April Is A Guy

On meeting again the old days,
when ‘young’ was spelled ‘yonge’
and it rhymed with ‘songe’;
when ‘eye’ was said ‘ee’
as in ‘melody’
(or ‘i’ in ‘melodye’) .

‘Sweete’, I suspect, became ‘soote’ –
what it had never been before –
just for a rhyme with ‘roote’.

In Coghill’s translation,
April is sexless
in the first line
of the prologue
before the first Canterbury tale.
Chaucer makes it male.