English Literature / Unit 4 ENL 0306 short lesson, about 20 seconds
The General Prologue: The Opening Lines
Captions available
The idea
The General Prologue opens in April, with showers, the west wind Zephyrus, birds singing, and people longing to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of the "holy blissful Martyr" at Canterbury. The narrator joins "nine and twenty" pilgrims at the Tabard inn in Southwark.
In practice
Spring, pilgrimage, the Tabard, twenty-nine.
Where people slip
The opening is one long spring sentence.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for English Literature