Love, Dreams, and Poetry in Parlement of Foules Sara Manlowe College

In Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, the dreamer is a lover and a writer of poetry; his dream occurs primarily in a series of images and interactions, left ultimately in a question unanswered by the formel eagle. This is a moment of synecdoche, in that the poem itself is a series of questions in the form of tableaus left unanswered. The dreamer moves through these tableaus one after the other without reaching any conclusion:

What the narrator is seeking is presumably the meaning of that love which is the major subject of medieval courtly poetry, but which he sees chiefly as a cause of suffering; what he finds in the dream is a subtle placing of love in the larger context of the social order and of the relationship between the natural and the human, nature and culture. (Spearing, 90)

Thus, he sees this question of love played out among birds; he walks himself, a poet and a lover, among gods, characters from ancient tales, personified virtues and vices. He is the human element among these forces. He is the human listening to nature, the poet seeking inspiration, the lover seeking answers for love. These lenses occur one inside the other, and all are linked to one another: ‘love and poetry can be seen in the same terms, as creative...