Very few people are aware of the dark and conflicting origins of Valentine’s Day: the Roman tradition involved a brutal feast called Lupercalia, where women were put in rather precarious situations. The Romans were also responsible for the name honored for the day when Emperor Claudius II executed two priests, both of whom were named Valentine, for performing forbidden marriages. It wasn’t until the 14th century that the day was popularized as a day of love as writers and poets began romanticizing it in their works. One of these writers was none other than Geoffrey Chaucer.
Also known as the “father of English literature,” Chaucer was arguably one of the most famous authors during the Middle Ages. He wrote a plethora of works ranging from adventure tales to a retelling of the Trojan War with his most notable novel being “The Canterbury Tales.”
The first recorded association of romantic love to Valentine’s Day came from Chaucer’s “Parlement of Foules,” a 700-hundred-line poem in the form of a dream vision. This poem is written in rhyme royal, a distinctive seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter. As you would know, middle English — due to its grammar, pronunciation and extensive borrowing of vocabulary from French and Latin — is drastically different than our modern-day English, and thus more difficult to understand.
[ Agon, hit happed me for to beholde
Upon a boke, was write with lettres olde
And ther-upon, a certeyn thing to lerne ]
The poem can be divided into three parts: a prelude to the dream, a scene in the garden and a meeting with the birds. In the first couple of stanzas, the narrator positions themselves as someone in search of love, detailing “a certeyn thing to lerne” and goes on to summarize Marcus Cicero’s book “The Dream of Scipio,” a dream vision novel of the Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus.
The dream begins when the narrator falls asleep and Scipio guides him to a celestial gate through the temple and garden of Venus. This place is filled with a band of doomed lovers and the goddess of Nature — a stand-in for the goddess of love — uses her judgment to mate off birds. It is helpful to note that the title of the poem, which literally translates into “The Parliament of Birds,” uses anglo-French and English words: parlement is from the French word parler meaning “to talk” and foules from the Middle English word, fowl, meaning “a bird of any kind.” With that, Chaucer uses the gathering of mating between English birds as a comparison to how the process of humans choosing a lover is an innate one. As a result, the construction of Valentine’s Day is during February because it is the one moment of the year when those birds come together to find their love. Below, you can read the main stanzas where Valentine’s Day is mentioned in the poem:
[ 302 And in a launde, upon an hille of floures,
Was set this noble goddesse Nature;
Of braunches were hir halles and hir boures,
Y-wrought after hir craft and hir mesure;
Ne ther nas foul that cometh of engendrure,
That they ne were prest in hir presence,
308 To take hir doom and yeve hir audience.
309 For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,
Of every kinde, that men thynke may;
And that so huge a noyse gan they make,
That erthe and see, and tree, and every lake
So ful was, that unnethe was ther space
315 For me to stonde, so ful was al the place. ]
The stanza starting on line 302 introduces the goddess of Nature as being “upon an hill(e) of floures (flowers),” ready to use her “craft” on all fouls who come to her presence for “doom” (judgment). This event takes place on “Seynt Valentynes day,” where every bird of mankind “cometh there to chese (choose) his make (mate).” Chaucer then describes how the overwhelming amount of birds make a great deal of “noyse” (noise) that there wasn’t even space for him to stand.
Professor Andrea Denny-Brown, who specializes in medieval literature in the English department, provided me with more insight into the poem. From a historical standpoint, the poem is “often read as an allegory for this particular moment in British history” where “he’s critiquing the social order that only allows the royals to choose their mates first.” This particular moment in history, noted by Brown, was one of big social change and strife between the upper and lower classes. This was due to the British Parliament’s reluctance to change their feudal system to address the labor shortage in the aftermath of the Black Death. Ironically, Chaucer was in service to the king and queen and was paid to write stories for (and was even a member of) Parliament for some time, so he had to play with his political opinions discreetly or else he’d have his head chopped off!
Springtime was also a subject that greatly concerned Chaucer. Professor Denny-Brown sees Chaucer’s evocation of all the springtime imagery in the poem as “a sort of poetic, pastoral manifestation of what happens in the springtime in terms of reproductive ambition.” All the flowery verses about nature are pretty to read about, but his interest in springtime coupling of birds helps us understand our own springtime urges. Lastly, at the end of the poem, when a female eagle ends up not choosing a mate at all, Chaucer not only critiques the idea that one has to choose a mate at all but also reverses gender roles as the “woman has the power of rejection here.”
