What Chaucer is describing here is the framing context for the 22 tales he will tell. His narrative fiction is that a number of English men and women from different walks of life have been brought together to go on an annual religious pilgrimage to Canterbury. Such pilgrimages took place in the spring when the weather turned pleasant. In short, warm weather and a common mission brought together folks who might not otherwise get together. As a way of entertaining themselves and not unduly irritating one another their "host" proposes each member tell a story.
The unseasonably (well, let's be honest -- even in Oakland County -- the climate change) warm weather made me think of this -- it is March not April and the pilgrims are not unlike soccer parents about to embark on yet another spring season.
What stories will the spring bring?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0MtENfOMU
| 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.
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