Chaucer's small crypt in Westminster Abbey is a striking memento
a mori. Standing there looking at the stone box that holds his
remains, I thought about how alive he and his characters are in
"The Canterbury Tales." In his verse narrative, a prototype for
imaginative literature from the English novel to Milton's epics
and Shakespeare's plays, he describes an energetic London whose
spirit remains in today's swirling streets of sound and color.
His bones have lain in the old cathedral for hundreds of years,
but walking outside into the city's life, I could imagine him
still a part of it, bustling around, hearing snatches of
conservation, hurrying to a tavern such as the one he mentions,
the Tabard Inn. Now, with another April arrived, I reread the
General Prologue to his famous book, his hymn to the month and
the renewal of spring as current today as when he first wrote it
in 1386. While his language is archaic, his poetic force surges
on, his words still expressing the reader's excitement at
spring's arrival.