POETS Day – Chaucer’s Prologue and High School

“A knight there was and…” You have to pronounce knight like it was k-nigg-it like they do in Monty Python.  So a kn-iggit ther was. It’s a home-made problem. It doesn’t scan even if you get to the Middle English complications I’m about to introduce.

This is P.O.E.T.S. Day, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, and life and circumstance have conspired to make me furious despite multiple requests for medical information sent if you want to head off to a foreign land but here I am. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday unless you want to go to Mexico via Royal Caribbean because despite doctor’s letters they will not let a fifteen year old partially vaccinated kid near one of their boats.

Maybe that’s the gag this week. I like to put up a way to escape work so you can POETS Day a way to happiness and mid-afternoon bliss and escape work but I think I have the opposite. Leave it to a cruise line to turn things sideways. We will do a how-to-get-out-of-a-vacation gag this week.

First, book a vacation on a cruise line that let’s you do something you have always dreamed about – visiting Mayan ruins. I said first but that was inaccurate. Let’s restart. First, find a woman. An amazing woman. Have a child with her and then a second. Then have a worldwide pandemic with variant rules for who should be injected with a kinda vaccine. Talk to your pediatrician about the possible complications versus the advantages of inoculation and then have your kid test positive for the disease before he gets a shot.

There’s a protocol that kicks in and once a test has a plus sign as my son did. You need to wait a full three months – this is per our pediatrician – before you can get a vaccine. So after week one when the government okayed those of fifteen years old to get a dubious vial of pediatrician heralded drugs shot into their arm but before we had our pediatric consultation on the whys and wherefores my fifteen year old tested positive for the Wuhan.

He didn’t care, for what it’s worth. He played video games and suffered not a lash from the scourge. There should be a category for how many of the news worthy cases spent their times cackling about not going to school and watching YouTube.

But if you get the virus you can’t take the prescribed vaccine for a proscribed term of three or so months. No manner of doctor’s letters or very well written appeals will budge the diligent folks at Royal Caribbean and so we are looking at a situation where my wife and youngest are set to sail in a prepaid way with many in-laws while my oldest and I are remaindered here treating my sister and her family along with my father and his wife and a step brother with accompanying wife and son as if they were plan B. They aren’t. They just weren’t supposed to be here at the same time as us and now shopping has not been done. Damn Royal Caribbean.

So it’s not a get out of work POETS Day scam or caper or whatever, but if you need to escape a pre-paid Mexican vacation, meet a wonderful lady and impregnate her and sixteen years later just after the approval of a drug that’s necessary for social acceptance have the kid get sick so he can’t get the drug and write a bunch of useless emails with a doctor’s imprimatur until you get told that you are going to have a Merry Christmas instead of a Feliz Navidad. That’s how you get out of that.

It’s unlikely that this is a useful escape plan of course, but keep it in your pocket. Who knows?

Today’s poem is not in English. I’ve read that in a millennium, in other words if you went back a thousand years, you would be baffled by what you heard in your purported native language. Pronunciation, diction, and newly, as it matters, is spelling. We say Shakespearian and act as if that’s archaic. It’s not. It’s Modern.

Chaucer wrote in Middle English. We get a sense but it’s not an immediate understanding. We need a sec.

In high school we had to learn the first forty-two lines of The Canterbury Tales. We would go in and recite them to a teacher and though you might hesitate here and there you could guarantee an A if you went on to line forty-three that began “A Knight there was…” because the teacher would stop you and you could act confused as if you thought you needed to learn more and then shrug it off as if you thought the assignment was harder. That would get you an A.

The learning and reciting was an odd rite of passage. Immediately post-graduation my friends and I would sit around playing spades or Risk and drinking cheap beer and someone would start with the poem as a distraction while they considered their next play and we’d race “Whan that April…” We were ridiculous nerds, but we never had to reconsider our lot because there was an absurdly gorgeous woman who hung out with us and that was cover enough.

I can still do the first fifteen lines or so, and at a reckless “Why are you threatening Kamchatka?” pace.

Author Geoffrey ChaucerTranslator Percy MacKayeIllustrator Walter Appleton Clark, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Geoffrey Chaucer

Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

1340? – 1400?

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

So priketh hem Natúre 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.

 

Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At nyght were come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye

Of sondry folk, by áventure y-falle

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everychon,

That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take oure wey, ther as I yow devyse.

 

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,

Er that I ferther in this tale pace,

Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun

To telle yow al the condicioun

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne;

And at a Knyght than wol I first bigynne.

But you cannot forget, “A Knight there was…” because that’s how you get an A.