This explains how it was that Chaucer, with all his admiration for Italian poetry, never, except in one small instance, tries to copy any Italian verse. He did not copy the Italian line because he had the same line already from another source; and he did not copy Boccaccio’s octave stanza because he had already another stanza quite as good, if not better, in the same kind. One need not consider long, what is also very very probable, that Chaucer felt the danger of too great attraction to those wonderful new models; he would learn what he could (so he seems to have thought to himself), but he would not give up what he had already gained without them. Possibly the odd change of key, the relapse from Italian to French style in _Anelida_, might be explained as Chaucer’s reaction against the too overpowering influence of the new Italian school. ‘Here is this brand-new epic starting out to conquer all the world; no question but that it is triumphant, glorious, successful; and we cannot escape; but before we join in the procession, and it is too late to draw back, suppose we draw back _now_—into the old garden—to try once more what may be made of the old French kind of music’. So possibly we might translate into ruder terms what seems to be the artistic movement in this remarkable failure by Chaucer.
Chaucer spent a long time thinking over the Italian poetry which he had learned, and he made different attempts to turn it to profit in English before he succeeded. One of his first complete poems after his Italian studies had begun is as significant as _Anelida_ both with respect to the difficulties that he found and also to the enduring influence of the French school. In the _Parliament of Birds_, his style as far as it can be tested in single passages seems to have learned everything there was to be learned—
Through me men goon into the blisful place Of hertès hele and dedly woundès cure; Through me men goon unto the welle of Grace, There grene and lusty May shal ever endure; This is the way to all good aventure; Be glad, thou reader, and thy sorrow offcaste! All open am I; passe in and hy thee faste!
And, as for composition, the poem carries out to the full what the author intends; the digressions and the slackness that are felt to detract from the _Book of the Duchess_ have been avoided; the poem expresses the mind of Chaucer, both through the music of its solemn verse, and through the comic dialogue of the birds in their assembly. But this accomplished piece of work, with all its reminiscences of Dante and Boccaccio, is old French in its scheme; it is another of the allegorical dreams, and the device of the Parliament of Birds is in French older than the _Romaunt of the Rose_.