and then turns to challenge the
audience.  See? Look what greed has done to me. But you can still save yourself. Give me
your money and put it to the use of the church….  It’s an astonishing about-face. He is willing
to throw himself on that cash-grenade to save your soul, so pony up your purses!
I could go on and on in that vein for another thirty pilgrims, but I do not wish to try your
patience.

Another reason The Canterbury Tales are worth reading is the very clever interconnections
between stories. You can pick and read individual tales with isolated pleasure, but Chaucer
designed them like legos to link to each other. Different stories respond to each other and
build upon each other, echo or challenge each other. Five of them in the “Marriage Group”
are actually a debate about what makes a happy marriage, with the Wife of Bath arguing
female control is best, the Clerk presenting a worst-case scenario for a submissive wife, the
Merchant arguing that all marriage is generally awful and filled with deception no matter
what you do, and the Franklin (on the surface) arguing for equality through generosity, but
(below the surface) changing the debate to be about what constitutes nobility, and
why parvenu generosity like his own makes him an equal to hereditary aristocracy.
Other groupings appear throughout the larger collection as well, and that ever-growing
interconnection culminates in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which systematically explores the
themes of all the earlier tales—questions of destiny vs. free will; social order and nobility;
what women really want in marriage and what makes a relationship work, and so forth.
However, the Nun’s Priest puts the entire debate in the mouths (beaks?) of farmyard fowl,
deflating the pretensions of the whole endeavor, even as his characters quote bits from
earlier tales (or in the case of the Wife of Bath, elevate her to equality with Aristotle). There’s
something supremely silly about a rooster’s pretensions in citing classical philosophers
with his wife, Lady Pertalote.
The Canterbury Tales, if you are paying attention, is a massive, interconnected circuit of
allusions to each other in delightful and surprising ways.
Last of all, the reason The Canterbury Tales  are worth reading is that they are about the
pilgrimage of life: la pelinerage humain. Saint Augustine and some later medieval French
poets used the same symbolism, but Chaucer does it with panache. It’s not just a story
about a bunch of tourists who start out in a bar and then make their way to Canterbury to
see a stuffy old shrine. It’s a story about the brief journey of existence we have with our
fellow humans—how we begin our lives in one place, but wander, get lost, quarrel, and
slowly and surely end up in another place in spite of ourselves.
The Canterbury Tales are about how we start the day fresh in the first morning, walking
along, and learning to get along with each other as we quarrel and argue and tell dirty jokes
and insult each other and debate deep spiritual matters and work through “that auld, auld
dance” of human relationships. Sometimes, we kiss and make up (like the Pardoner and
Harry Bailey). Sometimes, we are greeted by new fellow wayfarers (like the Canon and the
Canon’s Yeoman).
However, as the road goes on, we know that our journey will end by the last sunlight of the
third day as our shadows stretch out twelve feet behind us and we dimly see the gates of
Canterbury-as-Heaven, life’s ultimate pilgrimage destination. Then, the Parson pauses, and
he says he will “knit up this feast with a merrie tale,” the tale of how we can save our souls
through faith.

The Parson’s sermon is so to the point that the fictional voice of the poet himself stops the
sequence of narrative, ends the storytelling contest, and retracts his previous works, and
begs his audience that—if anything he said had any value to the reader, that they light a
candle for him and say a prayer for Chaucer’s soul.

Chaucer is probably the author who has most impacted my thinking and my love of
literature. Every October 25th, even though I’m not Catholic, I go to a Catholic church to light
a candle for him.

If this doesn’t convince you Chaucer is worth reading, then nothing will perhaps.