 Whan that Aprille |
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If you would have ever told me that I would end up falling in love with Chaucer, I would have thought you were shooting smack.
I first met Chaucer when I was seventeen, but I didn't fall in love with him until twenty-one.
In senior AP English in high school, my teacher introduced me to Chaucer. I remember how she showed us slides and grave rubbings from her trips to Canterbury, but perhaps I was too preoccupied by senioritis to notice old Geoffrey. There was really no room for another man in my life, despite his tales of knights and prioresses.
I thought there was no place in my life for courtly love.
In my next senior year, my last semester of my undergraduate studies, I met Chaucer again. I was taking five English classes, and I liked each of them, but of those fifteen hours spent reading and writing and discussing poets and theory and authors and criticism in classrooms each week, the three that most captured my imaginatation were those spent with Chaucer.
I couldn't believe it.
What seemed to be so complicated proved to be so simple.
The stories that had seemed so impossible to me four years earlier suddenly leapt up off the page. At first, when I realized that our professor expected us to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, I made immediate plans to drop the class. I had no interest in reading what I thought was boring literature in a language that seemed completely foreign. But since I wanted to graduate, I stayed in the class.
And I just fell in love with Geoffrey. I heard my professor read his words and they fell off of his tongue with a grace and a lilt and a rhythm that made me freeze in my chair. I found myself mouthing the words aloud to myself when I would read at home. I sat down with my grandmother one day and her eyes burst into light and life when I told her how much I was enjoying the class, and she started to recite the prologue in Middle English with her ninety-year-old lips, and I started to cry.
I wish I had my notes in front of me so I could remember some of the tales and the themes that thrilled me the most, but I don't. I did save them, but they're in a box in a closet that would crush me to death in a landslide of debris if I dared open it. Chaucer tells tales of love and romance and bloodshed and and evil and happiness and adventure and pain. Maybe I fell in love with him because I saw all of those things in my own life.
Maybe there's always another chapter to write, another page to turn. Maybe some tales never really end.
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