Significance of the opening lines

These are the opening lines with which the narrator begins the General Prologue of The
Canterbury Tales. The imagery in this opening passage is of spring’s renewal and rebirth.
April’s sweet showers have penetrated the dry earth of March, hydrating the roots, which in
turn coax flowers out of the ground. The constellation Taurus is in the sky; Zephyr, the warm,
gentle west wind, has breathed life into the fields; and the birds chirp merrily. The verbs used
to describe Nature’s actions—piercing (2), engendering (4), inspiring (5), and pricking (11)—
conjure up images of conception.

The natural world’s reawakening aligns with the narrator’s similarly “inspired” poetic
sensibility. The classical (Latin and Ancient Greek) authors that Chaucer emulated and
wanted to surpass would always begin their epic narrative poems by invoking a muse, or
female goddess, to inspire them, quite literally to talk or breathe a story into them. Most of
them begin “Sing in me, O muse,” about a particular subject. Chaucer too begins with a
moment of inspiration, but in this case it is the natural inspiration of the earth readying itself
for spring rather than a supernatural being filling the poet’s body with her voice. After the
long sleep of winter, people begin to stir, feeling the need to “goon on pilgrimages,” or to
travel to a site where one worships a saint’s relics as a means of spiritual cleansing and
renewal. Since winter ice and snow made traveling long distances almost impossible (this
was an age not only before automobiles but also before adequately developed horse-drawn
carriages), the need to get up, stretch one’s legs, and see the world outside the window must
have been great. Pilgrimages combined spring vacations with religious purification.

The landscape in this passage also clearly situates the text in England. This is not a classical
landscape like the Troy of Homer’s Iliad, nor is it an entirely fictionalized space like the cool
groves and rocky cliffs of imaginary Arcadia from pastoral poetry and romances. Chaucer’s
landscape is also accessible to all types of people, but especially those who inhabit the
countryside, since Chaucer speaks of budding flowers, growing crops, and singing birds.
The pilgrimage begins in the spring, "whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote /
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote" (General Prologue 1 – 2). Since this is the
beginning of the poem, and the beginning of the pilgrimage (which itself is the beginning of
repentance), it's likely that springtime here is a symbol of beginnings. And the beginning of
things is exactly what the poem emphasizes in its description of springtime, talking about
how the wind spreads the seeds that peek their heads above the soil as they begin to grow into
crops, and how birds begin their mating season. 

This brings us to another thing that springtime symbolizes: sexuality. You see it in the way
April is piercing March "to the roote" with his showers, watering things and causing them to
grow in the same way a penis "waters" the ovum and causes it to grow. In its masterful
opening, the poem links springtime and sex in the way that they both cause new life to begin. 

The poem might start this way in order to remind us how pilgrimages are also a start of new
beginnings. See, the idea of a pilgrimage is that you start on a journey of repentance,
beginning a new life, one free from sin. In the beginning of the poem, then, the springtime is
a symbol of the new beginnings and the creation of new lives the pilgrims are about to
undertake.