Before resuming our discussion of the Tales, it will be helpful to look at a final dream-vision that anticipates several aspects of that discussion. The Parliament of Fowls is generally dated to the first half of the 1380s, and, though one of Chaucer's shortest major poems, is also one of his most intriguing. The narrator in his dream enters the garden of Love (as in the Romance of the Rose), where he visits the temple of Venus with its attendants like Pleasure, Beauty, Youth, but also Foolhardiness, Flattery, Desire, and sees Venus herself in provocative display in its innermost sanctum: ‘Hyre gilt heres with a golden thred | Ibounden were, untressed as she lay, | And naked from the brest unto the hed … ’ (ll. 267–9). Leaving the temple, he then comes across the ‘noble goddesse Nature’ standing on a hill of flowers (ll. 302–3); it is St Valentine's Day, and she is here to supervise the annual pairingoff of the birds, in all their different species. On her wrist she holds her pride and joy, a beautifully formed female eagle, and contention arises when three different male eagles sue for her hand (or claw). While the lower orders of birds become impatient with the business, wanting to mate with rather less ceremony, a debate is staged over which of the eagles has the best claim, and how to resolve the deadlock; in the end the female eagle herself is given the choice of mate, and asks for a year's delay in making it. Nature grants this, the rest of the birds pair off, and some sing a roundel in Nature's honour celebrating the birth of the year and the death of winter. At this point the dreamer awakes, the whole poem with its dense set of cultural and literary references occupying a mere 699 lines.

One way in which this poem anticipates the Tales is in its humorous contrast of discourses between the aristocratic address of the eagle wooers (though the second eagle is noticeably blunter than the first, ll. 450–62) and the more demotic ‘lower’ birds: ‘Whan shal youre cursede pletynge have an ende?’ they ask the eagles (l. 495).