The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue & Frame Story Time

This is the first instance of something that happens constantly in the frame story of the Tales, which is the obsessive detailing of exactly what time it was when something happened.

For everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (Turn, turn, turn.) Yeah, you know the song, and it's basically making the same point as the first fourteen lines of The Canterbury Tales. These lines tell us that there's a particular time of year when people want to go on pilgrimages. They describe just what that time of year that is: namely, spring. The point seems to be that spring is a time for beginnings, like the beginning of a journey which is the beginning of repentance (and the beginning of this poem).

It's fitting that the Host would be the rooster here, since, as the frame story progresses, he is the character most concerned with time. He's constantly urging the pilgrims to hurry up and tell their stories already, for time is passing! This moment is important foreshadowing of that role.

Here, Chaucer is referring not to time as it's passing in the story, but to narrative time, the amount of time and space it takes him to say what he wants to say. Just as the Host is always worried that time is passing too quickly, Chaucer and many of the other characters are often concerned that they're going to take up too much narrative time and space.

By comparing the years of his life to a barrel of wine that's draining, the Reeve emphasizes the way that we are powerless to stop the flow of time, however much we might wish to. Wine is something desirable, that we'd like to have around forever. But no matter how much we desire to keep it, it always runs out eventually.

Half-way prime is only about 7:30am, but the Host is already worried the pilgrims are running out of time. Part of what's going on here could be a medieval Christian idea that waste, even the waste of time, is morally wrong. All time should be spent doing something productive, which is why the Host urges the pilgrims to tell stories.

As he does in the above quote, the Host suggests again that time is lost only through our negligence. He accomplishes this by comparing lost time to virginity lost in "wantownesse," or the lustful nature of the virgin. Sexist, yes, but it makes the Host's point that loss of time is our own fault.

As the Reeve does, the Host here compares time passing to a liquid flowing away. Yet he also suggests that it's possible not to lose time if we are careful. Time is only lost through our own negligence and waste.

These and the eleven lines that follow go into great detail about how the Host calculates the time of day by combining his knowledge of the date (May 18) with his observation of the position of the sun and the length of shadows on the ground. It's possible that Chaucer was showing off a bit here: we know that he wrote a book about the astrolabe, an instrument for determining the time of day based on the position of the sun, among other things. Here, he's probably demonstrating the knowledge he got from that endeavor.

There's an interesting echo of the poem's "a time for everything" beginning. The Host is emphatic about the fact that a pilgrimage is not the time for study. Yet the Host's conviction that a pilgrimage is the time for stories is a bit puzzling. Isn't a pilgrimage really a time for prayer?

The Monk's apology for failing to tell his stories in the correct historical order echoes Chaucer's apology in the General Prologue for failing to describe the pilgrims in order of degree. In both cases, the authors are upsetting order in the name of artistic license, but claiming a lack of wit or memory as their excuse.

Like he does in the Man of Law's Introduction, Chaucer shows off his knowledge of the astrolabe and calculating the time precisely based upon the position of the sun. This moment is also a neat match-up of time in the story with time in the poem: the poem is almost over for us, and the day is almost over for the pilgrims.