 Hi everybody, my name is Mike Kuzinski. I'm a professor of English here at Tulane. It's April, so happy National Poetry Month. At a time when we have to keep our physical distance from each other, one of the advantages of poetry is that it can help us to be together in spirit. So today I'd like to welcome you to hit the road with me with one of our greatest English poets Jeffrey Chaucer and a group of sundry folk, as he calls them, on the way to Canterbury. I'm going to be reading the first 18 lines, the first complete sentence, of a very famous English poem, The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. One that opryl with his shorter sota, The drook of March hath percid to the rota, And bothered every vein in switch liqueur, Of which for two engendered is the flour. One's efferous ache with his suet of breath, In spirit hath, in every halt and haith, The tenderer croppers and the younger son hath, In the realm his half-course iran, And little fool is mockin' melodia, That's slavin' all the neat with open ear, So pricketh him, nature, In here corages. Than longin' folk to goon, On pilgrimages, and palmeras for, to saykin, Stronga strondas, In fernah hallowaz kuth, in sundry laundas, And specially from every sheerah's enda Of engelond, to Canterbury they wenda, The holy, blissful vartyr for to sayka, That hem hath hopen laun, that they were sayka.