Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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"The Parliament of Fowls" is a Middle English dream vision poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, belonging to the tradition of allegorical love poetry. The narrator, a bookish outsider to love who knows it only through reading, spends the day absorbed in Cicero's "Dream of Scipio" — a cosmological text in which the shade of Scipio Africanus reveals the smallness of earth, the music of the spheres, and the promise of heaven for those who serve the common good. That night the narrator dreams Africanus himself appears and leads him to a park gate bearing two contrasting inscriptions: one promising bliss, the other warning of love's torments. Paralyzed between them like iron caught between two magnets, he is shoved through by Africanus, who pointedly notes the narrator is exempt from love's stakes and is there merely as an observer and writer. Inside the dreamer finds an elaborate allegorical garden — a richly described *locus amoenus* populated by personifications of Pleasure, Beauty, Jealousy, and Venus herself reclining in a dim temple — before the text continues toward the parliament of birds debating their Valentine's Day mate choices. The poem's distinctive move is its self-deprecating narrator who frames serious questions about love, cosmic order, and the common good through a comic admission of personal ignorance and bookish incompetence.

The Canterbury Tales and Other Works of Chaucer (Middle E...

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