Dream Visions And Other Poems

This Norton Critical Edition presents Chaucer's four dream visions and selected shorter poems and is suitable for both beginning and advanced students.

Both an enhanced digital edition and a handsome print volume, The Norton Chaucer provides the complete poetry and prose, meticulously glossed and annotated specifically for undergraduate readers, with apparatus reflecting current scholarship—all at an unmatched value.

Spanning Chaucer's working life, these four poems build on the medieval convention of 'love visions' - poems inspired by dreams, woven into rich allegories about the rituals and emotions of courtly love. In The Book of the Duchess, the most traditional of the four, the dreamer meets a widower who has loved and lost the perfect lady, and The House of Fame describes a dream journey in which the poet meets with classical divinities. Witty, lively and playful, The Parliament of Birds details an encounter with the birds of the world in the Garden of Nature as they seek to meet their mates, while The Legend of Good Women sees Chaucer being censured by the God of Love, and seeking to make amends, for writing poems that depict unfaithful women. Together, the four create a marvellously witty, lively and humane self-portrait of the poet.

Compiled here are some of Chaucer's shorter poems. These poems are all written using the Dream Vision. To name a few of these peoms: The Book of Duchesse, The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women, The House of Fame, and other short poems.

This 1976 book is a study of the medieval English dream-poem set against classical and medieval visionary and religious writings.