ABSTRACT
The Parliament of Fowls (PF) begins by viewing at close quarters a scene that has been described from a distance in another of Chaucer’s dream poems. In Book II of the House of Fame (HF) the eagle has described the dreamer ‘Geffrey’ back home as a devotee of ‘reckless Cupid’; as a follower who has no hope of real advancement in love; and as an indefatigable reader, sitting silently and blearily in front of yet ‘another book’. 1 In the first few lines of PF these features once again come into focus, but this time through the dreamer’s own words and voice. The uncertain expectations generated by the turbulent drift of the speaker’s felynge and thinking about love in the first stanza seem, in the second, to converge upon the poem’s first ‘solid’ image, that of bookes, and upon the authority that they appear to confer (ll. 10–12).
