A Study of Eastern Themes in Chaucer's "The Parliament of Foules"

Geoffrey Chaucer, the 14th century English poet, has a compilation of poems called "The Parliament of Foules" which has been translated into Arabic as "the birds’ meeting". The poem depicts a poetic dream on love in the form of “movashah” in which three male eagles give a marriage proposal to a female eagle who is sitting on the hands of the goddess of nature and each presents a lengthy chapter on love. The birds’ debate was interrupted by other birds and the poets’ views on the theme of love in his poetic dream and forms the skeleton of the compilation. The centrality of love in the two forms of mundane and sublime is alluding to a heavenly journey to paradise and hell in the poem and the opposition of incarnation of positive and negative human attributes such as patience, satisfaction, reliance on God, which is reminiscent of the mystical stages. The presence of the element of debate and dispute before the king to attain the goal reminds us of a general motif in Islamic tales such as The Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Night), Sinbad Nameh, Haft Peykar, Shah Nameh which are discussed in this article as elements of Eastern thinking dominant in the anthology under study.