THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS

"The Parliament of Fowls" opens with the line: "The lyf so short the craft so long to Ierne".  The opening lines of the poem shows us that the narrator wants to learn and conquer the difficult art of writing about love and he wants to try to do this during his lifetime.

Today through a very modern worldview, we see love and science as two different things. We think of love as something internal, something psychological, wheras we think of science as the external, material world. In the Middle Ages, both poets and scientists saw a closer link between our inner world and the natural world. 

The understanding in this poem is that God, being perfectly good and freely generous, created the universe from love, and from this love the universe receives its order and harmony. If the universe were not given its orderly arrangement through divine love, nature would disrupt into chaos and would not possess the slightest stability. Love, thus, binds the heavens in a beautiful concord, and the beneficiary of this universe bound together through divine love is each one of us. You and me.

If we ... the beneficiaries of this universe bound together through divine love then choose to act in self will, without love ... fight,  speak harshly without love,  condemn, judge, slander and all the rest.  The question remains to ask. What actions of my own have had an impact on the natural order of things!  What actions that I have taken during the course of my life were not rooted in love? In Divine love? 

Just like the narrator in this wonderful medieval poem I want to say about love: "The lyf so short the craft so long to Ierne".