The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Geoffrey Chaucer · a dream vision in rhyme royal · 699 lines: ninety-eight stanzas and a roundel of thirteen lines · composed in the early 1380s · scored on Chaucer’s Middle English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Middle English quoted only where its words are certain, in the Riverside spelling, with the desk’s own modern rendering
Mode
Dream vision and debate poem; love vision, philosophical allegory, comedy of estates and lyric in one short frame
Mythos
Nature as goddess and God’s deputy over generation; Saint Valentine’s day, when every bird comes to choose its mate; the temple of Venus; the birds as the estates of a commonwealth; the little earth seen from the heavens
Phase
One reading and one dream, from a book of Cicero’s to the waking; inside the dream, one Saint Valentine’s day, from the gate to the roundel
Presentation
Dream vision of 699 lines: ninety-eight stanzas of rhyme royal, seven decasyllabic lines rhyming ababbcc, and a roundel of thirteen lines sung by the birds; a proem, a summary of the Somnium Scipionis, the dream and the waking
Register
From the proem’s balanced line and the summary of the heavens to Boccaccio’s temple, the eagles’ high suits, the goose’s and the duck’s bluntness, Nature’s adjudication and the lyric of the roundel
Scale
The heavens and the fate of souls, the natural order of generation, courtly love, the estates of a commonwealth and their procedure, books and authority, each held in sketch inside seven hundred lines
Governing Proposition
A man who knows love only from books reads Cicero’s dream of the heavens, falls asleep, and is led by Africanus, out of that book, through a gate to a garden, a temple of Venus and the hill where Nature presides over the birds come to choose their mates. Three eagles plead for one formel, the lower birds demand that business be done, and Nature gives the formel a year to choose. The wager of the work is that a short dream can let every kind of love speak in its own voice, that the common profit Cicero sets against private desire can be argued out by eagles and ducks, and that a poem can decline the verdict its form promises and still hold together.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne” (1)
“the life so short, the craft so long to learn”. The first line sets the art of verse and the art of love in one balanced sentence, and the speaker who makes it knows love only from books. The poem runs to 699 lines: ninety-eight stanzas of rhyme royal, seven decasyllabic lines rhyming ababbcc, and a roundel of thirteen lines sung by the birds near the end. It is one of the earliest English poems in that stanza, which Chaucer brought into English. It is complete: it begins with a proem and ends with the dreamer waking, and nothing in it is a fragment.
The poem is made of books, and it names one of them. Its sources, as the record gives them, are Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis with the commentary of Macrobius; Dante, whose gate in the third canto of the Inferno the poem’s gate answers; Boccaccio’s Teseida, from which the temple of Venus, some sixteen stanzas, is closely adapted; and Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae, which the poem names as the “Pleynt of Kynde”. Behind them stands the French love vision, the Roman de la Rose and Machaut. The materials are borrowed and the poem does not hide it. What it does with them is its own.
It was composed in the early 1380s, commonly dated about 1380 to 1382. A link to the negotiations for the marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, in 1380 to 1381, has been proposed, and the poem read as an occasional piece for a royal betrothal; that is a scholarly hypothesis, not a fact of the text, and nothing here rests on it. What the text gives is a shape: a proem on love and books, a book read, a dream, and a waking to more reading. The frame, proem, book and waking together, is roughly a sixth of the poem; the debate of the birds is about half.
Movement II
The proem states the method. Out of old fields, it says, comes new corn, and out of “olde bokes” comes “newe science”
“old books”, “new knowledge”. The man who knows love from reading reads. The book is Cicero’s dream of Scipio, in Macrobius, and he gives it in summary: the little earth seen from the heavens, the music of the spheres, the fate of souls.
At its centre is the “commune profit”, the common good, set against private desire. The question is put before any bird appears, and it is the question the birds will argue. The vision of the heavens carries the poem’s first height, but it carries it in summary: the grandeur is reported rather than built.
