Consequently, he spends the evening drinking heavily and feeling seasick at the prospect of breaking up. However, they know they are not happy the woman is determined to end the relationship, and the narrator seems to know it is coming. The StoryĪ Whiter Shade of Pale follows a couple through a night of partying. The first mention of the phrase “a whiter shade of pale” follows immediately after the reference to Chaucer, seeming to imply that the unnamed woman of the song turned pale with shock at the rude content of the story. This seems to fit the sexual themes of the overall song, making its inclusion a strange coincidence. The Miller’s Tale, featured in The Canterbury Tales, is a bawdy tale about an adulterous affair with sexually-charged humor throughout. Reid himself was surprised to hear this, as he had never read the story and did not intend to quote Chaucer he later was unable to describe where he had taken the words from.Įven stranger is the thematic relevance of the reference. In an odd turn of circumstances, the chorus of A Whiter Shade of Pale includes a reference to The Miller’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. He wanted to create not just a story but also a mood around the characters, a man and a woman, in the process of breaking up. The phrase served as an idea for Reid, which led to a setting and characters. He used the phrase as a basis for the idea of a song about a sexual encounter between a man and a woman, though details around the encounter have been subject to widespread fan interpretation.
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