The Use Of Biblical Allusions In The Parliament Of Fowls And The Book Of The Duchess By Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and The Book of the Duchess belong to the medieval visionary literature genre, a mode of writing which began to flourish in early medieval Europe. It was partly drawn from the highly popular secular poem, le Roman de la Rose, written by Guillaume de Lorris, a young French poet. By placing the majority of the narrative firmly in the dream world, the author allows themselves greater freedom of expression, as well as removing any moral, political or religious responsibility. However, visionary literature, or ‘dream visions’, were often supposed to signify a divine origin, an assumption which was prevalent in both its medieval and ancient form. In both of these dream visions, Chaucer frequently draws on Biblical allusions, both implicitly and explicitly, as it would have been assumed that the contemporary reader had a comprehensive knowledge of Christian theology. For example, in The Book of the Duchess, the ‘lady bryght’ lamented over by the ‘man in blak’ closely resembles biblical description of the Virgin Mary, particularly from the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament. Furthermore, in The Parliament of Fowls, the abstract concept of ‘nature’ is personified as ‘the vicaire of the almighty Lord’, and Chaucer consistently refers to her in terms commonly associated with the Almighty God.

The Bible governed the medieval understanding of humanity, alongside their comprehension of world in general, making it as such that biblical descriptions of dreams, in the Book of Job and Book of Numbers in particular, dictated the medieval perspective on the significance of visions of the subconscious. Chapter 33 of the Book of Job makes an explicit and undeniable reference to the dream as a mode by which God may ‘speaketh’ to men. This teaching was interpreted and elucidated by Pope Gregory I, a Catholic saint and Pope of the Catholic Church from 590 to 604 AD, wrote Moralia in Job, a commentary on the Book of Job, in which he states that ‘The voice of God, in truth, is heard as if in dreams, when, with minds at ease, we rest from the bustle of this world, and the Divine precepts are pondered by us in the deep silence of the mind. ’ However, as Diane M. Ross remarks in her essay, ‘The Play of Genres in the Book of the Duchess’ (1984), both The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls are ‘made up of tentatively linked parts and are characterised by lacunae, discontinuity, or lack of conclusion’. Such a manipulation of narrative structure and flow allows Chaucer to imply that the narrators’ are not ‘with minds at ease’, as they struggle to reconcile the issues of reality with the supposedly cathartic and holy qualities of the dream world.

The Roman philosopher Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s ascetic Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio) was a similarly influential text for medieval sensitivities towards dreams. In William Harris Stahl’s translation (1952), it is made clear that Macrobius interprets dreams which ‘arise from some condition or circumstance that irritates a man during the day’, as ‘noteworthy only during their course and afterwards have no importance or meaning’. He instead places great emphasis on the ‘oracular’ dream, or somnium, ‘in which a parent, or pious or revered man, or a priest, or even a god clearly reveals what will or will not transpire, and what action to take or avoid. ’ Indeed, for both of the narrators, the dreams arise from the waking segment of the narrative, linking problematically to their preoccupation with the idea of love: not explicitly with ‘Divine precepts’, as exhorted by Pope Gregory I. In The Parliament of Fowls, the narrator provides a simple rationalisation for the idea that one may garner subconscious inspiration from their waking lives: The wery huntere, slepynge in his bed, To wode ayeyn his mynde goth anon; The juge dreameth how his plees been sped; The cartere dremeth how his cart is gon;The riche, of gold; the knight fight with his fon; The syke met he drynketh of the tonne;The lovere met he hath his lady wonne.

The stanza, as with the entire poem, follows the rime royal, in the form of a tercet followed by two couplets, with an ABA BB CC rhyme scheme. By including a broad scope of assumptions of men and their individual preoccupations, Chaucer allows for universal relatability and allows the reader to engage with a narrative that does not explicitly focus on the divine. Placed within a consistent metre and rhyme scheme, it is perhaps a reassuring passage for the reader, as Chaucer somewhat contradicts the divinely inspired teachings of Pope Gregory I and Macrobius that were accepted as common knowledge in the medieval period. The Book of the Duchess is a commemorative piece of writing, dedicated to the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s patron. The use of the word ‘white’ appears frequently throughout the poem in description of the ‘lady swete’, even so far as to name her ‘White’: ‘that was my lady name ryght’. This is perhaps an Anglicisation of the French word for white, ‘blanc’, bearing remarkable similarity to ‘Blanche’; although the lack of an overt and tangible link to the Duchess Blanche herself allows for authorial freedom, removing any potential for blame. The man in black’s amorously detailed description of the object of his affections bears remarkable resemblance to the female figure illustrated in the Song of Solomon. In the Bible, the lover describes his beloved as ‘most beautiful among women’, which is echoed in the man in black’s retelling of his first encounter with his lady, ‘White’, the lyricism of which would have resounded with the contemporary reader:Among these ladyes thus echon, Soth to seyen, y sawgh oon, That was lyk noon of the route;For I dar swere, withoute doute, That as someres sonne bryghtYs fairer, clerer, and hath more light, Than any other planete in heaven. The moone or the sterres seven, For al the world so hadde sheSurmounted hem alle of beaute…

