When April with his sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein in such moisture that by its power the flower is brought forth;

Chaucer makes April a he. Skeat’s note: “Aprille is here masculine, like Lat. Aprilis.” The showers are “his” showers, and the dry month he pierces is March. The veyne is a plant’s vein, the channel the sap runs in, and vertu is the old word for a plant’s power to grow. Skeat glosses it here as “quickening power” and in his note calls it “efficacy, productive agency, vital energy.” Herbals of the time used the same word for what a plant could do for the body. The language is Middle English, the English of London in the 1380s and 1390s. Many words are still ours under an older spelling (shoures, rote, flour), and the final -e was often still spoken. Skeat wrote out how he believed the opening line sounded: Whán-dhat Apríllə/ wídh iz-shúurez sóotə. The ə is the “a” at the end of “China,” so sote is two syllables, “soh-tuh,” and it rhymes with rote, “roh-tuh.” Tap any word in lines 1 to 18 to see Skeat’s spelling of its sound. He also worked out the day: from a date given later in the Tales, he puts the pilgrims at the inn on April 16, and suggests the year 1387.