In his dream poems, Chaucer uses acts of prayer to perform different versions of his own identity as a poet. Meta-poetic concerns have long been recognized as central to these writings, and indeed to dream poetry as a genre: since dreaming is a subjective experience that can only be recounted by the “I” who experiences it (or claims to have experienced it), dream poetry always involves the poet writing about himself. If the “I” of any dream poem is both a dreamer and a poet, the “I” of Chaucer’s dream poems is also often represented as a reader. He reads, dreams about what he read, and then wakes up to write a poem that can, in turn, be read and generate a new dream and poem; this “reciprocal association between books and dreams” is a “signature characteristic” of Chaucer’s dream poems and an important part of their reflection on what it means to be a poet. In these works Chaucer represents the poet’s task as “the writing of reading,” as Martin Irvine puts it, positioning the dream as an intermediary state in which the reading of an old book first begins to become the writing of a new one. Focusing on Chaucer’s three free-standing dream poems, this chapter examines how acts of prayer serve as focal points in this exploration of reading and writing as aspects of poetic identity. Chaucer repeatedly turns to prayer to effect transitions in these texts, such as the transition into the liminal space of the dream, a crucial moment that marks the beginning of the process of poetic creation. In the special context of a dream poem, the first-person pronoun is necessarily aligned with the voice of the dreamer throughout the text, such that acts of prayer spoken by this “I” might seem to be unusually distanced from readerly appropriation. The “I” of prayer in Chaucer’s dream poems does include readers in a different way, however, because this “I” often performs the role of reader in addition to, or instead of, the role of poet.

Although all three of Chaucer’s dream poems portray “the writing of reading,” they differ in which verb receives the emphasis. In The Parliament of Fowls, for instance, a formal invocation foregrounds the poet’s craft of writing, while in The Book of the Duchess the dreamer’s prayer casts him as a naïve and enthusiastic reader.