Spring: Two Ways of Seeing

The warming sun and the gentle breezes of Spring always turn my thoughts to Geoffrey Chaucer. The opening lines of his beloved poem, The Canterbury Tales, the words and sound of the words, are music to me:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóu
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

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Chaucer, who lived in the late 1300s, was the first significant poet of the English language. Chaucer’s language, known as Middle English, had gained an expressive power that surpassed the earlier forms of English (Old Norse and Old English) and Norman French. England was establishing its nationhood at the time after three centuries of French rule.

And when the poet turned his attention to the real people around London and the countryside, the language made the medieval world of England come alive. The Tales showcased the language’s ability to capture emotion, drama, humour, humanity and irony — things we take for granted today but were all shiny and new in the Middle Ages.

Caricatures of the common folk

The characters in The Canterbury Tales are primarily caricatures of the common folk. But with Chaucer’s poetic skill, they come alive. 2

So when April rolls around, the opening lines to The Canterbury Tales come readily to mind because the same things are true of Spring today as they were in the 1300s:

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

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I was enchanted by these words when I read them 50 years ago. They still sing to me! The warming sun and rains of April engender new life, and the world renews itself after the cold barrenness of winter. 4

Closer to home

But last year, I realized there are voices far closer to home speaking of Spring in a different context: the voices of the Coast Salish Peoples, particularly the W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) First Nation.

I’ve been fascinated by the poster on display in front of South Pender’s Church of the Good Shepherd. It’s called “The Thirteen Moons of the W̱SÁNEĆ Year.” It shows the “integration and flow of activities” the W̱SÁNEĆ people undertook over their year.

Looking at “The Thirteen Moons of the W̱SÁNEĆ Year” (see picture above), April (roughly speaking) is shown as the month of salmonberry, red rock crab and hummingbirds. It is also the month for red alders and the “moon of bullheads” (the fish).

July is the month of salal, octopus, oystercatcher and honeysuckle. And so on.

All was sacred to us

But the traditional W̱SÁNEĆ year, according to the illustration’s caption, did not differentiate between these seasonal markers the way Geoffrey Chaucer and his colleagues did. The caption reads:

“It was not our way to separate these activities when we lived a traditional life because all was sacred to us. Our art, language, spirituality and our everyday activities were all one. In our homes and in the privacy of our longhouses, we continue to observe the wisdom of the past.

“The moons are markers, not calendar months. Our “year” was more than 365 days. Some years would have thirteen moons, and some would have twelve. The land and marine ecosystems in this area were so rich that they supported the W̱SÁNEĆ culture year-round for thousands of years. Elders taught us that nature provided for food, medicine, clothing. tools. transport and building materials as well as beauty and cultural guidance.”

Nature is pre-eminent in this calendar, and we “visitors” don’t get any sense of the expressiveness of the language the W̱SÁNEĆ people spoke. Is this because the language was primarily unwritten? But through the pictures and words of the calendar, it’s clear that human life and nature were more integrated than in European culture.

And, in the calendar of the W̱SÁNEĆ year, beautifully expressed.

Spring is inseparable

According to the calendar, Spring is not a distinct entity the way Chaucer sees it, but part of a larger cycle, impossible to be pulled out and separated from all the other elements of the seasons.

The poster is haunting, remarkable to look at and wonderfully expressive in its own right. I welcome the language of the first people and the way they viewed the seasons and integrated their elements into everything they did and saw.

And as I experience the onset of Spring — the growing birdsong in the mornings, the chorus of frogs in the evenings, the gentler winds over the Salish Sea — I hear a distinctive voice that is every bit as clear as the words of the great Geoffrey Chaucer.

The two cultures/languages are worlds and ages apart, but I think there is a third language: that of the natural world. How ethno-European and North American aboriginal people describe Nature may be different in so many ways, but they are equally poetic. Equally compelling. 

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