Parlement of Foules

When he falls asleep, Scipio Africanus the Elder appears and guides him up through the celestial spheres to a gate promising both a "welle of grace" and a stream that "ledeth to the sorweful were / Ther as a fissh in prison is al drye" (reminiscent of the famous grimly inscribed gates in Dante's Inferno).

After some deliberation at the gate, the narrator enters and passes through Venus’s dark temple with its friezes of doomed lovers and out into the bright sunlight.

Fred N. Robinson (Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1957: 791) mentioned that "if the theories of allegory in the Parliament are rejected, the principal evidence usually relied on for dating the poem about 1381-2 disappears".

Later criticism, however, is much more objective on the reasons why the poem has been dated in 1382, the main reason given in lines 117–118 of the poem itself: "As wisly as I sawe the [Venus], northe northe west / When I begane my sweuene for to write" for according to John M. Manly (1913: 279–90) Venus is never strictly in the position "north-north-west...but it can be easily thought to be so when it reaches its extreme northern point".

Derek Brewer (1960: 104) then argues that the date of 1382, as opposed to that of 1374, is much more likely for the composition of the poem since, during the same period (1373–85), Chaucer wrote many other works including The House of Fame which, in all respects, seems to have been composed earlier than The Parliament of Fowls, thus: "a very reasonable, if not certain, date for the Parlement is that it was begun in May 1382, and was ready for St. Valentine's Day, 14th February 1383" (Brewer, 1960: 104).