As Louis Armstrong once say, it’s a wonderful World!
Even if it doesn’t last for long, here in England over the last few days the temperature had risen, daylight has perceptively longer and there is that silent rumbling of Nature as the bulbs and buds have begun to swell.
At times like these, I remember The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s never improved description of how we humans feel on such days. I like him and his canterbury pilgrims, long to go on pilgrimages, well journeys anyway. I am feeling it now so I thought I would share it with you but before that a commercial break:
Wonderful idea – superbly executed. I want to go to all those place right now and I’m tempted to take a faster form of transport than Chaucer’s stately little pony:
Geoffrey Chaucer (1387-1400)
I don’t think it is an enormous leap from that exciting piece of film-making to Chaucer’s poem written sometime between the year 1387 and his death in 1400. He too is conjuring up the excitement we all get from travelling:
When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire’s end
Of England they to Canterbury wend,
The holy blessed martyr there to seek
Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.
To get the full beauty of the language you really need to hear it read in its original Middle English but don’t be put off, it you have read the translation, you will find it an easy journey going on this linguistic journey with the poet.
It is too much – I want to go on holiday so here are another couple of pilgrimages around the World made in super-human speed:
