'The Parliament of Fowls'
- Author / Editor
- Cherniss, Michael D.
'The Parliament of Fowls'
- Published
- Chap. 7 in Michael D. Cherniss, Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1987), pp. 119-47.
- Description
- Demonstrates how PF uses the naive Boethian narrator--who, confused about love, turns "Ciceronian virtue and vice into varieties of 'love'." Reader expectation is frequently thwarted: the narrator misperceives his "own relationship to the locus of his visionary experience and...to his waking researches."
- Examines Chaucer's use of "Somnium Scipionis," and traditions of nature and garden within the Boethian framework: PF is a "Boethian vision poem by virtue of the relationship of the vision to the visionary's preoccupations," a relationship that "depends upon his confusion and desire for knowledge" about love.
- Alternative Title
- Boethian Apocalypse: Studies in Middle English Vision Poetry.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Parliament of Fowls.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.