Chaucer’s Cuckoo and the Myth of Anthropomorphism

Abstract

I would like to examine a strange moment in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls when the debate about a fitting mate for the formel eagle is abandoned by Nature immediately after an avian altercation between a merlin and a cuckoo that seems to go nowhere. The upshot is the silencing of the cuckoo, one of the most intriguing participants in the discussion. This exchange, the most dramatic dialogue in the poem, occurs when the merlin verbally attacks the cuckoo about the bird’s “nature.” The birds are no longer disputing which eagle will win the formel; now the habits of the infamous nest-stealing and “murdering” cuckoo bring the whole debate to a halt. The poem’s well-known political or social allegory, equating species of birds with classes of men, may be operating here, but if we think about this as nonhuman mating, the coupling of birds, we are up a very different tree. My argument will suggest how the parliament does not simply end; it virtually sinks under the weight of anthropomorphism when we consider the text in a less human-restricted way. The poem’s overreaching analogical relationship between bird and human thus cleverly parodies the well-established genre of bird debate, and the ordinary little cuckoo bird becomes the pressure point.