So, how’s your spring going? Chill, snow, nor’easter rain enough for Noah? Hope you don’t need to go to Baltimore, with the Key Bridge collapse adding to the usual disarray caused by high urban crime rates. Maybe you were among the 73 million AT&T customers whose personal data appeared on the dark web and now must take measures to protect your money and identity. Did the solar eclipse make you marvel at the wonders of creation and man’s ability to trace the pace of the heavens down to an atomic-clock tick? Or did the shading of the sun seem too much like a literal playing out of our current national mood?

Cheer up, says the poet (in translation*):

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;

That’s Geoffrey Chaucer, setting the scene before introducing the merry band of pilgrims who people his fulsome, intriguing 14th-century literary journey exploring the human heart, mind, and soul. By turns jolly, boisterous, bawdy, pious, incisive, telling, devout, and wholesome in its celebration of life, love, nature, and the divine, The Canterbury Tales sounds today like a lost voice of hope from an age that some would place on the latter edge of “dark.”

More in keeping with our current cultural moment, perhaps, is the headline quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, published in 1922 in the aftermath of the Great War that saw Christian Europe destroy itself and drew America into the trenches for the first act of Western assisted suicide. Grasping at shards of refracted literary light, unable to recite with conviction from Chaucer’s simple Prologue, Eliot turns the once sweet sprig of April into “the cruellest month,” no longer able to deliver on its promise of new life and resurrection.

“Winter kept us warm,” Eliot writes without irony, “covering/Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dry tubers.” In The Waste Land, there are no April showers bringing May flowers. No exit from gloom opening onto a pilgrim’s path. No sharing of stories along the way. And no faith—in God or even in heroic men of the past like the “holy, blissful martyr” St. Thomas Becket, who drew Chaucer’s pilgrims from a London tavern to Canterbury to pay their respects to the heavenly figure “who helped them when they were sick.”

We are amazed that there could be such well-considered hope soon after the Black Death swept away a third of Europe’s population. But the 14th century was the age not only of Chaucer, but of Dante, Bocaccio, and Giotto—perhaps all lighter in spirit because they were constantly reminded that life is short and uncertain, a mindset that helped them put their own spark of soul in perspective.

And they had greater faith and confidence than most of us do today in the reward of Heaven. Chaucer made fun of pompous religiosity and lecherous clerics, but he also praised true religion in the figure of the Parson, who gave a “noble example” to his parishioners, living out the virtues that he preached, so as not to become “a shit–stained shepherd” caring for “clean sheep.”

There is every reason to think that the evident malaise of our age is due largely to a lack of religious faith, especially among young people. The decline in marriage and births alone is causing a national demographic depression that feeds into personal and familial depression in a self-perpetuating loop. On top of this, we have the damage to minds and spirits of the COVID lockdowns, and the resulting skepticism over government policies (and even common-sense health guidelines regarding weight and exercise). Add to this our riven politics, with two holdovers running for president, the sitting one who is too mentally compromised to hold office, and the former occupant, thriving on the language of unbounded egoism. No wonder so many Americans see little hope or purpose in our way of life.

Or, as Eliot put it: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”

Chaucer didn’t complete the narrative plan for The Canterbury Tales outlined in the Prologue, his own death (at the age of 56 or 57) imposing itself in 1400. Six centuries later, let us re-embrace that sorely needed spirit of pilgrimage:

Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And professional pilgrims to seek foreign shores,

It’s April, Eastertide, let us set out on the “foreign shores” of life that God has laid before us, with faith, hope, and greater love.

____________________________________________

*1.1 General Prologue | Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website

____________________________________________

Brian Caulfield dedicates this blog to his former Fordham University professor, Dr. Theresa Halligan (d. 2007), who taught him Chaucer in the 1980s with the boisterous spirit and warm charity that suffuse the poem.