He sleeps and dreams the book’s sequel. Africanus, out of the book, comes to lead him, and the frame is set: a man who knows love only from books reads a book, dreams what follows it, and will wake to read again. The knowledge of love on offer is the knowledge in books, and the dream to come shows the books contradicting each other.
Movement III
Africanus leads the dreamer to a gate with two inscriptions. One promises a blissful place; the other speaks of the deadly strokes of the spear. The double inscription answers the gate of the third canto of Dante’s Inferno, and the poem’s way with its sources begins here: the swerve is not in the materials but in what is done with them.
Within lies a garden, and the poem inventories it: a catalogue of trees in the manner the tradition had made, running on the tradition’s momentum. Then comes the temple of Venus, some sixteen stanzas closely adapted from Boccaccio’s Teseida, with Venus and Priapus among its figures. It is love as sighing and sterile, shut in on itself. The adaptation is close and competent, and this is where the making is least its own.
The temple is there for what follows. From it the dreamer comes to Nature on her hill of flowers, and the fertile hill answers the sterile temple. The join is abrupt, temple to hill as book to gate, and the joins between the poem’s three borrowed blocks are felt. But the design is there: the love of the temple is the love that Nature’s hill answers, and the question of the book is the question the birds will debate.
Movement IV
It is Saint Valentine’s day, when “every foul” comes “to chese his make”, every bird to choose its mate, and Nature presides. She is the figure of Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae, God’s deputy over generation, and she is the poem’s one sustained height. The birds are gathered before her by kind, and a catalogue sets them out as the garden’s catalogue set out the trees. The assembly is also a commonwealth: the birds are its estates, and the order in which they speak is its procedure.
Three tercel eagles sue for one formel. Their suits are courtly and high, and each pleads his devotion while the day goes by and the other birds wait to mate. The devotion is noble and also absurd, and the poem lets both be seen at once: three suitors pleading through a day, before an assembly that has come to choose its mates and cannot.
Then the lower birds speak, and the parliament becomes a comedy of procedure: motion, counter-motion, the call to get on. They demand that business be done and the season served. The goose’s counsel is that a lover who is not loved should love another, coarse and also sane; the turtle-dove speaks for constancy unto death, beautiful and useless to the season; the duck answers her with a quacking retort; the cuckoo has his say. The comic speech is metrically as exact as the courtly pleas. Each kind speaks for love in its own idiom and each is partly right, and the love vision, having let the duck and the goose answer its question, does not recover its dignity.
Movement V
Nature gives judgment, and it is no verdict on the suits. She will not force the formel; the choice is hers. The formel asks for a year, and Nature grants it. Choice is given to the one who is chosen, and a female will is set above the parliament’s verdict. The ending declines the decision the form has promised.
The birds sing a roundel, thirteen lines in a lighter register: “Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe”
“now welcome, summer, with your gentle sun”. It is the last of the poem’s heights, and the lightest. Then the dreamer wakes, unsatisfied, and turns again to his books. The frame closes as it opened, on a man reading.
The poem has argued one question from the heavens and from the pond: whether private love serves the common profit. The vision of Africanus and the duck’s retort answer it in their places, and the law that holds them is real, though it is held by theme more than by tone. The poem does not say where the truth lies, and it was not meant to. Its open questions, whether it is one poem or three, whether the lower birds are mocked or vindicated, what the formel’s year means, why the dreamer wakes unsatisfied, are still argued after six centuries, and the stanza it brought into English went on to carry Troilus and Criseyde.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is whether the poem’s three unlike parts, the book, the garden and the parliament, are each required. The book and the parliament plainly are. Cicero’s dream sets the “commune profit”, the common good, against private desire before any bird appears, and the parliament stages exactly that quarrel: the eagles’ courtly suits against the lower birds’ demand that business be done and the season served. The temple of Venus is required as well, as the sterile, sighing love that Nature’s fertile hill answers. What holds the axis here is the length of the inherited material: some sixteen stanzas adapted from Boccaccio’s Teseida, and a catalogue of trees and another of birds that run on the momentum of the tradition. The first line earns its place; some of the garden’s inventory does not.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: love is not one thing but a field of interests, and each kind speaks for it in its own idiom and is partly right. The eagles’ devotion is noble and also absurd, three suitors pleading through a day while the others wait to mate; the goose’s counsel, that a lover who is not loved should love another, is coarse and also sane; the turtle-dove’s constancy unto death is beautiful and useless to the season. Above all the formel is given the choice: Nature will not force her, and she asks a year. A female will set above the parliament’s verdict is a real thing to bring into the open in the 1380s. Held where it is because the poem, by design, will not say where the truth lies, and its disclosure stays at the level of perspective rather than a condition stated and held.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation is reached in two places and touched in a third. The cosmic vision of the dream the narrator reads, the little earth seen from the heavens and the music of the spheres, carries real grandeur, though it is given in summary. Nature on her hill, God’s deputy over generation in Alain de Lille’s figure, is the poem’s one sustained height. The roundel lifts in a lighter register: “Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe”
“now welcome, summer, with your gentle sun”. Most of the poem is comedy and debate, deliberately unexalted, and the comedy is its excellence, credited elsewhere; but the axis counts frequency as well as height, and a short comic poem with two or three high moments stands in the middle of the band.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Here the myth is partly built. Nature as goddess presiding over the mating of every kind on Saint Valentine’s day, when “every foul” comes “to chese his make”, every bird to choose its mate, is load-bearing: the whole debate depends on the archetype of a natural order of desire that courtly love both serves and strains. The tie between the day and the choosing of mates has passed into general culture, and it is weighed here lightly. The birds as estates of a commonwealth are allegory built, not evoked. Held where it is because the mythic figures, Venus, Priapus, Nature and Africanus, are largely borrowed and arranged rather than made new, and the particular birds stay types.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the French love vision, the Roman de la Rose and Machaut, and the Latin philosophical allegory. The swerve is to let the courtly question be heard, and answered, by the duck, the goose and the cuckoo in their own voices: a comedy of social estates breaks into the love vision, and the vision does not recover its dignity. The ending declines the judgment the form promises, and the dreamer wakes to more reading. In English the stanza itself is new. The stake was real, a court poem that laughs at its courtly matter. The borrowing is not in question here: the swerve lies not in the materials but in what the poem does to them. Held below the bar because the debate poem was a known form, and the turn, though sharp, is made inside a small frame.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The form is the argument. A man who knows love only from books reads a book, dreams the book’s sequel and wakes to read again: the frame says that the knowledge of love on offer is bookish, and the dream shows the books contradicting each other. The proem states the method in its lines on “olde bokes” and “newe science”, old books and new knowledge. The parliament, with its order of speaking by kind of bird, enacts the comedy of procedure: motion, counter-motion, the call to get on. Change it to a single lament or a plain allegory and the poem can no longer show competing kinds of truth. Held off the top by the joins between the three borrowed blocks, which are felt.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The poem has sustained a long argument that is not exhausted: whether it is unified at all; what Cicero’s dream is doing at its head; whether it is an occasional poem for a royal betrothal, a hypothesis still unproved; whether the lower birds are mocked or vindicated; what the formel’s deferral means; and why the dreamer wakes unsatisfied. Each return changes the weight of the parts. The depth is demonstrated by six centuries of reading, not promised. What holds it here: the reading has been mostly scholarly since the eighteenth century, and the shortness of the poem limits how many layers it can hold.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is English and continental vernacular poetry of the late fourteenth century, in which English had not yet a high courtly verse of its own. Its intrinsic force: the poem makes English verse do what French did, in a new stanza, and makes it comic and philosophical at once. