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Abstract
Geoffrey Chaucer's poem, The Parliament of Fowls has been acknowledged as an intricate dream vision of balanced contrasts of ideas, double entendre words, classical models, and rules of courtly love. Examining the heretofore unexamined voices invented by Chaucer's narrator, I found that the ancient grammatical term of "middle voice," employed in recent linguistic criticism and theory, served to place the narrator inside his world of reading, dreaming, and writing. As critic and poet, Chaucer offers the reader new ways to think about ancient literary themes of reading, writing, listening, and telling stories about love. The reader remains free to enjoy the narrator's voices in Parliament from the opening line, "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," through the roundel and closing.