Kathleen Hewitt, ' "Ther It Was First": Dream Poetics in the Parliament of Fowls.'

Hewitt, Kathleen. "Ther It Was First": Dream Poetics in the Parliament of Fowls. The Chaucer Review, Vol. 24. No. 1, 1989. pp. 20-28.

Hewitt elaborates on Chaucer's literary sources in the Parliament of Fowls, focusing on Cicero's Dream of Scipio, Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Teseida, and Alain de Lille's Plaint of Nature. Hewitt also examines how the dream sequence of Chaucer's Parliament is fashioned like the segment of Cicero's Dream, in which Africanus explains the movement of the concentric spheres (from unity to disunity) to the younger Scipio. The article purports that the narrator's dream in Parliament illuminates the whole of the structure of this explanation. The article is also enlightening in that it compares particular segments of the dream, such as the gateway with two stanzas of verse on either side and the juxtaposition of the temple of Venus with Priapus and the inexplicable plethora of birds, as a clustering of source materials that has been deviated from, allowing the reader to account for the lack of resolution at the end of the poem.