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: rhyme royal became the stanza of English courtly and serious verse for a century and more (Troilus and Criseyde, James I’s Kingis Quair, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Henryson, Shakespeare’s Lucrece); the bird-debate passed to Clanvowe’s The Cuckoo and the Nightingale and the Chaucerians; and the Valentine association has passed into general culture, though it is not the main evidence. Held below the bar because the larger redirection belongs to Troilus and The Canterbury Tales, and this poem’s reach runs through them.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Six centuries, and the text whole. On form there is no charge: the poem begins with its proem and ends with the waking, nothing in it is a fragment, and it survives in some fourteen manuscripts and early prints and has been continuously in print since the fifteenth century. The charge is to presence. The poem lives mainly in the classroom and the scholar’s edition, and its life beyond the university is slight except through the association of Saint Valentine’s day with the choosing of mates. A text of this age read mainly in the academy stands below the usual mark for six centuries of survival, and this one stands within that lower band.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of the stanza is high from the first line, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne” (1)
“the life so short, the craft so long to learn”, a chiasmus on art and love whose balance is the poem’s in little. The verse shifts register without strain: the Dantesque gate, the translated Boccaccio, the eagles’ high suits, the goose’s and the duck’s bluntness, Nature’s adjudication, the lyric roundel. The comic speech of the lower birds is metrically as exact as the courtly pleas. Held below 9.0 by the stretches of close adaptation and catalogue, where the making is competent rather than load-bearing. The sounding of the line as Chaucer spoke it, final -e and stress, is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The two most distant elements are the cosmic vision of Africanus and the duck’s quacking retort to the turtle-dove. Do they obey one law? The poem argues that they do: both answer whether private love serves the common profit, one from the heavens and one from the pond. The range is wide, and narrowness is not the issue. The law is real, but it is held by theme more than by tone, and the joins, book to gate and temple to hill, are abrupt enough that the poem’s unity has been disputed for a century. Held where it is because the unity is argued for rather than felt everywhere.
Score: 8.2 / 10
In 699 lines the poem touches the cosmic order and the fate of souls, the natural order of generation, courtly love, the social estates and their politics, procedure and law, books and authority, and the reader’s own frustrated consciousness. The orders are integrated, not merely present: the estates of the birds and the common profit are one structure. What holds the axis at 7.4 is the form. It is short, and each order is held in sketch, the cosmos in summary and the society as types. A low mark on a small form describes the form, and the poem is charged for nothing beyond what it encompasses.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Made at 8.8, then The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 8.4. A text whole for six centuries and in print since the fifteenth; command of the stanza from the first line through every register, the comic birds as exact as the courtly suits; a frame of book, dream and book that is itself the poem’s argument about bookish love; and an argument over its unity, its occasion, its birds and its ending that six centuries have not exhausted.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4 and The Sublime at 7.5. The first is held by the form: seven hundred lines hold the cosmos in summary and the society as types, and a low mark on a small form describes the form. The second by frequency: height comes in Cicero’s heavens, on Nature’s hill and, lighter, in the roundel, and the rest is comedy and debate, deliberately unexalted. Next, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0: a disclosure held at the level of perspective, and mythic figures borrowed and arranged rather than made new. The sounding of Chaucer’s final -e is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 8.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.5, and The Sublime meets it exactly. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.2, from a sum of 98.4, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Parliament of Fowls, scored as the complete poem as transmitted: 699 lines in the standard lineation, ninety-eight stanzas of rhyme royal and a roundel of thirteen lines, from the proem to the waking, composed in the early 1380s (commonly dated about 1380 to 1382). Every axis is judged on Chaucer’s Middle English, read in the original, with no translation between the reading and the verse. No text was in hand and no quotation was checked against a file. Middle English is quoted only where its words are certain, in the spelling of the Riverside Chaucer (ed. Larry D. Benson, 1987), with the desk’s own close modern rendering beside or beneath it; the one line number given, for the first line, follows the Riverside numbering. Sources, as the record gives them: Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis with the commentary of Macrobius; Dante’s Inferno, canto III, for the gate; Boccaccio’s Teseida for the temple of Venus; Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae, named in the poem. The link to the marriage negotiations of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia (1380 to 1381) is a scholarly hypothesis and is stated as one. The metre depends on the sounding of final -e, which editors reconstruct and readers dispute; the music of the line as Chaucer spoke it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. Figures that could not be verified, among them the line spans of the poem’s parts, the date of the first printing and whether the poem was the first to join Saint Valentine’s day to the choosing of mates, are not given.