love, an owl who will never be a nightingale. Boethius, Dante, Langland and the poet
ofPearl dream to seek enlightenment, but Chaucer’s comical self-presentation is
disarmingly different.
A learner in love requires not a book but a beloved. If we re-run the dream back-
wards, the formel calls the bluff of her noble suitors the eagles, who will not die. She
keeps them waiting until she chooses. The farmyard birds know that love is physical;
and yet, humans should do better than birds. The Temple of Venus is hot with idol-
ized sexual pleasure.Scipio’s Dream says that love of the common good leads to
immortality, unlike the love oflikerous folk. Extremes of lust and of idealization are,
then, to be avoided. Yet human nature is not very reasonable: love remains a puzzle,
insoluble to those who take themselves too seriously. Such a fresh, elegant presenta-
tion of complex issues is dazzlingly new in English. The Parlement is not equalled in
French until Pierre de Ronsard in the early 16th century or in English until the late
16th century. Shakespeare drew on the Parlement in his Love’s Labour’s Lost(1595).
Chaucer’s work drew on Latin, and, in modern languages, on models in French
(The Book of the Duchess) and Italian (Troilus). He brought modern European
modes into English. He seems to have read Langland, but not Gawain.
The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women is Chaucer’s last love-vision, written
in the first decasyllabic couplets in English. It opens in a May landscape, full of flow-
ers; the courtly May Day love-cult involved flowers, especially the daisy. Chaucer is
found kneeling by a daisy by the God of Love, attended by his Queen and her train,
who sing a ballade in her praise: ‘Hyd, Absalon, thy gilte tresses clere’. Love asks why
his flower is venerated by Chaucer, an enemy to love:
‘Thou maist yt nat denye, canst
For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose, gloss
Thou hast translaat the Romaunce of the Rose,
That is an heresye ayains my lawe,
And makest wise folk from me withdrawe ... ;
Hast thou nat mad in Engly sh ek the bok also
How that Crisseyde Troylus forsok,
In shewynge how that wemen han don mis?’ have amissThe Queen of Love defends Chaucer:
‘T his man to yow may wrongly ben acused, be
Ther as by ryght hym oughte ben excused.
Or elles,sire, for that this man is nyce, foolish
He may translate a thyng in no malyce,
But for he useth bokes for to make, is accustomed
And taken non hed of what matere he take, to take no heed
Therefor he wrot the Rose and ek Crisseyde
Of innoce nce,and nyste what he seyde. ... innocently knew not
The Queen is Alceste,who offered to die in the place of her husband, and has
been turned into a daisy: a new metamorphosis. She bids Chaucer make a
Legendary of the lives of the saints of love. He tells nine legends of love’s ‘martyrs’
- Cleopatra, Dido, Lucrece, Ariadne and others – in penance for his ‘heresies’. The
Prologue is the most ‘autobiographical’ of Chaucer’s visions, and his last charade
in the wor ship of Love. The Victorians loved it. Today it seems a try-out for the
Canterbury Tales.
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 59