Diane M. Ross claims that Chaucer’s allusion to the Song of Solomon in the man in black’s dialogue juxtaposes the inclusion of Ovid and ‘readily suggests a contrast between profane and sacred narrative’, supporting the view that Chaucer challenges the medieval perspective on dreams. However, the inadequacy and ineptitude with which the narrator recounts Ovid’s tale of Ceyx and Alcione decreases the potency of such a juxtaposition of the ‘profane narrative’. In the essay ‘The Narrators in the “Book of the Duchess” and the “Parlement of Foules”’ (1992), J. J. Anderson remarks that the narrator’s ‘strange reading of the story may be explained in terms of his imposing his own preoccupations on it and retelling it in a matter-of-fact way which destroys all the refinement of the Ovidian source. ’ Anderson believes that the narrator has a ‘reductive approach’ to the story, a point that the narrator makes directly throughout his retelling of the story. When the messenger reaches the caves of Morpheus and Eclympasteyr, he frankly informs the reader that, ‘As I have told yow here-to-fore; Hyt ys no ned reherse it more’; a parenthetical remark which marks a digression from his reiteration of Ovid. Similarly, Anderson notices that the narrator ‘largely manages to avoid referring to the great love of the king and queen… which is the leading motif in Ovid’s story. ’ Indeed, a few lines after he neglects to restate earlier details of the plot, whether it be for the sake of brevity or a consequence of his lack of interest, the narrator dismisses the tragic import of Alcione’s death:. . . “Allas!” quod she for sorwe, And deyede within the thridde morwe. But what she sayede more in that swowI may not tell yow as now;Hyt were to longe for to dwelle.

Furthermore, he omits key plot points of the original tale, such as the final metamorphosis of the two lovers, which is, arguably, the most poignant part of the story and the ultimate resolution. The narrator’s dream in The Book of the Duchess is certainly influenced the story of Ceyx and Alcione, despite his blunt and ‘strange’ reading. He refers to Macrobius when he claims that, ‘no man had the wyt to konne wel my sweven rede’, which excuses the inclusion of a ‘profane’, pagan narrative and provides justification for Chaucer’s departure from the contemporary emphasis on the divine significance of dreams. In the opening lines of The Parliament of Fowls, the narrator instantly presents an allegorical personification of ‘Love’ analogous to the presentation of a male god, when he praises ‘his wonderful werkynge’ and ‘his myrakles’, which contradicts the narrator’s naïve, yet conventional statement of unquestioning Christianity in The Book of the Duchess: ‘For I ne knew never god but oon’. The narrator in the Parliament goes further as to personify ‘Nature’ in his dream as a ‘noble goddesse’, frequently employing language and modes of dialogue commonly reserved for a male god, or figure of similarly high importance, such as ‘my soverayn’. She is initially described as the ‘vicaire’, or deputy, ‘of the almyghty Lorde’, but her consistent utilisation of strong imperatives and exhortations of ‘I commaunde heer!’, coupled with her confidence in her ‘ryghtful ordenaunce’ over the birds, implies that she is independent of God’s sovereignty: a distinctly pagan and heretical implication. There remain consistent, seemingly colloquial references to a singular ‘God’ within the dialogue between ‘the noble goddesse Nature’ and the birds, as would have been common in everyday speech in medieval England, yet the narrator exploits the freedom within the dream vision genre to embrace and explore the classical belief in multiple gods. However, although the narrator in The Book of the Duchess displays a more explicit affirmation of his belief in one god, he makes reference to ‘Pan, that man clepeth god of kynde’.

Colin Wilcockson, in his explanatory notes in The Riverside Chaucer, quotes Vincent of Beauvais: ‘Pan… whom they [i. e. the Greeks and the Romans] make the god of everything and of all nature’. This would suggest that the narrator in The Book of the Duchess is perhaps also ascribing to the idea of a pagan god of ‘kynde’; a word which appears frequently in the description of the ‘noble goddesse Nature’ in The Parliament of Fowls, as well as meaning ‘species’ or ‘kin’. However, the narrator only briefly mentions ‘Pan’, which is indicative of the pseudo-intellectual persona he is at pains to emphasise throughout the poem, and symptomatic of his tendency towards drawing superficial and uncertain conclusions. As Francis Landy elucidates in The Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden (1979), The Song of Solomon is a rediscovery of the paradise lost in after fall of Adam and Eve: ‘…it portrays Paradise in this world, rediscovered through love. The Song transforms the images and motifs of the story of the Garden of Eden, so that it can be seen as a commentary on it. ’ Perhaps a similar ‘commentary’ on the ‘rediscovery of love’ can be found in The Parliament of Fowls, in the narrator’s emphatic descriptions of the beauty of the pastoral setting in which he finds himself. The image of the garden in the Song of Solomon is also traditionally a symbol of marital love and sexuality: ‘Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits’. A similarly pre-lapsarian image of a heavenly garden is described in The Parliament of Fowls: A gardyn saw I ful of blosmy bowsUpon a ryver, in a grene mede, There as sweetnesse everemore inow is, With floures white, blewe, yelwe, and rede, And colde welle-streames, nothyng dede, That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte, With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte.

Furthermore, in the Song of Solomon, the lover speaks of the ‘beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters fir’, which is echoed when the narrator describes Nature as being ‘set… Of braunches were here halles and here boures’. A distinct link between the divine and the dream world was a universally accepted notion in the medieval period, initially explicated in the Bible and interpreted by those such as Pope Gregory I and Macrobius. Chaucer utilises the freedom inherent within the nature of the medieval visionary dream genre to explore the possibility that dreams may arise from man, as a mode of reconciling reality with the subconscious mind.

In both The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls, the narrators are left somewhat bewildered by their dream experience, as a result of what J. J. Anderson refers to as ‘the fundamental dichotomy’ between the two: ‘one suffers from love, but is inarticulate on the subject, while the other has no experience, but talks readily of its awesome power. ’ Their preoccupation with love, arguably, removes the overarching presence of the divine from the narrative poems, as their minds are focused on another human being, rather than the ‘almyghty God’. However, perhaps the appearance of love as both an abstract concept and personification allegory in the poems, carries divine significance, if it is considered in its relation to the Song of Solomon, a celebration of sexual love from the Old Testament.