Page 2 - FEN1(2)C01 LITERATURES IN ENGLISH PAPER I: From Chaucer to the Present

Module I

Early English Poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer. (Prescribed Text, First
20 lines of Prologue to Canterbury Tales)
The opening lines of the General Prologue to Geoffrey
Chaucer’s great fourteenth-century literary work. The
poem is written in Middle English (858 lines in total). It
is a religious pilgrimage. The narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer,
is in The Tabard Inn in Southwark, where he meets a
group of "sundry folk" (clergy, nobility, and commoners
and peasantry) who are all on the way to Canterbury, the
site of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, a martyr
reputed to have the power of healing the sinful.

The setting is April, and the prologue starts by singing the
praises of that month whose rains and warm western wind
restore life and fertility to the earth and its inhabitants. The
setting takes place in April when travel conditions are not
favourable for long journeys.